Yarthros had been following Tol’s career rather closely and had even been in the crowd for his knighting ceremony, as it turned out. He remembered the debt quite well and was prepared to repay it however Tol desired.
“I knew when you busted through that door that you were destined for greatness, Tol-u-ol. I must confess I could not have predicted that you would be a Knight of the Crimson, but that status nevertheless suits you well, in my estimation. I am extremely proud to call you Sir Tol-u-ol.”
“Thank you, Ambassador. I must confess the title ‘Sir’ never entered my life’s plans, even in a dream. However, we must play the cards we are dealt and my hand of late has been one that exceeds imagining.” Tol was definitely getting much better at what he referred to as ‘forsooth speak.’
“Indeed, and I can think of none more deserving. Now, what brings you here, beyond this most pleasant reunion?”
“I must humbly ask a favor from you, Ambassador. If you wish to consider it repayment of your debt to me that is your privilege, but for my part let me state again for the record that you owe me no such debt; I was merely doing the job for which the citizens of Goblinopolis pay me.”
“I accept that as an expression of your personal philosophy, but from my perspective a great deed was done that day, and great deeds must be greatly rewarded in order for balance to be maintained. I am prepared to erase that imbalance which has persisted for these many years. What would you have of me?”
Tol explained to him the transfer to headquarters and how he missed his old beat. He also related the party thrown for him at Egmesta and the outpouring of affection from the people of Sebacea.
“I’ll rot away like an old pot-gourd if I have to devote the rest of my career to being hoity-toity. I need an excuse to spend as much time as possible on the streets of Sebacea. Since I only get assigned to high-profile cases that can boost the EE community’s PR efforts, I thought perhaps you could request that I head the security detail for your diplomatic receptions.”
Yarthros considered this for a moment. “Yes, yes, I think I can finagle that. I’ll need to approach it properly, but the EE Commissioner and I go back a very long way. And of course, you are brother to the king. That makes you a member of the Royal Family, which provides a great deal of lubrication for even the most recalcitrant wheel. Give me a week, no longer, and it should be arranged.”
“You have my profound gratitude, Ambassador, and you may truly consider your debt paid in full for this kind act.”
“It is little enough to trade for my life, Sir knight. I have a selfish motive, as well: it will allow me to see you much more frequently.”
Tol blushed in spite of himself. “I look forward to that also. I must take my leave now, but know that I hold you in, if possible, even higher esteem than before.”
“And I, you. Farewell, my friend. With luck we shall see one another again in under a fortnight.”
As he drove back to his office, Tol could not stop thinking about something Yarthros had said. The term ‘Royal Family’ kept running back and forth through his mind. It had never occurred to him before that he now possessed that status. As with most things connected with his new rank, he wasn’t yet certain how he felt about it.
Exactly a week later Tol received an official communiqué from the Commissioner’s Office assigning him as Chief of the Ad Hoc Diplomatic Security Detail for Extramural Ambassador Emeritus Yarthros. He immediately began to scout locations for his ‘resident’ office in Sebacea. Life was good again.
Tol’s appointment was made public in the weekly EE Commission press release. That gave Selpla the perfect excuse to call him and ask for an interview.
“You already know the price,” Tol replied wryly.
“Absolutely. The ale’s on me. Seven at the Balrog?”
“I’ll be there.”
Terp was so happy and honored to have a Knight of the Crimson as a regular patron that he had a special table and chairs built for him, with “Reserved for Sir Tol-u-ol” carved along the top. He placed them in one corner with a view of the entire establishment and put up stanchions with velvet-covered ropes blocking off the area. Tol was shocked and embarrassed the first time he came in, but got accustomed to it pretty quickly. The service was fantastic, and he always got to try the new ales before anyone else. Terp’s flyer now said,
The Bloated Balrog, Sebacea.
Good enough for the Royal Family:
Good enough for You.
