Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (30 page)

“And I’d deeply appreciate it if things remained that way,” said a crackly voice behind him. Prond spun around to see a fuzzy little creature standing there he recognized after a few seconds as a bugbear. Hadn’t seen many of those before. They regarded each other for a long moment. Prond finally broke the silence. “Did you build all this?”

“I was...responsible for the construction,” the bugbear replied, “Although I didn’t perform all of it personally.”

“Wow,” said Prond, simply. “Wow. This place is utterly amazing. Do all bugbears live like this?” He didn’t mean it in any racist way; just trying to expand his cultural horizons.

The bugbear didn’t seem offended. “Many of my kind do choose to live underground, but none, to my knowledge, have taken quite the same interest in...interior design as myself.”

A light snapped on in his head and Prond suddenly realized his awkward social position.

“So sorry. My name is Prond. I apologize for trespassing. I ducked into what I thought was a shallow cave to avoid drowning in the deluge out there and sort of got herded further into the mountain than I intended to go.”

His host noticed the falling rock contusions on Prond’s head and shoulders and shrugged. “Yes, well, no permanent harm done, I suppose. The mountain does tend to be rather selective about whom it allows in this far. You must have impressed it in some way.”

Prond raised his eyebrows. “The
mountain
is selective? Are you implying that this huge pile of rocks is somehow alive and aware?”

“Of course. The entire mountain has an active twelfth level sentience spell and geas on it. It took me over two years to cast.”

Prond’s jaw dropped. “
You
cast a permanent archmagical dweomer on this place? Who
are
you?”

“My name,” the bugbear replied somewhat hesitantly, “is Ballop’ril.”

Chapter Seventeen:
Answering the Call

S
elpla and her companions sloshed north along the road. They were heading slightly uphill most of the time, which meant opposing the seemingly infinite volume of precipitation making its way down to the lowlands behind them. Progress was slow and taxing. The rain rose and fell in irregular rhythm, but never stopped entirely. None of them had ever seen this much water before that wasn’t actually in the sea.

“Think it’ll ever stop raining?” asked Lom, glumly.

“Not until spell is done.”

They both looked at Drin. Selpla shouted over the noise of a fresh surge of precipitation. “What ‘spell’ are you talking about?”

“The spell that brought the rains. Is not natural rainfall. Magic aura very strong.”

Lom rolled his eyes. “That’s ridiculous. There can’t have been more than a handful of mages in Tragacanthan history who could cast a spell of this magnitude. The power requirements alone are staggering, not to mention the amount of personal energy and concentration necessary. There’s not a goblin alive today with that much dweomer.”

“Not goblin spell.”

“Whatta ya mean, ‘not goblin?’ Who else could possibly cast something like this? The arcanelementals have been extinct for millennia.”

“Goblins are not the only users of magic on N’plork.”

“I don’t suppose you intend to elaborate further?”

They plodded along in silence for a few seconds.

“Cryptic, as always,” Lom remarked, shaking his head.

Just then Selpla spotted something in the distance ahead of them. It looked like a large tree fallen across the road. They approached it. The crown of the tree was smoking slightly. She walked over to the smoldering lumber and inspected it, the ever-present rain trickling down her face.

“Lightning.”

Lom had drifted to the opposite side of the road. “Hey, come take a look at this,” he suddenly yelled to the others. They trudged obediently to his side and followed his pointing finger. He seemed to be indicating a nondescript pile of rocks. They regarded the manifestation for a long while until Drin expressed what he and Selpla were thinking.

“Rocks.”

Lom raised his eyebrows with an audible squeak. “Yes, they’re rocks. But notice something odd about them. They’re the only rocks anywhere around here. The nearest mountain is too far away for them to have fallen down its slopes. Also, they are broken and scattered, as though they were dropped from a meter or two onto this spot.”

Selpla surveyed the scene. “Yes,” she agreed, “That is how it appears. The question would be, ‘where did they drop
from
?’”

