Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (24 page)

“As it fortuitously turns out, Tragacanth is where you are now.” Aspet looked around suspiciously at the featureless gray landscape stretching out to the horizon in all directions. He shuffled through his mental index cards for a moment. “Sorry, I don’t believe you. I’ve never heard of any part of Tragacanth that looks like this.”

“Perhaps this will refresh your memory,” replied the spectral voice. An oval object suddenly appeared in front of him. He plucked it out of the air and examined it. It was metallic, with a fine filigree pattern covering one side. He turned it over and realized with a shock that it was...a mirror.

Aspet awoke with a start. His neck was stiff and his head stuffed with cotton, as though he’d been drinking heavily the night before. He thought back, but couldn’t remember any recent celebrations that would have necessitated significant razzle intake. His mind was a blank for a few seconds, and then suddenly the dream hit him all at once, a neural tsunami crashing ashore without warning. He struggled to a sitting position, but the dream was passing in front of his eyes so rapidly and in such vivid detail that he lost situational awareness and was unable to make it any further. All he could do was sit there, arms stiffly braced on the mattress.

Finally he rolled out of bed and staggered to the kitchen for a very large gourd full of stankabru. He needed it after last night. He couldn’t remember at the moment what he’d had for dinner the previous evening, but as soon as his memory returned whatever it was went on his ‘do not eat before bedtime’ list. That dream was totally weird and completely different from his usual nighttime cinematics. It was as vivid as the memory of a recent trauma, and showed no signs of slipping into the oubliette of vague, misty recollection where the vast majority of his dreams ended up by the time breakfast was finished.

Aspet had never really been a devotee of the ‘dreams mean something’ school, but then he’d never experienced a dream of this clarity before, either. It had taken control of his mind in a way he found highly disturbing but completely irresistible. He sat in his breakfast nook and stared vacantly out the bay window into a small vegetable and herb garden he maintained as much for relaxation as thrift. It was beginning to rain; the droplets ran down tall reddish plant stalks and hung glistening from their leaves as tiny liquid globes. They looked like planets to him: entire worlds where countless creatures passed their lives and died, unaware of and unconcerned about all the other droplets around them, or the larger world beyond.

He shook his head and frowned. He never used to see things that way—what was wrong with him? Was the dream somehow involved? He got up to pour himself another gourd of stankabru. He was seeing everything a little differently this morning. Even his trusty ol’ bru gourd seemed to have taken on a new dimension since yesterday. He saw textural details and tiny irregularities in the handle he’d never noticed before. As the steaming stankabru took hold and nudged him fully awake, Aspet realized that everything within his field of vision was clearer, more ambiguous, and less easily explainable than he remembered. He’d heard that certain pharmacologically-active substances could have this effect, but two facts kept hammering at him, militating against the theory that he was under the influence:

1) He didn’t recall ingesting any such substances; and

2) He didn’t have the munchies.

As the day wore on, he found himself wandering aimlessly around his house and grounds, puttering with this and that but unable to concentrate on anything but the dream. The unwavering monomania was really getting to him. He unwittingly reviewed every minute detail of the night’s events over and over, until he was ready to scream. Aspet finally decided to go online and try to get his mind on something else before he plunged precipitously over the frigid falls into incapacitating insanity.

It was waiting for him in his inbox. The message. He’d gotten some pretty odd messages since he announced his intention to try for the throne of Tragacanth, but this one was just...out there.

To: Asp37!cholinergia!goblinopolis

From: RCLiaison!FerrocLoca!CoME

Subject: Oneiric Profile Exam

Congratulations. You have passed the final qualifying examination for ascendancy to the Throne of Tragacanth. Your tournament will be held at 0900 hours three days hence at the Royal Network Operating Center Tournament Hall (South entrance). Please be there by 0800 hours for judging briefing and security checks.

Your disentanglement trigger is Fimbolu lagra premnalb

It must be activated orally, and repeated thrice.

Sincerely,

Faxol Brokk

Royal Candidate Liaison

Tragacanth Council of Mages and Engineers

Oneiric profile exam
? What the smek did that mean? He hadn’t taken any sort of exam. In fact, it had been awhile since he’d even heard from CoME or anyone else associated with this Royal stuff. It was weird that he’d spent so much time and effort honing his mad skills and preparing mentally for this, the challenge of his life, yet suddenly it all seemed so distant. That damned dream was sucking his psyche dry. He glanced down at the message again. What was that globber about a ‘disentanglement trigger?’ Aspet felt himself getting irritated at the sheer paucity of explanatory information in this communication.

After a brief but frantic search he located a disc containing the extensive collection of docs he’d been given when he attended the Seminar. Scanning the table of contents scored no hits, but after a global search using the right string, this popped up:

At the conclusion of the Oneiric Profile Examination, a trigger phrase will be supplied which should be repeated slowly and clearly out loud three times to disentangle the examination implant from the candidate’s subconscious mind. This procedure
must
be carried out within one diurnal period of the exam termination or the subject will risk severely diminished mental capacity.

Rereading this part several times oddly did not help to form any cogent mental image for him. He saw the words but found it increasingly difficult to comprehend them, as though they were changing into a foreign language right before his eyes. After a few minutes it seemed prudent to stop trying to understand the nuances and just concentrate on absorbing the gist. Even this seemed more and more hopeless. Finally some small nugget of intellect holding on to a tiny shred of awareness fixated on the words “fimbolu lagra premnalb” and began repeating them in his head, over and over. A mental struggle between this bizarre phrase and the swirling juggernaut that was the dream ensued, driving him even closer to the edge of
non compos mentis
.