To give credit where it is due, Selpla did ask a few due diligence questions about Tol’s new assignment: what were his duties, what sorts of challenges did he expect to face, what was it like working closely with a legend of the diplomatic community? He answered them using EE-approved language, which he’d spent hours memorizing the night before (never having had occasion/reason to bother learning it in his prior role as a foot patrol grunt).
What Selpla was really after, of course, was the Morianella story. Tol grinned at her and summoned the waiter (it was so easy to do that here). “A pitcher of Uberrazzle. On her tab.” When she returned with the coveted libation, Tol began his tale.
“Of course, I wasn’t even born when this all took place. Not by a long shot.”
“How did you get involved, then?”
“I’ll explain that as I go. About fourteen or fifteen years ago I was serving on this task force looking at cold crimes: ones that had never been solved and were still on the books.”
“Nine hundred and forty years isn’t a cold case. It’s frozen solid.”
“Heh. Morianella wasn’t even one of the cases we were looking at. We were actually reviewing the evidence for a murder that took place in an arcane bookseller over on Aslovava Boulevard.”
“Oh yeah, I remember that shop. Toqualah’s Tomes, right? Burned to the ground. Used to give me bad dreams just walking past the place as a kid. Creepy architecture.”
“That’s it. Toqualah was supposedly in the building when it burned. She was presumed dead, but no part of her body was ever recovered from the ashes. One of the few things we did manage to find intact in there was a book. It was a very old book, and apparently had some sort of defensive magic cast on it because it wasn’t even sooty when we pulled it out of the rubble. It had Codex Lapidismotus on the spine in cracked gold tooling.”
Tol paused to take a long pull on his ale. Selpla was busy scribbling in her reporter’s pad. “Codex Lapidismotus, eh?” What kind of book was it? What language?”
“Dunno. We couldn’t get it open. It was magically sealed. We took it to CoME and they told us it had been sealed by an archmage after it had been…misused. Apparently it was a very dangerous spell book that could cause, among other things, devastating quakes.”
“Quakes? Did it have anything to do with all the recent quakes?”
“No, that was a totally different mechanism, as far as I know. Anyway, the Master Archivist asked if she could put the book in the CoME Library for safekeeping, and since I couldn’t see it having much use as evidence I turned it over to her.”
“I assume the book plays a further role later on?”
“Valid assumption. About a week, maybe ten days later, I get a call from the Archivist, who asks me to stop by because she has managed to get the book open and discovered something she thinks might interest me. What she’s found is a sort of record embedded in the book’s pages of the mages who have made use of it.”
“Handy.”
“Yeah. Apparently not unusual for spell books of that magnitude. Any mage powerful enough to use a book like that leaves a distinctive, unique ‘fingerprint’ behind that can be read by a mage specially trained in that sort of thing. The Archivist is one of those trained mages, and she told me the last person to actually cast spells from the book was an archmage named Plåk, who left quite an extensive calling card.”
“How did you connect Plåk and the book to Morianella?”
“Part of the fingerprint mages leave is the last spell they cast. The Archivis
t—her name is Umsaxe, by the way—showed me his activity record; specifically the spell he was casting and botched, as well as when it happened. She told me the likely consequences of that screw-up and all the pieces just fell into place. Massive quake that submerged an entire island occurs in an area of no known fault zones or evidence of previous seismic activity at exactly the same time that a very powerful mage fatfingers a very powerful spell from a book devoted to shaping land masses…doesn’t take much of a detective to put those clues together.”
“Okay, so you have evidence that the tragic drowning of a half million people over nine centuries ago wasn’t a natural disaster. Why would you think Plåk would even still be alive after all that time?”
“Because he was listed as a current library patron.”
“What? No way.”
“Yep. Not only that, Umsaxe said he came in pretty regularly. He had lived that many years by transcending, so he couldn’t hang around very long, but he still made use of the reading room for an hour or so every week. Mostly read books about The Slice and chuckled a lot. All I had to do to meet him was come back and wait for him to show up.”
