Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (2 page)

At the conclusion of her performance, the ogress (it was apparent now that she was a fullblood) climbed up on the bar to dance—Terp had long ago reinforced that bar with timbers salvaged from the shipwreck of a commercial sea-going freighter in Myndrythyl Bay for just this eventuality—but before the bouncer could sweep her off with a huge metal claw designed expressly for that purpose an extremely loud and discombobulating explosion went off right outside the tavern. One wall blew in immediately, several large support beams fractured, and parts of the ceiling began to sway ominously. There was a moment of stunned silence, during which the ogress fell limply off the bar of her own accord, followed by a mad stampede for the door. Tol was too far away to have any hope of getting through the hysterical crowd. He shrugged and slipped unimpeded around the corner to the back door. Panic is a curious thing, he mused as he casually skirted the building to see what all the brouhaha was about. It makes people forget that they are sentient (where applicable).

The front side of the
Balrog,
or what was left of it, was a bubbling stew of confusion, liberally sprinkled with a wide range of body parts and erstwhile architecture for condiments. Gnomes were shaking their little fists, goblins were wailing, ogres were cursing; the few elves who had been in attendance (and a couple more who were passing through at the time) were weeping quietly off to the side. Tol pushed his way through the fractured throng to examine the blast area.

“Anyone see who did this?” he asked of the nearest circle of bystanders. An ogre wearing the livery of the Goblinopolis Transport Service, who ran the city’s cabs, stepped forward. He was old and leathern, with gobbets of what had probably until recently been tavern patrons embedded here and there in the folds of his waxy skin.

“I seen ‘em,” he croaked, “I seen three elves come a runnin’ out from behind that there buildin’ and they drops this box undern th’ winder there. Then they goes skeddalin’ off that way and not more’n fifteen pops later there was the biggest boom you ever heard. Lucky I’s next door by then or I’d jest be leetle lumps on th’ pavement now.”

Tol cocked his head, “Are you trying to tell me that
elves
blew up this pub?” The cabbie nodded vehemently in the affirmative.

He whipped out a notebook. “OK, oldster. Can you describe these ‘elves’ for me?” He tried not to sound too doubtful, but it was a struggle. The ogre didn’t seem to notice, but then ogres aren’t famed for their mastery of linguistic nuance.

“They’s skinny as rails, wearing light gray shimmery-lookin’ duds. One of ‘em had on a hood with one o’ them long tails on it. The other two was sportin’ what looked like some kinda red sashes er wide belts. They mighta had a metal buckle or somethin’ on th’ front—I didn’t see ‘em from thet angle long enough ta tell fer sure.”

Tol scribbled some of this down in his leather bound department-issued notepad. His writing instrument was a clever little biomechanical hybrid thing that some misguided genius had thought it would be nifty to endow with a limited form of ‘domestic intelligence.’

“Skinny has two
n
s,” it reported quietly, “and while we are on the subject of skinny, you are 14.5 kilocalories above your optimum intake for this week, and it is only Midweeksday.”

Tol rolled his eyes. “Spare me the dietary editorials, will ya? I’m trying to take notes here.”

There was a strategically-calculated pause, and then a very slightly affronted electronic voice replied, “I apologize. I am just a poor mechanical device attempting to carry out my programming as well as I am able. If I have offended or annoyed you in the process, I am sorry. I shall shut up now and go back to being an inert piece of elegantly crafted metal and apparently utterly wasted circuitry. Do not mind me. I shall be in ‘silent’ mode, hoping against hope that someday you will find even the smallest reason to validate my presence in the universe. The gods know I do not ask for much. I only live—wait, I am not alive, am I?—I only
exist
to serve.”

Tol stuffed the pen back in the acoustically dampened lining of his overjack pocket (he’d had that lining installed specially and at considerable personal expense) and pulled his lower fangs across his upper lip in deep annoyance. He hated those stupid pens, but they were regulation for all field officers because the Edict Enforcement Commissioner’s brother owned the company that manufactured the confounded atrocities.

