Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1

by Robert G. Ferrell

  Hnuppa noticed in his peripheral vision that Slud was batting at something near his ear. He turned to look and saw little sparkling insects of some sort flitting to and fro. He smacked one between his hands and found nothing there. Soon the little glimmering bugs increased in number and as the voices approached to just around the corner a kaleidoscopic light show of colored pillars and swirls seemed to be accompanying them. Hnuppa realized after listening to the now very nearby voices that he knew at least one of them.

  • * • * • * •

  Lom seemed less bedazzled by the hypnotic light show than either Selpla or Drin (although with Drin it was hard to tell), so he assumed the temporary de facto leadership of the party. The hail storm had been short-lived, but when it had spent itself Lom discovered that the path leading back to the soggy plain from whence they had come was no longer in evidence. As they made their way in fits and starts along the winding trail in pursuit of the flashing lights, it was quite apparent to Lom they were being deliberately driven further and further up the hillside for reasons unknown.

  Without warning the ground beneath them shifted, throwing all three off-balance and onto the rocky trail surface. At the same time stones slid all around them, changing the landscape dramatically and revealing for the first time that they were climbing no mere hill: it was a full-fledged mountain, one that apparently had decided abruptly to change street address yet again.

  “Congratulations, Selpla,” Lom said, rubbing his bruised backside, “I think we finally made it to your moving mountain.”

  Selpla seemed to come alive, as though waking from a dream. “Yippee! Let’s get some pics and start cracking this mystery.”

  Lom took a few shots with his still camera while Selpla nosed around, peering under rocks and into crevices.

  “What exactly are you expecting to find doing that?”

  “I’m an investigative journalist. I’m investigating. Duh.”

  “Look more like prospecting to me,” Drin observed.

  “She forgot to pack her pickaxe,” said Lom, dryly.

  “Yeah, well, maybe I’ll strike it rich, then. Either way I’m doing more than just sitting around on my duff waiting for Kurg to somehow find us.”

  “Which this little outing will render well-nigh impossible.”

  Selpla ignored the pessimism and moved steadily up the trail, poking and prodding whatever looked interesting. The light show was still underway, but she paid it little attention. There was a faint but growing rumbling under their feet which Hnuppa decided was the harbinger of another rockslide.

  “Heads up! Stay away from loose rocks on the walls!”

  They did a little dance figure to avoid not one, but two rockslides, the second more dramatic of which followed immediately on the heels of the first. Dusting themselves off, they resumed their trek. Drin had gone a little way off the trail and came back with an announcement.

  “Another way open up.”

  There was, indeed, a broad new path revealed by the larger of the two slides. It looked well worn—as though it had been here for quite some time but got buried by rockslides. Selpla and Lom speculated on the nature of this anomaly as they walked along. They rounded a corner and came face to face with serendipitous destiny.

  Hnuppa stood there for a moment trying to understand what was happening. As soon as he actually saw Selpla’s countenance, though, he stopped wondering. He knew from past experience that when Selpla was involved the odds of this sort of coincidence increased drastically. She had a supernatural knack for making things work out this way; more accurately, when things worked out this way Selpla was usually somewhere in the vicinity.

  “Hi, Selpla. Good to see you.”

  Selpla jumped, but recovered her composure in admirable time. She even managed to bat her eyes alluringly at him (or so she hoped). “Great to see you too, Hnuppa. What’s going on here?”

  Hnuppa shrugged. “Drin and I were just chilling, waiting for Kurg to come back.”

  “Kurg was here? Where did he go?”

  Hnuppa pointed. “In there. We heard him cussing and moaning about something a few minutes ago. He should be back anytime now.”

  Selpla turned to Lom smugly, “Not so impossible after all, it appears.”

  Lom shook his head. “Your luck is smekking supernatural.”

  A burning smell assailed their nostrils, followed closely by the appearance of Kurg himself. His clothes were singed in many places, outright burnt in others. Most of his incidental body hair (goblins don’t have much) was gone. They crowded around him.

