Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (3 page)

The significance of the Dubers was that they were the only points in the kingdom where the spheres of magic and technology truly overlapped. Magineers were equally well-versed in either realm, which made them the most valuable people around. It took a minimum of fifty years of study and an exhaustive series of progressively more demanding examinations to achieve the status of Magineers’ Apprentice, the ranks from which a new Magineer was chosen to ascend by the Council when an existing member died or retired from government service (and most chose to serve for life).

The Magineers are imposing old farts. They’ve spent the better part of a life getting to where they are, and they don’t care who knows it. The last thing one wants to do with a fine sunny day is waste it arguing anything at all with a Magineer. You’re hopelessly outgunned, because if they can’t win you over with rational discourse they’ll just turn you into an amphibian and let you hop about until you’ve seen things their way. That can be frightfully inconvenient if you’ve planned to tee off right after lunch.

Another useful thing to know about Magineer candidates is that they are required to live their entire lives in the district which they hope one day to represent. Each area has its own particular magnetic fields and arcanomorphology that have to be imprinted on the prospective’s psychic template in order for him (no female had ever ascended; something to do with genetics, or so the official story goes) to be able to manipulate the Duber fully. The only way to accomplish this is for him to spend many years wandering the district, absorbing its auras and tuning his bioresonance to that of his Ferroc. By the time they’ve been aligning their neurons with the local universe for that long, they just don’t give a wet slap about what lesser mortals think anymore.

Each of them is fanatically convinced that their district is far superior to the others, and they can work up quite a lather when someone dares to intimate otherwise. For this reason they are never allowed to associate with any of the Magineers or Magineers’ Apprentices from outside their district, even in the unlikely event they retire from the office and are then theoretically free to travel. It would be like mixing matter and antimatter without the magnetic bottle: quite untidy for the local space-time continuum. A disagreement in person between Magineers would almost certainly result in rearrangement of the nearby landscape and possibly even one or two constellations.

The Dubers were located in highly ornate structures in the capitol of each district. The districts tried to outdo one another in providing facilities for the Duber and its Magineer, and so over the years the architecture had gotten more and more elaborate. In all four of the provincial districts now the Dubers formed the centerpiece of veritable palaces. It takes two years to fully train those who aspire to be guides for assisting visiting engineers and mages in weaving their way through the baroque maze of a Duber complex.

The purpose of the Dubers is to provide a place for registered mages and engineers to access both the awesomely powerful Arnoc and the reservoir of magic known as ‘The Slice’ through far greater conduits than are available elsewhere. The Arnoc is a repository of all written or spoken knowledge, as well as an almost infinitely powerful computing engine.

The reason that the Royal Network is so powerful rests with the Magineers, or more precisely, their art. When the system was first designed and constructed, the highest level mages and most brilliant engineers in the kingdom collaborated. Every data transport buss in the network’s massively parallel CPU array was suspended in a permanent temporal stasis spell that enabled the system to do its calculations, for all practical purposes, instantaneously: essentially infinity-1 flops. No matter how long it actually took to complete a calculation, the amount of time that passed in the native temporal frame was measured in nanoseconds.

It wasn’t merely a matter of casting a spell on a piece of machinery, though. The interactions between subatomic particles operating at a quantum level and the flow of magic are extraordinarily complex; some pundits say, in fact, that magic itself is simply a manifestation of quantum energy states. It took many, many failed attempts before engineers and mages working together finally stumbled on the correct procedure, a procedure that became the most jealously guarded secret in Tragacanth. Any significant modifications to the system had to be performed by the only people with total understanding of both the technical and arcane aspects of the architecture—the Magineers.

Custodianship of this awesome resource was the principal job of the Magineer of Ferroc Loca. The Ferroc Loca Duber was located on the grounds of the Royal Palace Complex, only a stone’s throw away from the Arnoc. While Duber Loca was the most heavily used interface in the kingdom, the Loca Magineer nevertheless spent most of his time hovering around the Royal Network. His status in the kingdom was roughly equivalent to that of the King, who was in reality the Chief Hacker, although the Loca Magineer had no formal duties as a policy maker. His influence on the king—and therefore on the king’s edicts—was usually considerable, nonetheless.

In many ways, the Magineers were a form of clergy: they acted as priests who could commune with a higher power—the supernatural conjunction of magic and technology. Heaven in this mythos was that narrow band of overlap between physics and metaphysics, called
The Slice
by Tragacanthan philosophers. The Arnoc represented the temporal manifestation of The Slice: a place where cutting-edge technology and rarefied magic coexisted in one of the stranger and more sublime of all known juxtapositions.

The current Loca Magineer was, at 62, one of the youngest ever appointed, and he was a certifiable genius even among his esteemed peers. His birth name was Gepefrindos, but he’d bowed to ancient tradition and at his ascendance taken the name Cromalin, which from Old Goblish translates approximately to “Imposer of Order.” In strict point of fact he was Cromalin II, since there had been a previous Magineer with that name, but the first Cromalin had served less than two years owing to an unfortunate fatal accident involving a spilled lightning potion and an unexpectedly well-grounded heating duct grating, so very few were even aware of him.

Chapter Three:
Magic Marker

T
he scent trail effectively vanished at the edge of a large urban park about a kilometer from the ill-fated
Balrog
. Tol made several sweeping arcs centered on the last position where he’d been certain of elf scent, but to no avail. He stood at the park boundary, wondering what to do now, when an ethereal voice washed over him like an invisible wave.

