Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (16 page)

“Get a grip, Kurg. Selpla and her crew are stranded down in Dreadmost and need someone to come pick them up.”

“Selpla? What the smek happened to her pram?”

“She just said they were having ‘mechanical trouble.’ By the tone of her voice, I’d speculate that it was pretty thoroughly out of commission. She also mentioned something about ‘running out of ground,’ whatever that means.”

Kurg looked south, towards Dreadmost. The clouds were black as midnight there, and stacked so high in the sky they seemed to touch the edge of space itself.

“I think I know what she’s talking about. It looks pretty nasty down that way.”

“Can you go get her, or should I try to find Weewit?”

“Smek. I’m already halfway there, so I guess I’ll rescue the fair damsel. It’ll be a tight squeeze getting her whole crew in here, but we’ll manage somehow.”

“Thanks, Kurg. I’ll let her know you’re coming.”

He turned to the cameraman in the jump seat. “Looks like we’re off to Dreadmost, Hnuppa. Hope you didn’t have any early dinner plans.”

“I’m just a piece of driftwood on the wayward tide, boss.”

“Come again?”

“I’m free for the evening.”

“Oh, good...smek!”

Kurg suddenly jerked the pram hard to the right to avoid a two meter-diameter ball of glowing gas that appeared in front of them and rolled straight down the centerline of the highway at a respectable velocity.

“There’s something you don’t see every day,” Hnuppa remarked casually as he extricated his face from the cargo restraining net.

Kurg pounded the nav console. “Will someone please tell me what in the smek is going on with this weather?”

Hnuppa shrugged, “Maybe it’s some sort of global warming.”

As if in response, large sheets of ice began to fall on them from somewhere far above. They smashed noisily onto the pram and shattered like thin glass, propelling thousands of frozen shards in all directions.

“Or, maybe not.”

As they neared Dreadmost several hours later, the ball lightning and ice sheets gave way to ever more torrential rain. The windshield wipers were useless, so Kurg switched on the hydro-repulsing ion field. It got overwhelmed, as well, so there really wasn’t anything left to do but to drive very slowly and squint a lot. Fortunately, as a veteran news editor Kurg was a master squinter.

A few kilometers north of the city they started running into refugees. There were only the occasional clumps at first, but as they drew closer to Dreadmost the density increased dramatically. The standing water accumulation in the fields bordering the road was steadily growing from pools to small lakes as they approached the city limits.

Navigation was getting to be a real problem now. Not only was the weather atrocious, pedestrians were trudging along the roadway in ever greater numbers, their heads bowed against the driving rain. Needless to say, they were somewhat inattentive to oncoming traffic.

The Southern Reaches were remote and possessed some of the least hospitable lands in all of Tragacanth. They were populated predominately by hobgoblins, ogres, half-ogres, and dwarves, with one isolated orc colony. As was the way of minorities, they tended to clump together in small to medium-sized enclaves, each with its own set of traditions, cuisine, mores, and distinctive architecture.

While a great chunk of the Southern Reaches was sparsely-vegetated and uninviting, there were oases of a sort dotted across the landscape, where fresh water, abundant vegetation, and at least minimally arable land combined to support isolated knots of civilization. The only improved roadway linking the Reaches with the rest of Tragacanth snaked its way through the plains and mountainous areas of the region, passing through or near as many of these outposts as possible on its way to Dreadmost, the de facto capitol and economic hub of the southern peninsula.

Random acts of hardship and the tribulations of the natural world were nothing new to Reachers. The winds seemed to blow harder, rain fall with more gusto, and the seasons generate more pronounced extremes here than anywhere else in the kingdom. Whenever there was a shortage of some raw material or manufactured commodity, here was where it was felt most keenly. As a result, those who lived in the Reaches, by choice or necessity, were a resilient and determined lot with finely-honed survival skills. The current weather, while admittedly harsher than any of the inhabitants had previously experienced, did not faze them. They simply bundled up in their oiled skin cloaks and boots and rode it out.