He interviewed several more eyewitnesses to the bombing, but no one had seen the perps as closely as the old ogre. The others just spoke of vague figures that ran out from the shadows, dropped something near the pub window, and scurried away. They agreed that there were three of them (well, one witness said six, but he was obviously deep into his gourds since he addressed Tol as “you guys”), and that they took off in the direction of Elixir Street. No one else from EE had shown up yet—mostly because they avoided Sebacea whenever possible—and the trail was already getting cold. Tol realized that this was going to be his case for the simple reason that it already was. Every time he fought fate, he didn’t even score a point.

He sighed and started sniffing around. Goblins had a pretty well-developed sense of smell; he could definitely catch a faint whiff of elf that led off in the indicated direction. It must be true, then: elves were responsible. He’d never heard of an elf willingly involved in a wanton destructive act like this. What was the world coming to? This could never have happened in the old days. He sighed again.

This time he heard himself sigh, and the sound made him realize what nostalgic nonsense he was thinking. People were people, be they elf, goblin, troll, or even chimera, and people were capable of just about anything at any given moment. They weren’t any better or worse than they’d ever been. He was just getting more cynical. Being a street cop in Sebacea will do that to you if you keep at it long enough.

As he tried to track the rapidly-fading scent trail, Tol was a bit put off to discover that the cobblestone walkway he was treading seemed to be dissolving under his feet. The buildings also were behaving rather oddly, in that their exterior walls were bowing out and sucking in, as though they were engaging in respiration, an architectural function he’d somehow never noticed before. The stars peering from between patches of cloud were beginning to leave contrails when he moved his head. This wasn’t normal, even for a goblin. Tol stopped for a moment and shook himself. The realization sloshed over him like a large wave of liquefied toffee that he
was
stoned from the smekking gourd. That
would boost his detective aptitude, all righty. All righty, all reety, all reety-righty-roty. All de all de lall de lull de looloo.

He sat down abruptly on the sidewalk and began to hum a song from his childhood. The humming turned into singing, and that turned into not very skilled goblinwarbling, which woke most of the neighborhood, or at least that contingent who had managed to get back to sleep after the explosion. Somewhere deep in Tol’s brain there was still a tiny capsule of sobriety and that capsule had just enough room for a single thought:
thank the gods
that being stoned on the job isn’t against regs anymore.
The Commissioner’s sister owned a pharmaceutical company that specialized—under the table—in ‘recreational hallucinogenics;’ EE management as a result now tended to look the other way when officers ‘indulged,’ so long as no one got hurt or duties weren’t
too
grievously impacted.

Tol finished a couple of songs and was about to launch into a third when a large and decidedly odiferous article of footwear came sailing out of a second-story window and plopped unceremoniously into his lap. He grinned at it and took a bite out of the upper. He chewed on it for a few seconds, rolling it around in his mouth like a dollop of vintage razzle. He swallowed with some difficulty and decided that further ingestion was not warranted at this time. It needed to age a bit more. He tossed it aside and got unsteadily to his feet (there being no one else’s feet to get to).

He knew there was something he was supposed to be doing—something important—but his attention kept getting diverted by fascinating little details like the patina on a corroding doorknocker or the way in which a rain gutter jutted out from the wall to which it was no longer firmly attached. As Tol stood there with his head cocked and one eye shut, staring at the empty space between gutter and stone, a liripiped figure crept up on him, silent as a worm, deposited a small package wrapped in paper near his feet, and disappeared just as quietly into the night.

He noticed it right away, as the accumulated precipitation from the cold mist that was now falling rather heavily caught the light from a street lamp and drew his attention. He knelt and picked up the package, fascinated by its sudden appearance. He turned it over in his hands; then his faced screwed up in exaggerated concern when his fingers encountered a greasy film that seemed to be emanating from within. Tol marched over to a nearby public trash receptacle and dropped the offending parcel inside. He turned away and had taken about seven or eight wobbly steps when the trash receptacle blew itself apart. The compound curves of the ornamental slats forming the outer structure of the container hurtled out in all directions, one narrowly missing Tol’s head and embedding itself in a brick facade a half meter to his right. The pressure wave from the blast knocked him to his knees.