  “Kurg, are you all right? Where have you been?” Selpla asked, sweeping soot off his back and shoulders.

  “Of course I’m smekking all right. Where the smek have you been?”

  “Oh, here and there.”

  “Where’s your company pram?”

  Selpla looked around. “Where’s yours?”

  “I asked you first.”

  “We had a run-in with some very sticky mud and some crazy mutants outside Dreadmost. The pram is still there, I suppose, although it’s probably fossilizing as we speak. That’s why we called Bewl in the first place.”

  “We’ll have to go down there and get it, then.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “When I say ‘we,’ I mean you.”

  “Not gonna happen, Kurg. I’m an investigative reporter, not a roustabout.”

  “I don’t care if you’re a smekkin’ root vegetable, you’re going to retrieve that vehicle.”

  “Perhaps this discussion might best be tabled for the moment,” said a voice that did not belong to any goblin. They all stopped and turned to face the source, which oddly seemed to be a large oblong boulder. As they had no prior waking experience in conversing with boulders, they waited to see if it would deign to speak further. It did.

  “You are all my honored guests here today. I have an announcement that I think will be of interest, and which will affect all of you to some degree. Please step inside and be welcome to my abode.”

  They looked at one another, and then back at the rock, the surface of which was beginning to shimmer and ripple, fading into transparency. In its place there was now a very inviting portal into one of the most stunning architectural marvels any of them had ever witnessed. There really wasn’t anything further to debate. They all marched in without hesitation.

  Prond met them just inside, dressed strangely and beaming like a newlywed.

  “Now, circle once more complete,” declared Drin.

  Chapter Twenty:

  Velvet Gauntlet

  The Royal carriage chugged out of Port Zog where it had stopped for refueling and began to skirt the ridiculously scenic expanse of Myndrythyl Bay, at the mouth of which sat Lumbos, Boogla’s destination. The bay was lined with magnificent barktitan trees, some of which had been there for over a thousand years and had reached fully a hundred meters in height and twenty meters in girth. Each of these arboreal behemoths was its own self-contained ecosystem, with literally hundreds of species of animal, insect, and plant that thrived entirely within the confines of the tangled bark and extensive upperstory. There were rumors of other, more sentient creatures that made their homes in the trees, but no solid evidence of this had ever been provided to the Society of Sages and Mages (‘SagMag’), who served as the official arbiter of natural history in Tragacanth, so the accounts remained purely in the anecdotal realm.

  The water in Myndrythyl Bay was a glorious deep blue, kept crystal clear by the same minerals that provided the blue color: they dissolved in from the surrounding cliffs and precipitated out any suspended particulates in the coves isolated from larger ocean currents by the sheltered topography. In places you could see down twenty meters or more when the light was right. The marine life was no less diverse or spectacular than that of the woods. Blaze fish swam in huge schools, flashing their iridescent reds and yellows like littoral fireworks as they twisted and turned. Enormous seabeeves lazed along the pink sands, spaced almost
perfectly every fifteen meters, the limits of their territorial range on land. A host of black and white saltchitters with bright blue beaks mixed with ponderous brown fish-storing pouchdivers wheeling overhead. At least ten other less well-represented species of avians lent their antics and voices to the saltmist cacophony.

  All in all, it was an outdoorsgoblin’s paradise, with numerous tourist accommodations ranging from simple bed and breakfasts to elaborate resort complexes dotting the landscape for a hundred kilometers along the paddle-shaped shoreline. Boogla was not here for the view, though. She had an important diplomatic mission of which this represented merely the initial step.

  Lumbos was the oldest major settlement in Tragacanth, tracing its roots to the very first exploratory landings from the mother continent of Bazgush over four millennia ago. It was constructed essentially in concentric layers, oldest in the center, like a ripple expanding inland in three directions from the enormous harbor district. Ferroc Oria was an imposing tower of glass on the northern edge of the innermost circle. It was built using bricks made by melting the local beach sand in enormous furnaces and pouring the resultant slag into frames to cool. The unique mineral content of the sand lent these blocks not only great strength but also a pleasing appearance. They were opaquely crystalline and threw off rainbows when viewed from the correct angle relative to a strong light source. The edifice could be seen from quite a distance, and its visage was constantly changing according to the time of day and position of the viewer.