Time for another pitcher. Selpla waited patiently while it was fetched and Tol had taken a generous swallow.
“What happened when you met him?”
“He told me the whole story, after a little wheedling. Then I arrested him.”
“You did what? Arrested a thousand year-old archmage?”
“I didn’t really have an option. He confessed to mass murder right in front of me. I’m a sworn edict enforcement officer. There is no statute of limitations for murder.”
“How did he take it?”
“Actually, quite well. He surrendered peacefully; then, as we walked into the door at the Precinct he just…vanished.”
“Wow. What did you do?”
“I cursed him out for a while and then had to explain to the duty sergeant why I was standing there with no prisoner. He laughed at me for a good ten minutes. In fact, he chuckled every time he saw me for the next year or so.”
“That’s one heck of a story. Is it true?”
“Every word.”
“Most entertainment I’d had in a couple hundred years, as a matter of fact.”
Selpla and Tol looked around to see Plåk standing there, grinning ear to ear.
Tol offered him a seat. “I know you can’t hang around long. Can transcendent mages drink?”
“You bet your sweet glutes we can,” Plåk replied. Tol motioned for another stein.
Selpla was trying her hardest to maintain journalistic detachment here, but sitting at a pub table with a Knight of the Crimson and a thousand year-old transcendent archmage made it quite challenging.
“What is it you were trying to accomplish when the ‘accident’ happened on Morianella?” she finally managed to squeak out.
“What? Oh, that. Well, ironically enough, the Elder Council of Morianella had hired me to unblock the principal channel leading into their largest port. It had been filled by a recent landslide and was majorly interfering with their shipping commerce. Not like they had dredge barges and soil transport bucket loaders back then, you know. I could probably have got it done with a long series of greater teleport spells, but that would have taken a couple of weeks altogether and they wanted the channel open toot sweet.
In my defense, I did warn them that magic at the level they were requesting could be potentially dangerous and unpredictable, but they insisted. Anyway, I stumbled over one of the tertiary incantations in the Codex Lapidismotus and instead of opening a crevice just wide enough to swallow the unwanted debris, I opened one that went under the entire land mass and destabilized the bedrock. There was a tremendous quake and then the whole island just...sank into the hole.”
“How did you get away?”
“Same way I got there. Teleportal. I took all the nearby residents who would fit in the teleport field with me and tried to resettle them on the mainland. They were still in shock the last time I saw them. I lost track of them when I transcended; I suppose they lived out the rest of their lives there.”
“Where did you take them?”
“Woklopen in Solemadrina. Nice city. Great public gardens.”
“Never been. I’d like to see it, though.”
Tol had been silent through this exchange. “I wonder if any of those people you rescued wrote anything about Morianella or the disaster?”
“I dunno. You could check the libraries and bookshops in Woklopen, I guess. That was over 900 years ago, though. Good luck. Oops. I gotta split. Thanks for the razzle.”
He downed the remainder of his drink, and then held up a finger.
“Oh, by the way, Tol-u-ol, I’ve done my best to repay society—and you—for my little faux pas. I played an important role in your brother becoming king of Tragacanth, for example.”
Tol frowned at him. “What role would that be, then?”
“Ask His Majesty about it sometime.”
With that, transcendent archmage Plåk dissolved once more into thin air.
They sat without talking after Plåk’s departure: Tol drinking and Selpla scribbling. Tol was thinking back on everything that had transpired since the attempt on Pyfox’s life. It wasn’t that long ago on the calendar, but it seemed an Age to him. He wondered about Plåk’s parting comment, but decided that he would leave sleeping scrubhounds lie, as it were. Selpla was daydreaming about winning a Lemishbin Prize for her investigative reporting. They wrapped up their respective reveries and stood up simultaneously.
“Thanks, Sir Tol-u-ol. I appreciate your time and willingness to relate the story for me.”
“Welcome, doll. Any time you want to buy me ale, I’ll fit you into the schedule.”
