Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (19 page)

The little party stood and stared in silent awe at the impressive sight, except for the hobgoblin, who had been yammering non-stop since they arrived. Even Drin seemed to have ceased listening to her.

Finally Prond took a deep breath, “Hard to argue that
something
pretty impressive didn’t happen here.” The others nodded. “The question now, I think, is ‘what do we do next?’” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the hob, who was still having at it. Selpla started to reply, but then glanced at Drin. “What in the name of Grund is she gibbering about?”

“Hard for Drin to understand, but sound like she keep repeating some kind of magical ward. Something about ‘keep us safe from giants in the mountains.’”

“It’s a prayer,” said Lom, with sudden recognition. “
The Prayer for Protection from the Rock Titans
. My mother used to have it hanging on the wall when I was a whelp. If I remember aright, it goes like this:

Mighty spirits, hear my prayer,

You who dwell in realms of air:

From the mountains to the sea;

From titans cruel deliver me.

With sinewed arms, with trunk and stone,

They rend the world, tear flesh from bone.

So hear my plea with each new day,

Pray, keep those titans far away.

“Yah,” agreed Drin, “That sound like what she saying.”

“Rock Titans?” asked Selpla, “I thought they were extinct or something.”

“Maybe. I’ve never seen one, at least. My mother’s folks were quite nervous about them, though. I grew up hearing stories of the terrible destruction they were capable of inflicting when they were on a rampage about something. We had to leave them offerings at the equinoxes every year to appease their wrath. Must have worked, ‘cause, as I said, I never saw one.”

“What kind of offerings?” Prond inquired.

“Meat pies, mostly. Big ones. And a couple jugs of leggen nut razzle, although I realized late in childhood that these were more for my uncle Ikorn than the titans,” Lom chuckled. “One spring I caught him up on the hill where we left the offerings, wandering around in his skivvies. He had one of the jugs in his hand; the other one was lying empty on the ground. He made me promise never to tell mother or aunt Follia about it. I did get a new pro kickball out of the deal, though.”

Selpla looked thoughtful, “Do you think rock titans could have been responsible for this mess?”

Lom surveyed the scene. “I doubt it. First of all, no footprints. Second, spark carefully at the air. There’s still a faint magical aura here. Titans are decidedly non-magical creatures. They’re just huge and brutal. Whoever did this used magic, and a lot of it, by the look of things.”

“There can’t be many mages in Tragacanth powerful enough to wreak this kind of havoc,” Selpla replied, crossing her arms, “I seriously doubt the Sutha Magineer threw a temper tantrum here...but if not him, who?”

“Equally puzzling,” added Prond, “Is why?”

They stood there for a further minute. Finally Selpla shrugged and shouldered her bag. “I guess the only way we get any answers is to follow the trail.”

“Just a minute, intrepid newshound,” said Prond, “We’re supposed to be waiting to be rescued by Kurg, remember? If we get so far from the road that he can’t find us, there’ll be smek flying every which way.”

“Oh, come on, Prond, it’s a
story
. You know Kurg will always forgive anything anyone does, so long as a good story comes out of it.” Selpa turned her lower lip down in a rather unconvincing pout. Prond rolled his eyes and stuck out his tongue in response. She giggled.

“Yeah,” Lom added, “besides, it could be hours before Kurg finally hauls his hindquarters down here to pick us up. We could probably be back before he even shows.”

Selpla knew that these were weak arguments, but her urge to sniff out a scoop lent them considerably more credence then they would have garnered otherwise. “Right you are,” she agreed, throwing prudence to the wind, “So let’s move out.”

Prond still seemed a little reluctant. Selpla turned to him.

“If you’re that worried about it, why don’t you hang here and wait for Kurg? We can manage without you for this trip. We’ll meet you back here in a couple of hours.” She gestured to the others, “Come on troops, let’s march.”

Prond started to protest, but then thought better of it. “Fine,” he said, plopping himself down on a stone mileage marker that looked like it would make a decent stool, “Don’t get yourselves lost.”

Selpla held up his comm. “I still have this,” she said, waving it in the air.

Prond smirked, but made no reply. They were already too far down the trail to hear him if he had. The rain picked up again, so Prond pulled the hood of his overjack over his face as far as it would go and stared at the deluge. Better to be sitting here than stomping around out there in the mud with Selpla the soggy newscaster. He whistled softly, watching a variety of waterlogged wildlife slosh about their daily business.

After about half a kilometer Selpla called her little party to a halt. She pointed to the ground in front of them. “What are those holes all about?”

The path ahead was riddled with pits maybe half a meter in diameter, all, naturally, filled with water. They were superimposed over the debris trail left by the retreating mountain, so presumably had been formed since its passage.

“Looks like a print from the world’s largest cleated shoe,” Lom observed.

“Someone or something had to be expending a lot of energy to get all these dug since the mountain passed through. Wonder what for?”

As they stood there puzzling, Drin suddenly spoke.

“Holes getting bigger.”

Selpla was momentarily startled. She had forgotten the little guy was there again.

The holes were, in fact, growing. Each had widened by about ten percent of its diameter in the minute or so since Selpla and her crew first spotted them. They seemed to be getting deeper, too; water busily swirled down into the cavities with an audible sucking sound.

Selpla suddenly yelped as her right foot slid forward and down a few centimeters.

“They’re not only getting bigger, they’re increasing in number,” said Lom.

“Yeah, I noticed that,” replied Selpla, shaking the mud out of her shoe.