It took a few seconds to recover from the shock, and by that time he’d noticed a pair of luminous eyes peering out at him from a broken grate. He crawled over to the grate to investigate, serendipitously moving out of the way just in time to avoid being crushed by a gargoyle dislodged from its rooftop perch by the explosion. The stone monster shattered on the sidewalk about two meters behind Tol, spraying berzal nut-sized chunks every which way. The eyes vanished into the pitch-dark recesses from which they’d materialized.

Tol got to his feet and brushed off the gargoyle debris. He picked up one of the chunks and regarded it briefly, wearing a frown that looked like concentration but really was more akin to hangover, and dropped the fragment absently into his overjack pocket. The gourd buzz was beginning to wind down, and he felt a growing sense that something wasn’t right. He examined the shattered remains of the gargoyle and peered up at the shadowed skyline trying to ascertain where it had fallen from. The mist had turned into light rain which streamed down his EE helmet and into his eyes. He snapped the collapsible brim into place and pulled his collar up as far as it would go against the chilly dampness. Then he remembered what he was doing out in the wet night.

He backtracked to the last place he’d been sure of the elves’ scent and tested the air. The rain had done a thorough job of erasing any definitive trail; all he could register was a faint hint that might or might not be elf spoor. Sighing, Tol picked his way along, relying as much on professional intuition as physical evidence.

Back at the site of the ruined gargoyle, a thickish mist, faintly blue in color, formed near the center of the debris and slowly began to rotate. It intensified and grew more substantial as the swirling increased in velocity. After half a minute the rotating column was a goblin-foot wide and the center of it radiated a strong white light that suddenly erupted in a blinding flash. When it faded the gargoyle pieces had mysteriously reassembled. This time around, however, the monster was no mere piece of grotesque sculpture. It was quite definitely alive. It shook itself, sniffed the night air, and let out a low, mournful keening. Suddenly it leapt forward and ran along at a trot on powerful, compact legs, nose jutted forward like a hound at the scent. It left a trail of warm, blue liquid oozing from a hole about the size of a berzal nut in its left shoulder.

Chapter Two:
Arnoc, Ferrocs & Dubers (Oh My!)

T
he Council of Mages and Engineers was billeted in a rather stylish manor house at the east end of the smartly designed and landscaped Royal Tragacanthan Government Complex in Goblinopolis. The building had two distinct components: an elaborate conference suite and office block occupied by the Council and their staffs, and the heavily fortified open floor plan Royal Network Operations Center, known widely as Arnoc. This was the central nervous system of the kingdom, where four discrete network layers provided all the data and control operations for the Royal government. These layers were named for the prevailing color schemes of each: aqua, cyan, teal, and chartreuse (the chief design engineer, it later turned out, was quite color blind and thought he had picked contrasting hues).

Each of these networks had its own dedicated core of analysts, engineers, systems administrators, operators, and programmers. They were in constant rivalry with one another; getting into any of them, however, was the pinnacle of a career in the Royal Data Corps. They were ‘the best of the best.’ The rivalries were actively supported by senior management because they tended to keep the geeks occupied and too busy to think much about hacking the systems for their own advancement/amusement.

All of the functions of government in Tragacanth were controlled by one or more of these networks, whose terminal linkages with the rest of the country were under the oversight of either engineers or mages. Some of the interfaces were digital, some magical. A few swung both ways. There were five dual interfaces, to be exact; together they constituted what was known as “The Pentagorn.” They were located one in each of the five administrative districts of Tragacanth, called
Ferrocs.
Ferroc Norda was in the North, Ferroc Sutha in the south, Ferroc Osta in the West, Ferroc Oria in the East, and Ferroc Loca in the central capitol district. Each of these had a dual interface, or
Duber
, and each interface was under the control of a Magineer, a cross-trained mage and engineer, of which no more than ten existed at any given time, by order of the Council: one primary and one backup for each Duber.