Not everyone in the Reaches was a native or permanent transplant, however. Perhaps due to its very inhospitability, the area attracted a small number of enthusiastic tourists annually. Mostly these were deep urban types who yearned to escape from the cities for a while, to experience nature in a relatively unspoiled and pristine landscape while still having access to basic conveniences fairly nearby: weekend adventurers, as it were. They were almost always part of a carefully herded tour group. While not overly supportive of the influx of strangers, the Reachers found the considerable income they generated attractive and so made some small accommodation for them.

There were also, of course, a few hardy souls who truly wanted to get away from it all—those with atavistic leanings, paranoid survivalists, hermits, fugitives, and even a few out and out crazies. They were for the most part loners, fiercely independent and rabidly protective of their homesteads, such as they were. The natives knew to leave these folks alone; encounters were few and far between. Tourists occasionally ran afoul of the Wilders, as Reach inhabitants called them, but so far no serious trouble had erupted as a result.

Ballop’ril was a bugbear. That alone made him something of an outcast, as there were only a few scattered settlements of that species in Tragacanth. Bugbears, with their odd guttural language and even odder social customs, were difficult for the other races to understand; misunderstanding inevitably breeds mistrust. Consequently, in many places bugbears were automatic social pariahs, a distinction that did nothing to conventionalize their somewhat bizarre world views.

This particular bugbear had been some distance from the cave he called home foraging for his favorite snack, fleggen worms, when the rains struck. The water came down with such ferocious intensity that the path leading back to his grotto became a raging torrent in short order, so raging that he was unable to trudge his way home against the current. He cursed the weather roundly and stumbled down the hill as the stream that had been his garden path swept him along before tons of water, mud, and debris. The flood finally deposited him, bruised and waterlogged, at the bottom of the hill. He wasn’t exactly in high humor. When a few seconds later it became apparent he was also now more or less trapped, by dint of multiple mudslides in all directions, in the middle of a major highway, Ballop’ril’s disposition began to sour.

It was at this point that Kurg’s pram came chugging around the bend. Kurg and Hnuppa were both busy ogling the huge mass of water and splintered timber that was cascading down the hill, threatening to overflow the roadway as it crashed headlong into an overburdened culvert. Kurg totally failed to see Ballop’ril until the bugbear was scarcely three meters from the pram—the heavy rain and mist rising from the road would have obscured him even if he weren’t only a little over a meter tall and the same color as the mud. Swerving madly, Kurg careened up onto a guardrail, actually drove with one wheel skirting it for a few meters, then dumped the pram fairly gently over on its side. It slid to a halt, pirouetting on its door handle a few times as an encore to the soggy automotive ballet.

Ballop’ril, who dove out of the way at the last second, picked himself up and pointlessly wiped the pouring rain off his fuzzy forehead. He walked over to where Kurg and Hnuppa were extricating themselves from the crippled vehicle.

“Peers as though you boys had yerselves an accident,” he said flatly, rain dripping from the matted hair tufts shading his ample ears.

Kurg glared at him in silence for a full ten seconds, soaking wet, thoroughly disheveled, and bleeding from a respectable laceration engendered by a chance meeting between his cheek and the shattered windshield.

Hnuppa expected a blistering barrage of invective from his boss, but Kurg merely continued to glare malevolently at the bugbear as he gathered up his scattered notepads and equipment. Maybe he was too angry and shaken to verbalize, although if so this represented the first time Hnuppa had witnessed such an occasion. He would have opened a bottle of vintage razzle in celebration if he had one. None was available, however, so he settled for watching the show in saturated bemusement.

“Why are you just standing around?” Kurg snapped at him abruptly, like a domestic scrubhound suddenly made aware of a rodentcatcher on his backyard fence. “Get the cameras and your other junk and let’s get out of this smekking rain.”

Hnuppa surveyed their surroundings, blinking against the hydrological onslaught. “How do you propose to do that, exactly?”