“I’d venture to guess that they’re sinkholes,” Lom added after a moment’s reflection, “Flooding and the vibrations from the mountain’s passage must have dissolved the interstitial carbonates in the bedrock.”

Selpla looked at him and frowned. “Do you have
any
idea what you just said?”

He bit his lip. “No, not really. I think I must have read that somewhere.”

“Good. I wouldn’t want to think you’d suddenly gone all smartsy on me.”

Drin abruptly backed up and started on a wide circling path to the right. Selpla and Lom watched him for a couple of seconds, until they realized the wisdom of what he was doing and followed suit. He was skirting the geologically unstable area altogether rather than trying to traverse it, as had been their original intention. They’d gone no more than ten or fifteen meters beyond it when they heard a sudden roar of water and the crunching of a large volume of collapsing rock. Water rushed past their feet on its way into the gaping maw where they’d been standing only moments before. The return path to Prond and the highway now ran smack through a lake.

Lom chuckled, “Looks like a new swimmin’ hole coming in.”

“This whole
place
is a swimming hole,” Selpla snorted, “C’mon, let’s keep moving.”

They sloshed in silence for a few moments.

“Given any thought to how we get back to Prond now?” asked Lom, making his way past what looked like a tree stump with gently waving tentacles.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“If it hasn’t been washed out.”

Drin, who had been taking point about twenty meters in advance of the other two, came back and gave his report.

“There is bridge up ahead.”

Selpla looked smug. “See, what did I tell you?”

Lom put his hands on his hips and frowned. “A bridge? Over what?”

“Water,” replied Drin, simply.

“Well, duh. I mean what was there
before
the flood?”

“Water. Else, why build bridge?”

“Who knows why people build bridges? There could be a ravine, or an endangered orchid, or even a pork barrel contract between a local administrator and his bridge-building brother-in-law,” expounded Lom, pausing to shake his head to dislodge an accumulation of precipitation. He managed to nail Selpla with the effluvia. She slapped him on the occipital ridge.

“Watch where you sling that stuff, smekking surfdiver.”

“Oh, like it really matters in this smekking deluge.”

“It matters to
me
.” She shot him a warning look.

“Sorry, Your Highness,” Lom replied, genuflecting broadly. “I’ll endeavor in the future to keep my personal runoff from impacting the Royal Person.”

“See that you do, bloody peasant.”

Their fabulously clever repartee was interrupted by the decidedly odd sight of Drin hopping about wildly, as though the ground beneath him had suddenly grown red hot. Of course, if it had, the half-meter of water
covering
it would be steaming, so that obviously wasn’t the case. They watched him leap and gyrate for a few moments, torn between compassion and entertainment. Selpla looked down into the turbulent water near Drin’s legs and noticed dark shapes darting here and there.

“What are those things?” she asked, pointing.

Drin’s trajectory took him near them at this juncture. “Needlefish,” he explained, hopping away again.

His companions’ eyes got wide. “Needlefish!” they both exclaimed in unison, and joined Drin in hopping madly about. “I thought,” Selpla gasped as she jumped frantically, “That needlefish only lived in the (ouch) Molkpot river.”

“Drin,” Lom asked, matter-of-factly, “You said there was a (ow) bridge up ahead. Did it have a sign on it?”

“Ya. Two.”

“What (ow) did they (ouch) say?”

“One say,
Molkpot River, No Swimming.
Other one say,
Danger! River Over Banks! Keep Away!
”

“Aaggh!” replied Selpla, “Why the smek didn’t you
tell
us?”

Drin looked at her and shrugged. “Didn’t ask.”

Selpla, Lom, and Drin eventually managed to thrash and kick their way to a small sandbar in the middle of the flooded river, but not without quite a collection of lacerations from the fish and bruises from submerged stones. They sat on a fallen tree breathing hard and rubbing their mangled feet. Lom was scanning the middle distance looking for some way back up to the road (he’d privately decided it was time to abandon the moving mountain story before it killed them) when something strange floating in the water caught his eye. It was a large, thin, vaguely circular mat or raft of rust-red, heading slowly but deliberately in their direction.

He stared at it for some time, trying to figure out if it was vegetation, or some sort of oil slick, or just what it was. Eventually the floating mat touched the small island where they sat and began to disintegrate. More accurately, the tiny creatures of which it had been composed started swarming over the sand and up the bark of the tree towards them. Suddenly it hit him what he was witnessing: the landing of a raft of voracious pincer ants, driven from their colossal nest by the rains.

Lom yelped and splashed back into the water, where he was immediately set upon by the circling needlefish. The others were momentarily confused by his apparent loss of sanity, but soon realized the reason for it and followed suit as the powerful ants descended on them by the thousands.

Caught between needles and pincers, their only option was to flee to high ground, the nearest example of which was about fifty meters to the southwest. They leapt, kicked, and stumbled their way across the expanse of water, avoiding a couple more rafts of ants along the way. Finally they flopped weakly on the far shore, too exhausted from their ordeal to care that they were now mired up to their elbows in dark blue muck.

Chapter Twelve:
Chosen

T
ol concluded that he must be dreaming. It was the only explanation, unless he was deceased, but he didn’t feel deceased. What did being deceased feel like, anyway? He’d always assumed it didn’t feel like much of anything. He definitely felt
something
, so he must not be deceased. He wasn’t in a place that seemed to be adhering to the natural laws he’d come to know and respect, however, so he had to be dreaming. Odd. He didn’t remember ever having realized he was dreaming before while he was doing it. You’re never too old for a new experience, he decided. Or did he dream that, too?