There didn’t seem to be any reasonable solution to the conundrum until Drin pointed out a series of wide, deep gouges all leading away in the same direction. Selpla immediately seized on the discovery, dropping the current puzzle in favor of a far more intriguing one. “My moving mountain!” she exclaimed, “On the trail, trackbeasts!” and scrambled off along the gouge lines that disappeared over a nearby ridge.

Drin and Lom looked at one another, and then at Selpla, who was rapidly diminishing over the horizon.

“Something not right about Selpla,” Drin said, as they started off after her.

Lom nodded in violent agreement. “I keep sayin’ that, but no one listens. Trackbeasts. Sheesh.”

Selpla’s news instincts were seldom wrong, and her stick-to-itiveness once she was hot on an investigative trail was much less than half a tad below frightening. Lom and Drin had to break into a full run to catch up with her as she jogged along in pursuit of the montane migrant. The spoor it left did not require a skilled tracker to follow.

“Selpla,” Lom asked as he and Drin jogged along beside her, “have you ever stopped to consider what, exactly, could motivate a mountain to take up a nomadic existence?”

“No, I haven’t given it a lot of thought. I figure when we catch the thing we’ll just ask it.”

“That’s a Selpla plan if ever I’ve heard one,” Lom mumbled as he dropped back a bit. Drin looked at him quizzically but made no remark. The terrain was getting pretty rough by this time, and their focus was increasingly on minimizing the skeletal trauma that too often accompanied Selpla’s pursuits of journalistic excellence.

You’d think a moving mountain would be fairly easy to catch, but all three of the intrepid newshounds were puffing hard with the effort after half an hour, with no bagged quarry to show for it. The trail had been crystal clear, but there was no sign of the mountain itself. They stopped to rest on a ridge that stuck up rather incongruously from an otherwise gentle upslope. Lom immediately found a semi-comfortable bank of ferns to lean against and proceeded to take one of his famous instant naps. Selpa stood on the highest point of the ridge and scanned the horizon for her fugitive topography. After a few minutes she seemed to experience an epiphany. “This way!” she shouted as she ran towards the nearest foothill.

Drin shook Lom awake. He struggled to his feet and together they scrambled after her. The route she had chosen became more and more strewn with increasingly larger boulders as it wound its way up the shoulder of a hill that was much steeper in the climbing than it had appeared on the approach. The boys stumbled and cursed whilst negotiating the tricky footpath, never really seeming to gain any ground on Selpla, when suddenly they rounded a corner and narrowly avoided colliding with her. She was standing motionless and staring open-mouthed at nothing at all.

Drin and Lom took up positions on either side of their feckless leader and gazed out at whatever was holding her in its rapt embrace. Lom was about to make a snide remark about her newfound fascination with hallucinations when all at once the bottom fell out of his brain: where a moment before there had been a rugged, rock-strewn hillside there now swirled a phantasmagoric fractal maelstrom, replete with darting crystalline insectoids and chromatic milk globule explosions. Lom and Selpla were utterly transfixed by the show. Drin started salivating. It began without warning to hail. The only shelter they could see was a rock overhang up a steep path that most certainly hadn’t been there before the hail began. Selpla shrugged and started up, wincing from the bruises that were forming where the hard ice pellets traumatized even her tough goblin skin. Any port at all was welcome in this storm.

“It would appear,” remarked Ballop’ril to his guest while staring intently at a glimmering bubble of magical televescence hovering between them, “That we have more visitors on the lower terrace.” Prond had a look. “Ah, I was wondering where they’d got to.”

Prond would have been considerably more skeptical when Ballop’ril introduced himself had he not personally witnessed the moving mountain at very close terms. It was hard to argue with a calling card of that magnitude. Prond had heard of Ballop’ril, of course, but a cursory mental calculation put his age well beyond the normal goblin lifespan. He didn’t know very much about bugbears, though. He decided it was both prudent and sensible simply to take Ballop’ril’s word for his identity. He was evidently a powerful mage, whoever he was, and that in itself was a strong argument for maintaining an amiable relationship.

