Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (13 page)

Tol pulled his disruptor—time to nip this nonsense in the bud. It was set to “disable,” the standard default setting dictated by departmental regs. He fired point blank at his attacker on his next swing. Didn’t even flinch. Puzzled, he jacked it up to “full stun” and fired again while rolling out of the way of a full body lunge. Got him right in the chest. The red-eyed goblin shook it off as though he’d been shot by a child’s water pistol.

Tol was beginning to get worried. This guy wasn’t right. He longed for the days when firing his disruptor actually accomplished something besides using up a charge.

Luckily, ol’ scarlet eyes didn’t move too fast. As he was pivoting around for another go, Tol barked into his pocket.

“What exactly is that thing? It sure doesn’t act like any goblin I’ve ever seen before.”

“Strictly speaking, it is not a goblin, per se. It is a magically-animated construct known as a
golem
,” replied the pen. “The body is that of a goblin, but the force which drives it is not metabolism, but rather magic.”

“Great,” Tol huffed, setting his disruptor on ‘liquefy,’ “I suppose that means that this won’t do any good, either.”

He fired at very close range into the golem’s face, narrowly avoiding being caught in a crush hold. The shot ripped away half of the flesh on the golem’s head, spewing not blood and tissue but a weird spongy gelatinous glop like pale greenish-beige packing material all over the carriage. The golem shook its gory locks and, despite now having no functional ocular apparatus, came unerringly for its quarry, who was rapidly running out of self-defense options.

“Gah. Sometimes I hate being right.” He shoved his obviously useless disruptor back into its shoulder holster. “Any advice on what I should do now?” he yelled into his pocket as he dove out of the way of another powerful roundhouse.

“Discretion, it is said, is the better part of valor.”

“What the smek is that supposed to mean?”

“Employing the vernacular, it is time to split.”

“Gotcha.”

Splitting was going to be problematic, unfor-tunately. The carriage was traveling at quite a respectable clip through a tube specifically designed and constructed to house a speeding carriage of these dimensions and nothing else. The gap between outer carriage skin and tunnel wall was never more than about fifty centimeters. That just wasn’t room for a full-grown goblin, even one in relatively good shape like Tol. He reached above his seat and pressed the “Emergency Stop” button. That would bring the carriage to a halt at the next exit, be it a station or just a service access tunnel, where GRUC authorities would be waiting. Theoretically, anyway.

He had no idea how far it was going to be to the next possible stop, though, and it was promising to be quite a challenge to stay out of the way of the rampaging golem until then. He found himself devoting a fair amount of energy to that goal. As he began to tire from the constant dodging, his strategy got necessarily more creative. Perhaps he could lead the golem to one of the doors and trick it into leaping out. After barely escaping a particularly vicious lunge, he decided now might be a good time to try it.

Tol jumped up and stuck out his tongue at the golem, making a derisive noise with his lips and lower nostrils. When the enraged monster came after him, he led it toward one end of the carriage. As he approached one of the toolboxes, he heard a muffled exclamation from his pocket.

“Use caution. Something has just triggered a transient planar magical power flux perpendicular to the long axis of the carriage.”

At that moment Tol encountered something invisible but very, very solid about a meter from the exit. It left him rolling on the floor in pain, which at least made him a more difficult target for his less than agile pursuer.

“A smekkin’ force field. Ow.”

“I
did
warn you.”

“If you’d learn to speak plain Goblish, your warnings would be a lot more comprehensible.”

“Look, is it
my
fault that you have the vocabulary of a caged mimic-bird?”

“Ya know, if your little pen body happens to get smashed beyond recognition during the course of this encounter, no one could blame me.”

“My exoskeleton is composed of reinforced anthratanium. It would take a blow of approximately 1,250 kilograms of force per square centimeter to deform it significantly. Such an impact would pulverize your biological structure utterly. In other words, anything that manages to ‘smash my body beyond recognition’ would do far worse to you, although one might argue that any such action would present no serious detriment to society at large.”

Tol looked up and saw the golem heading in his direction. He waited until the last possible moment before leaping aside. The golem smashed into the force field with considerable momentum, losing several large skull fragments in the collision. His head was now reduced to less than half its original mass, and had gone from horrific to faintly ridiculous. The golem lined up on him, and again Tol leapt aside. The force field was becoming increasingly spattered with magical golem guts.

“Hey, I could start to like this,” Tol chuckled as he jumped again and watched his literally mindless assailant lose yet another round with the force field. Golem debris was beginning to pile up at his feet.

“How long can this thing keep attacking? I mean, how many parts does it have to lose before it gives up?”

“It will never ‘give up.’ So long as there are any contractile muscle fibers remaining, whatever body remnants contain them will continue to strive in your direction. Think of it this way: each cell in the golem’s body is under magical geas to kill you—alone, if need be.”

“Super. The quest for the holey gore,” Tol muttered.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing. So, what can bring an end to this geas, other than my untimely demise?”

“Not much. You could incinerate every last cell of the golem, or get a mage of sufficiently high level to cancel the spell.”

“How high a level?”

“Depends on the level of the caster. From the nature of the energy being drawn from The Slice, I would venture to speculate a very high level indeed.”

Suddenly the golem’s fist came crashing down on Tol’s shoulder from the side. He hadn’t expected that move, since his assailant had been lumbering straight at him up until now. The force of the blow drove him to his knees.

The monster immediately followed through with a blow to Tol’s head, which fortunately didn’t fully connect because Tol was in the process of slumping to one side at the time. The fist missed his head and hit his other shoulder, driving him fully to the ground.