Aspet closed his eyes as tightly as he could, scrunching down until his face sported one long wrinkle across the ocular axis. He made a monumental effort to suppress the dream just enough to bring the phrase his brain was chanting at him into focus so he could grab it. Succeeding for a fleeting moment, he began to mouth the words, quietly at first, but louder as he gained confidence.

Fimble lagga premal....fimbala laggar premnob...fimbola lagra premnal...fimbolu lagra premnalb...fimbolu lagra premnalb...fimbolu lagra premnalb!

A loud snap reverberated through his skull and suddenly the dream was gone. Totally. No trace. As though it had never happened.

Aspet sat in stunned confusion. He was relieved at suddenly having control of his mind handed back to him, but the sucking hole left by the dream as it was ripped out of his consciousness gave him a wicked case of mental nausea. Except he couldn’t make it better by throwing up. He put his head in his hands and took deep breaths, instead.

Gradually the gaping chasm vacated by the dream got filled in by granules of real memory and fragments of fancy, leaving him a little disoriented but no longer acutely traumatized. He rubbed his eyes to improve focus and looked around. The world seemed to have dropped back into routine mode: comfortable, familiar, boring. Not that boring was bad in this case.

He noticed the post on his screen and read it again. It still didn’t make his top ten most lucid communications, but it was no longer the jumble of nonsense it had seemed minutes earlier. Well, except for the
Fimbolu...
business. He had no idea what that was supposed to mean. The gist seemed to be that he had been the subject of some sort of test, which he had apparently passed. The whole episode jogged something; he figured it was a crumb he’d picked up in The Seminar but forgotten about due to extreme lack of engagement. The Seminar’s presenters were not exactly scintillating, and nor was the subject matter terribly gripping. It was mostly officious government-speak interspersed with hefty dollops of rules and edicts. Throughout most of it Aspet had struggled simply to keep his eyes open.

He scrolled through the electronic documents he’d brought home with him and read the entire section on the ‘Oneiric Profile Examination.’ Apparently it was a deep psychological examination conducted on candidates shortly before they were scheduled to make an attempt at the crown. A dream scenario was magically injected into the candidate’s neural stream just prior to the initiation of the dreaming part of the sleep cycle. The reactions of the candidate to various situations and problems posed during the dream were carefully scrutinized by a team at CoME to determine if the candidate was suited for ruling and that he had no vengeful itinerary or other ulterior motives for wanting to be king. Aspet wasn’t sure
why
he wanted to be king, other than feeling he could do a better job than the current monarch, but he felt reasonably confident that he wasn’t harboring any repressed sinister aspirations.

The fact that he now had less than three days to make final preparations for his attempt at the throne suddenly squirmed its way through the crowd of thoughts and ruminations currently milling about in his consciousness and shocked him into action. He had a lot to do, and a short time to do it in.

Chapter Fourteen:
Null Magic

T
ol sighed. As expected, he wasn’t having any luck convincing his superiors that there was an imminent threat to The Slice. He had stopped short of telling them about Oloi and the phantom pub, though. He just got out of the infirmary and the last thing he wanted was to be sent back forcibly, under restraint.

The walls of his cramped office were closing in on him, as they often did after he’d met with the duty sergeant. The only cure was to hit the streets. Besides, he wasn’t going to make any headway on this problem sitting at a desk.

It was raining, as usual. Goblinopolis really wasn’t all that wet a place, except when he needed to walk and think. Then you could guarantee precipitation of exactly this sort: deliberate and drenching. Something about the way they were falling enabled the individual drops to wriggle into areas they weren’t supposed to be able to reach, at least according to the marketing claims of the rainwear garment manufacturers. He snuggled down into the flipped-up collar of his departmental trench overjack and stared grimly at the rain-slickened sidewalk as he trudged along en route to his favorite destination: nowhere in particular. Tol had a standing reservation for a window seat.

He decided on a whim to wander down by the docks. Not his Precinct by a long shot, but what the smek. Goblinopolis was inland, but built on a river that had been widened and dredged repeatedly over the years to accommodate larger and larger vessels. As a result, the vast majority of traffic on the waterway below the city now consisted of huge barges plying their way back and forth between ocean-going freighters docked in deepwater Myndrythyl Bay and the extensive municipal warehouse district. If there was a logical place in the city to conceal horded technology, or anything else for that matter, the block after block of massive freight storage buildings in the warehouse district was it. Most of them also had connections to a labyrinthine underground routing facility that occupied nearly a square kilometer of the area below the district’s streets. A goblin could thread his way through that maze for days, even weeks, without ever seeing sunlight.

The rain slacked off as he approached the eastern wharfs. These were the only ones designed to handle passenger traffic, the others being dedicated solely to freight. It was getting late; the last disembarkation of the day had just taken place and people returning from holiday or shopping on the semi-autonomous Halo’jn Isles just east of Lumbos streamed past with luggage, boxes, and bags. Tol dodged and chuckled as a wizened old gnome crone with a particularly wide load went scooting by, hurling gnomish obscenities in his direction for having the audacity to be in her way.

Tol decided just to wander up and down the commerce-choked streets until something interesting happened. Having grown up not far from here, he knew it wouldn’t be long. Sure enough, after less than a minute a curious parade came around a corner and wound its ponderous way up the street in front of him. At its head was what would appear to the uninitiated to be a horribly disfigured monster, tentacles waving wildly. Behind this apparition trailed, in orderly single-file, a procession of diminutive robed monks. As the tentacled thing came abreast of Tol, he took off his helmet respectfully and spoke to it. “Glorious day to you, Exalted One. On visitations?”