“Looking for something?”

Tol stood up perfectly straight and spun around very slowly. After a complete 360 he wrinkled what little forehead he had and grunted into the cold air. His breath made fog sculptures in the stillness.

“Maybe I am, and maybe I’m not. Who wants to know?”

“I’m positively devastated. Don’t you recognize me?”

The sensation bugging Tol the last few seconds was not, as he had first surmised, jock itch. It was a dawning recognition that made his stomach knot up.

“Plåk? For the love of...I
distinctly
remember you being banished to the negative energy plane.”

“Change is a fundamental force, Tol-u-ol. I found a momentarily unguarded teleportal and slipped through. Okay, actually I made the whole banishment story up. You don’t sound happy to see me.”

“I’d be happier if I
could
see you.”

A faint shimmering manifested itself in the air a short distance from Tol. He watched with a kind of grim resignation as it ever so gradually coalesced into a wispy generic biped. When it became apparent that the process had gone as far as it intended to go, Tol arched his eyebrows and chuckled.

“That the best you can manage? You must not be eating right.”

“It’s been nearly nine centuries in my personal reckoning since I possessed a physical body, goblin. I’m a bit out of practice.”

Tol shrugged. “As I recall, you weren’t much to look at before, anyway.”

Plåk ignored the insult. “I repeat: are
you
looking for something?”

Tol rolled his eyes, “Nah, I just thought I’d go for a little midnight stroll out here in the frozen freakin’ wasteland. Of
course
I’m looking for something! Looking for things is part of what I do for a living—if you wanna call this living.”

“Would that something be three rather scruffy elves?”

A sharp involuntary intake of breath gave Tol a lung full of crisp, damp air. He coughed as the less sooty park atmosphere mixed with the polluted Sebacea glop resident in his lungs.

“Could be. What do
you
(cough) know about all this?”

Tol’s could feel his mental gears beginning to grind. True, they could stand a good lubing, but he was on the job and his favorite pub was scattered all over the sidewalk.

“About half an hour ago three elves made a quantum portal jump, right about where you’re standing. Caused a lot of ripples. I followed ‘em for a while, but they disappeared down a wormhole that I wasn’t prepared to enter without damn good reason and a reliable map.”

“Are you sure it was a quantum gate and not a magical door of some sort?” Tol asked, frowning.

“Quantum portal, for sure. No magical aura, no invocation. Just an old-fashioned temporal distortion with medium-frequency rippling. Seen a lot of ‘em, back in my neck of the woods.”

Elven teleportation: red flag.

“Someday you’re going to have to tell me more about ‘your neck of the woods.’ It sounds like a weird place.”

“Heh. That’s exactly what my people would think of Tragacanth. In fact, I doubt if any of them would believe me if I told them about it.”

“Tragacanth is the
real
world,” Tol sniffed.

“Sure it is,” replied Plåk, “as long as that’s where you happen to be standin.’ To me, this place is like a dream that can’t make up its mind if it wants to be a full-fledged nightmare or just the aftermath of an over-spiced meal.”

“Yeah? Well, the feeling is mutual. N’plork don’t need you around, anyhow. So, what brings you to our nightmare this time? Surely you didn’t tromp across the multiverse just to report sighting three fugitive elves...”

“No, that was pure serendipity. To tell the truth, I came here to find you. I didn’t expect it to be this easy, though.”

“To find
me
? I must have gone up several notches on your list of favorite people since our last encounter. As I recall, you were none too fond of me then.”

“Nothing to do with my fondness for you, or lack thereof. This is not a social call—it’s all business.”

Tol snorted. “
Business
? What possible business could you have with a goblin? You just said my world doesn’t really exist.”

“That’s not what I said, at all. However, my business with you is predicated on an issue that is of vital concern to goblins, and in fact every creature on this entire planet. It concerns The Slice.”

“What about it?”

“I have strong reason to suspect that someone is plotting to disrupt it.”

“Disrupt it? How? Why?”

“How, I don’t really know, not yet. Why, I can only guess at. I believe that someone wants to do away with magic on N’plork altogether by making it inaccessible, or at least reducing that access drastically.”

Tol scratched his head, in that spot right between the temporal ridges that always got sore when he tried to think about things like The Slice.

“Magic is a meta-quantum phenomenon,” Plåk continued, “it exists in a continuum that bears the same conceptual relationship to quantum space as quantum does to the classical universe. That meta-state is accessible to creatures such as us, or rather, you, only via a narrow conduit that you know as The Slice. If something disrupts that conduit, which is actually a region of multidimensional overlap, you will no longer be able to invoke magic in Tragacanth. For example, on my native planet the only gateway was destroyed millennia ago. There is no stable access to magic.”

Finally Plåk had said something that Tol could grasp and react to. Doing away with magic would severely disrupt every aspect of Tragacanthan society. That would be a bad thing.

“Why should I believe you?”

“Why would I lie?”

“Plenty of reasons. You’re a criminal, for one thing.”

“I prefer to think of it as a victim of circumstance. Either way, my ‘crime’ was not one of deception. However,” Plåk paused, picking his words carefully, “I’m merely trying to make amends for my past actions by bringing you this warning. If you choose to ignore it, that be on your head.”

“You’re not telling me the whole truth.”

“Perhaps not, but I’m not telling you any falsehoods, either.”

Tol sighed. “Fine. So let’s assume that you are telling the truth, at least as you see it. What do you expect me to do about it? I’m not a mage.”