“I...can’t feel either of my arms,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Trauma to the suprabrachical plexi,” the pen diagnosed, “sensation will return in a few minutes if there is no further damage. Roll around randomly on the floor; it cannot anticipate your movements, and it has not the dexterity to hit you if you roll quickly enough.”

“Oof,” Tol replied as he rolled, “Ugh...mmf...argh...ow...”

He sat up and struggled to his feet, bleeding from several new wounds. “I beg,” he began, narrowly avoiding a hit that tore a seat from its moorings, “to differ.”

“Odd,” replied the pen, “reference data indicates that golems are strictly reactive—they depend on movement and detection of the magical aura of living creatures to track their targets. It should not be able to hit you if you keep moving in unpredictable ways.”

“I’m thinkin’ your definition of ‘unpredictable’ and his aren’t the same, ‘cause he keeps putting his fist right where I’m ending up.”

“Interesting. I will need more data to revise my initial analysis.”

“Too much more data collection and I won’t be around to read the final report. How about some data on how to
stop
this thing before it kills me?”

“Very well,” the pen sighed, “I will scan the databases for more specific details.”

“You mean you haven’t done that already? What the smek
have
you been doing?”

“Proper analysis of a real-time tactical situation is complex and requires correlation across a broad array of information matrices.”

“Have I ever mentioned how smekkin’ worthless you are?”

“I believe the sentiment has been expressed previously.”

“Good. I’d hate to think you were operating under the mistaken assumption that you served any useful purpose.”

The feeling returned to Tol’s arms at last, and he wrenched a mangled iron bar from a destroyed seat. He used it to deflect a particularly ferocious onslaught by the golem, slicing off the lower third of the leftmost appendage: there really wasn’t enough left to call it an ‘arm.’

“Ole!” Tol shouted, twisting out of the way of the golem’s counterpunch.

“What does ‘ole’ mean?” asked the pen.

“Err, nothing. It’s just a word a friend from another dimension once taught me.”

“It does not appear in any of my dictionaries.”

“Because it’s not of Tragacanthan origin, I told you. Forget about it and concentrate on saving my skin, will ya?”

“If I must,” the pen sniffed.

“Well, it might possibly justify your existence. Certainly your prowess as a writing instrument hasn’t filled the bill.”

“If
you
were a little more adept at the actual process of writing,
my
utility might be drastically improved.”

“Will you for the love of Gammag stop being defensive and focus? This thing isn’t slowing down, but I am.”

“Very well. Stand by.”

“Easy for you to say.”

Tol had taken to staying up on the seats. The golem apparently couldn’t negotiate climbing, and was reduced to swinging at his legs. Of course, any hit that incapacitated him would put him within easy reach of his adversary, so Tol was really dodging just as much as before. Not having constantly to duck away from blows to his head and neck was a relief, though. As he was bracing for another attack, Tol caught a glimpse of something whizzing past the carriage. It took a few seconds before his brain registered just what he’d seen. It was a maintenance portal. The carriage should have stopped at it, but obviously it didn’t. That probably meant that the emergency stop system had been sabotaged. Made sense; he should have anticipated that move.

The situation seemed a great deal less hopeful than it had a short time ago. He was trapped in a small cylindrical prison with a virtually immortal magical opponent eager to rip him limb from limb and/or beat him into a gooey pulp. There was no realistic hope of stopping the carriage, and attempting to escape it while moving would be suicide. His only ally was a wise-cracking writing instrument with an attention deficit disorder. How much bleaker could things get?

There is an old goblin maxim to the effect that one should be careful what sorts of rhetorical questions one poses, even mentally, lest they lose their rhetorical nature. As if to illustrate that nugget of wisdom, the gods chose that moment to answer Tol’s question in an unequivocal manner. The golem caught him just behind the knee in another surprise move and slammed his relatively intact fist into Tol’s ribs as he buckled. He managed to roll away from the next blow, but his pain level had increased logarithmically.

“I have good news and bad news,” said the pen suddenly, its electronic voice a bit muffled from the makeshift bandage Tol had wrapped around his cracked ribs.

“I
hate
it when people say that to me,” replied Tol through gritted teeth, “what’s the bad news?”

“According to my sensors you are losing blood too rapidly to sustain consciousness much longer.”

“What did I say that sounded like ‘raise my stress level even more, will you?’ And the good news?”

“My power consumption curve has leveled off. That means my ambient energy conversion cells have finally stabilized to their mature values.”

“Remind me to throw you a smekkin’ party in celebration. Looks like I’ll have to do it from the afterlife, though, since I won’t actually be alive much longer.”

He dropped to his knees as he spoke. The lack of blood was overcoming him. The golem wheeled around and moved in for the kill.

“Oh yes, I have one more bit of news, as well.”

“I can’t wait. What is it, did you discover some heretofore undetected mocking module in your onboard ROM?”

“Not exactly. I have detected the presence of a magical singularity.”

“Would I regret it if I expended my last conscious breath to ask you what the smek you’re talking about?”

“I am talking about him.”

“Him? Him who?” Tol gasped weakly, and swiveled his head around. There in the middle of the carriage was a small fragile-looking creature about a meter tall, with bluish skin and casting a faint pearly radiance. He looked like a tiny glowing elf seen through the wrong end of a spyglass.

“Great. Now I’m hallucinating. What’s next, flying purple seabeeves in sequined tutus?”

“You are not hallucinating, on this occasion. There is a creature now present in the carriage that is, as far I can tell from my telemetry, a manifestation of The Slice itself. A sort of living personification of magic, if you will.”