“Nice that your pal Plåk dropped by, too.”
“No extra charge.”
Selpla laughed as she walked away, then turned and blew him a kiss.
“Good night, Sir Knight. Maybe we can get together again some time.” She winked.
Tol practically skipped back to his fancy new pram. There was a priority message waiting for him on the onboard comm unit. He punched it up on screen.
His Majesty Tragacanth has announced that he will be wed to Magineer Liaison Boogla on the twenty-eighth of next month in the Royal Cathedral. His Majesty further requests that Sir Tol-u-ol of Sebacea act in the capacity of Second to the Groom. Please respond as soon as is practical for rehearsal information.
Tol grinned one of those disconcerting tooth-filled grins that only a goblin can pull off properly. He was starting to get used to this knighthood stuff. It wasn’t half bad.
Early one evening a few weeks after the wedding, which was one of the most spectacular events ever conducted in Tragacanth and literally involved a cast of thousands, Tol was driving around in the old neighborhood reminiscing. He drove a little teary-eyed past the Precinct, flinched as he cruised by the EE infirmary and did a double take at the vacant lot. There was a pub there now, a pub that looked familiar. A hand-lettered placard in the window read
Try our ‘Guardian’ Berzal-Nut Razzle.
Tonight Only!
Through the open door came wafting a haunting melody: something about a sorcerer’s daughter. Tol smiled and pulled the pram up to the ‘no parking’ curb in front of the pub. He wouldn’t be long.
As he walked up to the door a messenger gob slid to a halt in front of him. After he caught his breath, he held out an envelope for Tol. “Some lady asked me to deliver this to you right away, sir. I’ve been chasing you for the last six blocks!”
Tol took the envelope and handed him a five billme note. “An extraordinary effort deserves an extraordinary tip. You have my thanks, young sir.” The gob’s eyes got big. “You called me ‘sir.’ A Knight of the Crimson called me sir!” He bowed awkwardly and ran off at full speed, almost dropping the currency in his haste. Tol could hear him repeating as he ran, “Sir Tol-u-ol called me sir!”
Tol smiled after him and exa
mined the envelope. It smelled wonderfully of some exotic, sexy perfume. In it was a perfumed page with brilliant gilt edges and beautifully calligraphed script in silver ink.
Sir Tol-u-ol,
I have uncovered some additional background on the Morianella incident. I would love to share it with you over some rather nice imported sparkling cherish-fruit wine. Can you meet me at my residence later tonight, say, 11 PM? I will try to make it well worth your while.
Affectionately,
Selpla
Below was a map to a house in the Tropsalla district of the upper west side. Very nice homes up there. Celebrities, sports figures, and politicians, mostly. Tol had no idea why a news reporter would reside in such a hoity-toity neighborhood. He felt it was his duty to accept her invitation and investigate this anomaly.
Tol smiled a special smile at the thought of seeing Selpla again. Still beaming, he positively bounced into the pub.
...like a nightingale piping in a green forest grove...
Acknowledgments
Goblinopolis began life in 2004 as a stream-of-consciousness serial fiction blog on LiveJournal. I used the Merck Index for many of the names, hence the seeming medicinal/chemical theme. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at a full-blown fantasy world. It requires a huge output of creative ‘sweat and tears,’ I will freely admit, but the rewards are great as well. Involving magic in the milieu is effectively adding another dimension, and the rules of magic add another complex standard against which all of the characters’ actions must be compared for consistency’s sake.
I would like to thank Corrie Bergeron, Marthe Moss Cole, Terry A. Harper, Lisa Sawyer, and Troyce Wilson for reading the manuscript at one draft stage or another. Marthe Cole, in particular, offered some invaluable comments that were sincerely appreciated.
The indomitable Elizabeth Moon, whom I am proud to count among my friends, served as a mentor and cheerleader during this journey. Her extraordinarily deep understanding of the publishing industry and processes thereto appertaining saved me years of trial-and-error,
Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 Page 32