Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (34 page)

“I don’t think ‘sense’ and you have anything to do with one another.”

“The first three words are the only ones in that sentence that matter, smekker.”

Kurg stomped off back into the tunnel to give it another go. He was determined to come out somewhere else this time. Hnuppa made as though to follow him, but Slud put a hand on his shoulder. “Wait. He’ll come out here.” Hnuppa stopped and nodded.

“Yeah, you’re probably right. Why tire ourselves out chasing after the old coob?”

Ten minutes or so after Kurg vanished into the darkness they heard a faint voice. At first they couldn’t make it out, but a few moments later it resolved into the sound of Kurg roundly cursing at something or someone. Hnuppa considered going in after him, but thought better of it when a decidedly un-Kurg-like howling roiled up out of the cave mouth. Even Slud looked put off by it. They came to a nonverbal consensus that whatever Kurg had gotten himself into he could smekking well get himself out of.

The mountain, which had been relatively quiescent for the past half hour, lurched suddenly into motion again, throwing Slud and Hnuppa onto the boulders. They crawled out of the path of a minor rockslide and waited to see if Kurg would reappear. Another somewhat larger rockslide opened up a trail around the side of the mountain and they heard faint voices coming along it. Not knowing what to expect, they hid themselves behind a newly-raised stone barrier.

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

T
he 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.”