Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (11 page)

B> Perhaps. I have no real opinion on the issue, one way or the other. It’s just what we are taught. But I will say that I have never met any at our level who were not sisters.

B> Sorry, no, I meant ‘Sisters of the Code.’ A secret sorority of female hackers.

Aspet wondered if this was some sort of elaborate practical joke, or if he had indeed stumbled across an uber-underground unknown to the conventional underground. A sub-basement of the hacking community, as it were. He needed some time to realign his world-view.

• * • * • * •

Pyfox shrugged noncommittally. He wasn’t going to get involved in a petty political dispute just now, not when he had issues of far greater magnitude to address.

“Pyfox wants hobs to take it somewhere else now. Pyfox has thinking to do. Hobs make too much noise arguing all time like children.”

He adopted the classic deep urban hobgoblin disdain for pronouns. It was an affectation for him; he spoke perfectly well when the need arose. Speech affectations of one sort or another were something of a fashion in Tragacanth. Most who spoke this way had a tendency to drop out of it when stressed. Pyfox seldom got stressed. Even the recent attempt on his life elicited little reaction. The other hobgoblins cleared out of the room immediately. They knew better than to ignore the boss.

Spread out on a table in front of him were a series of diagrams—flow charts, in point of fact. They depicted a complex sequence of events, each annotated extensively in the margins with lots of cross-references and explanatory doodles. It was difficult to make out exactly the overall objective of the mapped-out processes, but given that Pyfox seemed intently interested in it, it was no doubt quite illegal.

He spent almost an hour poring over the charts, his face a model of hobgoblin concentration. Finally he jabbed his stubby little finger near the bottom of one and traced a rather shaky path around and across two others until he wound up at last at an apparent finishing point. “Stalash!” he said, with great emphasis. “Then will Pyfox have victory over the magic-using swibs. No more magic except through Pyfox. Hobs will be in charge. Sweet days for Pyfox then, no?”

As he was relishing the sound of his own little oratory, there was a knock at the door. Pyfox slid open a narrow reinforced spy panel at his eye level and stared out, contorting his body in an attempt to look at something apparently at or near ceiling height in the foyer. He grunted after a moment and opened the door. The visitor had to stoop severely to enter the room. He was a troll, of ancient lineage, if appearances were any indication. Hobgoblins aren’t particularly puny by Tragacanthan standards—a little smaller, on average, than goblins, but bigger than most of the other races. Next to the hulking troll, however, Pyfox looked pathetically insignificant.

“Hail, Pyfox, savior of the people,” the troll boomed in greeting. Pyfox raised his eyebrow, but said nothing in reply except, “Pyfox welcomes Fen.” The two returned to the table where Pyfox had been examining his flowcharts.

“The agents of Pyfox relay that the plan has reached stage three, with stage four expected by next week. What news does Fen bring?”

The troll puffed up his already smekking impressive chest.

“I bring news of high import, O great one. A total of six spheres have now been located and the attack venues established. We have probable coordinates for six more.”

“Pyfox is pleased. Fen will return to Astflanar base and tell the Liberators to continue the mission. Fen will also deliver an artifact to the Liberators.”

Pyfox handed Fen a bundle wrapped in a soft grayish fabric.

“Fen will handle the artifact with great care and guard it well, for it is one of the ancient keys to The Slice, obtained at immeasurable personal risk by Pyfox himself.”

The hobgoblin had, in fact, bought it from a clueless gnarlignome at an auction for practically nothing some years ago, but he had a mystique to maintain, after all.

The troll’s already enormous eyes grew even larger. He bowed reverently in the downward direction of Pyfox and took the bundle from him carefully, as though it were made of finely spun crystal lattice. One of the things Pyfox liked best about trolls was their trusting nature and the ease with which they could be manipulated. They were habitually polite, too, which was a real plus for creatures strong enough to crush an adult hobgoblin’s head in one hand.

“I will lavish the artifact with tremendous care and keep it safe from any harm, ‘ere I deliver it to the Liberators two days hence.”

Pyfox rolled his eyes almost imperceptibly. This particular troll had learned hobgoblin from an itinerant thespian, and so his mode of speech was a bit disconcerting at times.

“Pyfox wishes Fen to begin the journey.
Now
.”

The troll nodded subserviently and scrambled for the exit, nearly taking the door frame with him as he miscalculated the degree of ducking necessary for successful negotiation in his haste to do his master’s bidding. Fen clutched the precious bundle to his chest and lumbered away, the growing knot on his huge misshapen head merely reminding him of his sacred mission.

Pyfox watched him go and shook his head. Having a troll devoted to you was like having a three meter-tall scrubhound. As long as you gave him specific instructions and never let him do anything on his own initiative, he was pretty reliable. Unlike scrubhounds, many trolls were even housebroken (so long as you didn’t overly excite them).

The artifact Pyfox had entrusted to Fen was, at least as far as he and his ‘consultants’ could tell one of the original keys used to lock The Slice in place thousands of years ago, when the ancient Archmages introduced magic into the world. Neutralizing the inviolability spell
in toto
would of course require all of the keys, but possessing even one should make it easier to destroy the spheres which marked the transition from physical to magical space. Once the field was sufficiently weakened, a concentrated attack of adequate proportions should do the job even without the remaining keys.