  Kryptoq was the Oria Magineer. He had a reputation for being even more antisocial than usual for his ilk. True to form, he did not show up to greet the new Magineer Liaison, nor did he send anyone in his stead. Boogla waited there on the carriage platform until it became apparent she was not going to be escorted, counted to ten, then hired a pram to take her and her security detail to the Duber.

  Her reception at the Duber itself was equally cool. Kryptoq was not impressed with some upstart little girl who had taken a semi-mythical hacker’s name for herself and gotten a plum job out of the deal. She may have pulled the wool over the new king’s eyes, but fooling a Magineer was something else again. He would simply have to make an object lesson of her, on behalf of the other Magineers. Once she’d learned her proper place in the pecking order, they could get along more amicably.

  When Boogla arrived at the Duber, Kryptoq did have the decency to send a minion down to the reception area to bring her up to his office. Boogla was diplomatic and courteous to her, and to everyone she met in the Duber, until she was seated across the elaborately-carved Teslu heartwood desk from the Magineer.

  “I don’t believe His Majesty will be pleased to hear that a Magineer was less than fully receptive to a visit from His Liaison, Doctor Kryptoq,” she began, pleasantly. (Magineers were granted the rank of Doctor of Magical Arts and Letters upon taking office, if they did not already possess it. They also had to be Doctors of at least one Engineering specialty.)

  “Ah, so? Well, I’m sure He’ll get over it in due time. I have important work to do, and cannot always rearrange my schedule to accommodate messengers and their ilk.”

  “Verily. I have read your latest paper on computational transfiguration matrices and found it quite interesting. I believe if you’ll examine your interspatial transformation algorithm you’ll find a substantial error in the nonlinear fractal math, though. Correcting it alters the final magical flow pattern efficiency rather significantly and, I might add, for the better.”

  “I hardly think so, missy. That paper was thoroughly peer-reviewed and no one reported any such error.”

  “I certainly believe you. However, I’m not your peer.”

  “Well, it’s good that you recognize that, at least.”

  “I don’t think you understand. Check your math. I’ll wait.”

  After a chat with the Oria Magineer—who turned out not to be Boogla’s peer after all—that was in the end productive and congenial, the Magineer Liaison departed Lumbos for Tillimil. Kryptoq now knew precisely what the King expected of him and his office, and he accepted those assignments without reservation. Boogla had established herself as an intellectual and diplomatic force to be reckoned with, and the other Magineers knew it within minutes of her departure.

  The road to Tillimil was somewhat arduous in the best of conditions; in the aftermath of the magical tempests its traversal became downright challenging. The carriage tracks were washed out on the southeastern end of the Ullglava valley, a wide, fertile plain between the Bungash and Espwe mountain ranges that served as the breadbasket for Tragacanth. It was almost entirely occupied by sprawling back-to-back grain farmsteads. The rivers and streams were lined with extensive vegetable plots. The land approaching the foothills of both ranges was occupied, in turn, by ranches raising the meat and dairy livestock upon which the Tragacanthan livelihood largely depended.

  The Royal Transportation Officer assigned to Boogla arranged during the carriage trip down from Lumbos for a heavy off-road military dray to meet them at the last serviceable carriage roundabout, in the little town of Strix about forty kilometers beyond the Southern end of the Bungash range. The voyage from Strix to Tillimil was not exactly smooth sailing, but the large dray was quite accustomed to slogging through mud and debris and carried Boogla and her companions without complaining, albeit with numerous jolts and bumps.

  Tillimil, and in fact virtually all of Ferroc Sutha, was in disarray as a result of the magical storms that had wreaked so much havoc during the past few days. Nevertheless there was a formal reception waiting for Boogla—she and her party were taken to the Duber in the Magineer’s own conveyance, with two honor guards as escorts. This was much more in keeping with diplomatic protocol, and Boogla took mental note of the way things were supposed to work. The encounter with Kryptoq had apparently propagated to the other Dubers.