His host seemed pleased at Prond’s unquestioning acceptance and offered to conduct a personal tour of his fantastic lodgings. (He had dropped the provincial dialect he habitually employed on the ‘outside’ to keep strangers from guessing his identity.) Prond nodded in silent assent and they set off. The entire mountain was riddled with chambers and catacombs, each more spectacularly appointed than the last. They wandered for hours among the grottoes of towering crystal, precious metals, and multihued magical luminescence. They passed through an endless array of breathtakingly splendid magnificence, punctuated occasionally by glimpses of more utilitarian spaces where the actual work of running the vast complex got done.

They stopped at last in a lavishly appointed library. Prond had no idea that many books existed on the whole of N’plork, much less in one room, enormous though it admittedly was. At the center of the expanse was a crystal globe, larger than a goblin, which glowed with an intense blue radiance. Ballop’ril invited his guest to peruse to his heart’s content while he excused himself to attend to some pressing duty. Prond wandered in an overwhelmed daze amongst the hundreds of shelves that stretched up into the darkness of the arched cavern ceiling. Massive ladders that moved effortlessly on their tracks with a light touch were positioned every few meters for access even to the topmost tomes.

After an incalculable period of aimless browsing, Prond caught sight of an oversized volume far above on an upper shelf that seemed to pulse as would a beacon, beckoning him. He was a bit afraid of heights, but swallowed his fear and scaled the multitudinous rungs in pursuit of the object of his temptation.

The grail of his quest was a book with
Theoretical Magic: The Way of Mastery
embossed in cracked gold along an age-stiffened spine. It was musty and dusty and in all ways lived up to the stereotype of the forgotten tome of arcane lore. Prond carried it carefully back to one of the elaborately carved reading tables and opened it gently, half afraid it might disintegrate in his hand so ancient did it appear. It fell open to a passage about a third of the way through the fourth bound signature. He settled back in the padded leather chair and began to read.

Goblins developed what we commonly refer to as senses as a result of slow adaptation to their environment. Over the long history of life on N’plork, the demands of the physical environment allowed those creatures that could detect and respond appropriately to the constantly-changing conditions surrounding them to breed more successfully; with each successive generation these senses were honed until no reproductive advantage was to be gained from further increase.

As we have discovered throughout our intellectual history, there are many forces and phenomena present in the holoverse that we are unable to perceive without some form of interface to translate extrasensory information into stimuli that fall within our range of sensation.

Sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, spark, and the less common senses all evolved in response to survival pressures. We see the colors we see because of the nature of sunlight. We hear what we hear because of the range of frequencies generated by events that affected our survival and reproduction. We smell, taste, and spark in response to other natural stimuli, the processing of which enhanced our survival. Our sense of touch and the related ‘subsenses’ such as proprioception, balance, and visual echolocation are necessary to move through the environment, avoid danger, and gather resources.

‘Magic’ is a widely-used and for the most part poorly-defined term. Many different meanings have been assigned to the word, some of them with little regard for what I will call ‘etymological fidelity.’ While there are many manifestations of both the subjective mind and objective nature that have been referred to as ‘magical,’ I do not refute these events, nor do I begrudge any for applying the term ‘magical’ to them. For my purposes, however, ‘magic’ will refer to the comprehension and controlled use of forces not ordinarily perceived by the unindoctrinated sentient. Perception is fundamental to the mage; one cannot control forces one cannot envision. Comprehension is next. Again, the mage must understand the forces the mage purports to control. The last and perhaps most difficult stage in the development of a mage is Direction. Not all mages are able or desire to advance to the level where they are capable of directing the flow of magic. Contrary to popular belief, in fact, relatively few mages choose this path. It is arduous and can lead to great danger for the mage, for Directing is a task that requires absolute concentration and total dedication. Anything less can be catastrophic, as some of the forces of magic are highly volatile and possess tremendous kinetic energy. Many of the greatest mages have chosen not to embrace the discipline of Directive magic, but this has not diminished their greatness.