“Easy. I’ve got the Amulet of Dryness that mage in Dresmak gave me.”

“You mean the one who told you never to darken his doorway again, even if he were dying and you were the only living creature who could help him?”

“Um, yeah, I think that was the one.”

Hnuppa grimaced. “I’m just gonna step over here for a moment.”

“Wimp.”

“Let’s just say I have a robust survival instinct.”

Kurg made a rude noise with his lips and pulled out the amulet. It was an intricately worked silver arc, beneath which were three copper spheres suspended by fine chains. He squinted at the activation phrase, etched on the rear of the medallion.

“Yestwe collnud meshwa resnam,” he chanted unconvincingly.

Nothing happened, except the rainfall rate seemed to increase a bit. Ballop’ril, who was too far away to understand what was happening, chose this moment to shake himself like a dog, spraying bugbear-flavored rainfall all over the already saturated Kurg.

Kurg scowled even more deeply and shook the amulet, as though to wake it up. Hnuppa chuckled. “I don’t think you’re doing something right.”

“Brilliant deduction, detective. Maybe I wasn’t forceful enough. Yestwe collnud meshwa resnam!”

It suddenly began to hail. Pea-sized, at first, but the plummeting orbs of ice were gradually increasing in diameter as the three of them scrambled for shelter in the wrecked pram.

“Are you sure that thing is a
dryness
amulet?” Hnuppa yelled over the hailstone barrage.

“That’s what what’s-his-name told me. I suppose he could have been pulling my leg.”

“That wouldn’t surprise me. If I recall, he wanted to pull your legs clean
off
at the time.”

“Show it to me,” commanded Ballop’ril. Kurg growled. “What does a
bugbear
know about magic amulets?”

“One may as easily ask, ‘what does a goblin know of them?’ Obviously nothing.” Ballop’ril replied.

While Kurg worked this one out, the bugbear coaxed the amulet from his grasp. He stared at it for a moment, then, holding it tightly in his right hand, chanted.

“Resnam meshwa collnud yestwe.”

A bluish radiance leapt from the amulet, slowly spreading until a hemisphere formed over them, repelling all rain and hail in a three-meter diameter.

Ballop’ril smiled a toothy smile and handed the talisman back to Kurg.

“Inscribed incantations are read right to left. That’s Magic 101; glad I could be of service, oh great and powerful mage.”

Kurg glared at him from under his bushy eyebrows for a few moments, and then began to make a repetitive gasping noise. At first it gave the impression that he was softly gagging, but then Hnuppa recognized that the sound was not of Kurg choking, but rather his peculiar way of chuckling. Kurg was
amused
by the cheeky bugbear.

The chuckle escalated to a full-fledged guffaw. Laughter is, as a rule, easily communicable amongst nearly all sentient species. This rule ordinarily fell flat on its pimply face when applied to Kurg, however, as his expressions of mirth were barely recognizable as such, not to mention as a general rule altogether unpleasant to experience. Ballop’ril was not put off by Kurg’s odd laugh, though, and soon he lent his own throaty tenor to the opera. Appalled by the sudden cacophony, Hnuppa retreated to the far perimeter of the magical barrier and tried to find something to stuff in his ears. Fortunately, before he could seriously contemplate damaging his aural apparatus, the noise died down and the two jocularists gazed at one another with dawning affection.

Hnuppa noticed the upgrade in diplomatic relations and wasn’t happy about it—Kurg was difficult enough on his own. As part of a duet he could be well-nigh impossible. He rolled his eyes.

“I hate to put a damper on the party, but we need to figure out how we’re getting out of here. And someone still has to pick up Selpla and company.”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that?” Kurg fumbled with his comm. “Bewlie?

Bewlie, can ya hear me? Confound it, what’s wrong with this smekkin’ thing?”

“I think the freaky weather and this magical shield together are interfering with the signal,” Hnuppa said, “Try switching to ‘arcane’ mode.”