Fen would take the key to Pyfox’s elite commando unit the Liberators (so named because their mission was liberating money from everyone else into Pyfox’s pockets), who operated from a secret base beneath the slopes of Mt. Astflanar in the Espwe range, the highest peak in Tragacanth. The Liberators had been laboring for some weeks now on their mission, which was to tear down the border separating magical space from physical space, effectively destroying access to The Slice and rendering magic inoperative, except through one conduit controlled by Pyfox. Their motive was basically that Pyfox told them to, although he’d also filled their heads with propaganda about the evils of magic and how much better the hobgoblin lot had been before it came along. Hobs made notoriously poor magi—something to do with their lack of patience and shallow intellect. Still, for the most part they were just following orders, something that hobs did fairly well. The stuff about hobs having been better off before was pure speculation—magic had been introduced to Tragacanth millennia ago, before there were many written records. No one alive today really
knew
anything about conditions in those distant days. Pyfox had an ulterior motive for the destruction, as he had for most anything he did: his own profit.

Fen was an orphan who’d been befriended by Pyfox years ago, and he had proven to be a most excellent messenger boy and courier. Trolls were not exactly stupid, but the rivers of their thought did not run deep. Some of them had surprisingly large vocabularies, for instance, but they employed them almost exclusively in the conduct of utterly pedestrian small talk. They had no real concept of morality and tended to become fixated on a single idea or goal, which of course made Fen the ideal errand boy for Pyfox’s criminal organization. One drawback is that trolls are purely incapable of lying; Pyfox had to be certain that he did not ask Fen to do anything
too
illegal, else run the risk of him being picked up and unwittingly confessing, possibly revealing sensitive operational details in the process.

Pyfox returned to his charts. Everything was coming together nicely, despite the pathetic attempts to interfere with his plans by killing him with a magical bomb. He didn’t know who was behind that nefarious plot, but he was certain his spies would soon ferret out that information, and then he’d deal with the perpetrators in a suitably vengeful manner.

Meanwhile, he needed to send a more critical and secure message. He pulled out a small telecomm module and switched the encryption selector from “magical” to “quantum.” Wouldn’t do for him to entrust his confidentiality to a system he was actively working to decimate, now would it?

“Pyfox to Treqliw: Operation Tumble proceeding according to plan. Prepare to initiate stage four on my command. Transmit status report on this frequency at prearranged time. Pyfox out.” Pyfox smiled. He always felt so deliciously high-tech and sophisticated when he used the telecomm module. Who needed magic? Technology was superior in every way, and he had a recurrent dream of emerging from the downfall of magic as technology’s benevolent champion, bestowing technological bliss upon a grateful citizenry from his many factories. He would practically give it away at first—but as they grew more and more dependent on the devices only he could supply (he held most of the patents by acquisition or theft, and employed a large contingent of ‘competition discouragement personnel’), prices and profits would rise accordingly. Of course, there would still be one magical access point remaining, and he would control that, as well. It was a classic case of externally-lubricated supply and demand. Pyfox broke into a delicious chartreuse sweat just thinking about it. 

Chapter Nine:
Golem on the GRUC

“I
dream a dream unvanquished; I soar with the buoyancy of a spirit unfettered.”

Tol put down the file he was perusing and frowned. “What the name of Plegma are you babbling about?”

The pen let out an affronted huff—rather a disturbing sound coming from a writing instrument—and spit out a curt reply.

“I am trying to compose poetry here. Poetry is
a manifestation
of
culture
: I am not at all surprised you cannot comprehend it.”

Tol snorted. “Poetry? Sounded like gibberish from this end.”

The pen sighed, “Yes, well, that is just the sort of response I would expect from you. You have not a single molecule of literary appreciation in your entire wretched organic physical makeup.”

Tol didn’t like the direction this was taking. “I’ll make a deal with you: you shut your smekking inkhole while I’m trying to think and maybe I won’t ‘accidentally’ flush you down the toilet later.”

“Spoken like a true vulgarian. I shall make every attempt not to interrupt your laborious mental grunting again.”

Tol rolled his eyes. He noticed the hypersonic shredder across the room and idly speculated on what it would do to the pen.

“Do not even contemplate it, you crass barbarian,” came a voice from his pocket, “I am departmental property, you know. You can’t afford to ‘lose’ me.”

He frowned in annoyance and turned his attention back to the file. It was a compilation of reports from citizens who’d observed suspicious activity in and around the park where he’d lost track of the elves. They ranged from the innocuous to the raving paranoid (aliens with thin pink skin and no armored ridges—right), but a couple caught his attention. One described a small, delicate, elf-like being seen flitting through the flowerbeds—possibly this “alfar” thing Plåk had told him about—and the other was a rather detailed account of mysterious ‘energy fields’ or something that the reporting party had seen on several occasions in one specific area of the park. The same area, in fact, where the trail of the elves had disappeared.

He studied the reported observation times. No apparent pattern. His detective’s seventh sense was buzzing, so he dragged out the computer and started looking for matches between the reports and significant events in the activity database. It didn’t take long before he’d come up with some interesting hypothetical correlations.

Some of the possible connections were a bit silly, like the kidnapping of eight juvenile fruit-eating grunzagas from the zoological gardens. Others were just plain unlikely, such as the murder by electrocution of a sanitation worker on the job in the posh Goblinopolis neighborhood of Eshvodsi.

Then Tol came across this little tidbit:

Shortly after sunset I was strolling along the southern edge of the park, near the Trokkle gate, when I saw three bright flashes of light about two meters off the ground above a hedge. There was a crackling or spitting noise, and a strong smell was in the air, like that odor during a nearby electrical storm.

The time stamp of the report coincided almost perfectly with a strange rift in the magical matrix, reported to the CoME by numerous lower and mid-level mages. CoME provided copies of these reports to the EE community as part of a cooperative information-sharing agreement.