  El-Asral was a cultured goblin of multitudinous accomplishment and impeccable breeding. He was courteous and engaging, and Boogla found herself both impressed by and strangely drawn to him. He was everything she had expected a Magineer to be. Despite the fact that he had a lot on his plate trying to analyze and counter the maelstroms and their aftermath, he met with her on her own schedule, patiently listened to her concerns and the instructions she conveyed from the Royal Seat, and responded appropriately and eloquently.

  Boogla left the Sutha Duber in good spirits and ahead of schedule, so she took a little time out to sightsee. Tillimil had suffered some damage from the storms, true, but much of the charm of the old port city remained intact. The trees here were nowhere near as tall and magnificent as those in Lumbos, but they had a spreading stately majesty of their own. Encased in a silvery bark of wonderful carved intricacy, they threw their limbs out in all directions, creating an umbrella-like canopy that played host to myriad species of brightly-plumaged avian life. Long twisted tendrils of greenery cascaded from the higher limbs almost to the ground, like verdant streamers announcing some joyful forest celebration.

  The trees swayed lazily in the wind, now that the gales had died down to the gentle salt-air breezes more characteristic of the area. The very essence of Tillimil was laid-back; even with damage from the recent storms in plain evidence it was still easy to imagine life as a mellow, rich experience, like a double dip of your favorite frozen confection on a summer’s day. Boogla closed her eyes and drank it all in. She decided then and there to return to Tillimil someday and spend a lot more time getting to know the city and its people.

  For now it was time to start the very long journey to Ferroc Osta and Cladimil on the far western coast. She had never been to that district, or seen the Noorprid Sea; Boogla was both looking forward to and dreading it just a little. She’d heard some disturbing rumors about the folk of the western shores, although they were merely hearsay, she kept reminding herself. The broad expanse of plains and shoreline beyond the imposing Masron Mountains remained something of a mystery to the rest of Tragacanth, as contact was traditionally rather sporadic be
fore the introduction of modern communications and conveyances only a couple hundred years prior. The western peoples were mechanically, not magically, inclined, and kept to themselves. Gnomes were more numerous here than in the other districts. Boogla knew comparatively little about them or their culture; what snippets she had heard were disconcerting, but she was determined to give them a clean slate nonetheless and see the truth for herself.

  There were no major cities at all on the rail line from Tillimil to Cladimil. It wound through hundreds of kilometers of farmland, skirting the northern edge of the Espwes, making a long straight run traversing the wastelands of Asga Teslu before crossing the headwaters of the mighty Zongat River, whose meandering channel formed the major portion of the border between Tragacanth and Galanga to the south, and then bent northwesterly. Beyond the Zongat, between the Masrons and the sea, lay the western plains, rich with volcanic soils that supported most of the herbs, root vegetables, and tuber crops grown in Tragacanth. A great majority of the producing fruit trees in the kingdom were also located within a band fifty kilometers inland from the coastline.

  Asga Teslu was a vast desert area of rugged hills, gorges, and exotically colorful geological formations, but almost totally devoid of significant vegetation. The Masrons trapped most all of the moisture that streamed in from the Noorprid Sea and precipitated it on the windward side, leaving nothing but hot, dry winds to sweep over the wastelands. While the desert had a certain stark beauty about it, Boogla had to admit she was relieved when the wind-carved sandstone chiaroscuros gave way to the verdant grasslands of the Western plains.

  Cladimil boasted the highest per capita income in Tragacanth. Manufacturing firms wanted their corporate headquarters located here to be close to the vast gnomic talent pool and to take advantage of the abundant sunshine and temperate climate, as well as the expansive port facilities. The broad boulevards were lined with tropical trees and raised beds overflowing with brilliantly colored flowers. The buildings were all possessed of the same basic architectural facade by city ordinance, a tiled roof palacio-type construction that added to the overall exotic, well-to-do metropolitan ambience.