Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (21 page)

Tol could sense that Oloi was being sincere. It embarrassed him.

“Uh, yeah, thanks. I expect I’ll need all the help I can get.” He got up to leave and fumbled in his pockets.

“How much do I owe you for the meal?”

“On the house. Consider it a goodwill gesture. Best of fortune to you, Tol-u-ol.”

Tol frowned. He wasn’t supposed to accept free stuff or gratuities of any kind. Ethics violation. He started to protest but stopped short when he suddenly found himself alone in the middle of a vacant lot. An ethereal voice said, “Drop by again sometime. We’re always open when you need us.” He stood there for a moment, mouth hanging open, then turned and walked back to the street as though nothing out of the ordinary had transpired. He only hoped the entire thing hadn’t been some sort of illusion. He hated to think passers-by might have seen him sitting in this field talking to himself. Bad for his street cred, you know? As he walked away he heard, faint but clear, the sound of Oloi singing to his own melodic accompaniment. It was a sprightly yet haunting tune about someone or something called
The Baron of Eastmarch
.

Chapter Thirteen:
What Dreams May Come

A
spet grimaced. The reports coming in on the vid were confirming his suspicions about the nature of that weird cloud formation. There was quite obviously a hurrarcane moving in from the Southern Reaches. Widespread flooding had been noted, as well as a host of other, less conventional, magical meteorological manifestations such as scorching orbs and plasma devils. Well, at least it would give the Emergency Magical Operations Center folks something to do besides conduct spell mishap drills.

He wondered what had precipitated this magical weather. It may just have been a natural event—a space rock with magical properties passing through N’plork’s atmosphere with just the right velocity and trajectory, as the cloud formation had suggested—but something told Aspet there was more to this incident than random astronomical pummeling. It seemed somehow contrived; a little too convenient; a setup, in other words.

All he could really do about it was button up his own dwelling and get back to preparing for his challenge to the throne, however. He only had a few days left before the big event; the pressure was building hourly. The current king was an accomplished hacker, although such skills tended to get rusty after a year or two. Not much time to practice the art, after all, when you’re busy running a huge government like Tragacanth’s. Nevertheless, Aspet’s gut feeling was that it would be a bloody battle. The king had already fended off two challenges from decent code slingers Aspet had known through the underground. Both had since vanished. One of the undocumented but nevertheless widely-known issues with challenging for the throne is that if you lost, you were pretty much washed up in Tragacanth. The Royal Protective Corps made certain you were no persistent threat. Many challengers committed “suicide” or disappeared under mysterious circumstances, although a few later turned up in other countries, predominately under assumed identities.

Consequently, Aspet understood that he
had
to win. There was no reasonable alternative. Even if he backed out now, the RPC would consider him a potential future challenger. Everyone who attended The Seminar went on a watch list, but those who never actually challenged the throne were generally left alone, albeit under lifelong scrutiny. These weren’t facts you took lightly when starting on the path to possible regal status, but Aspet had considered them carefully and decided the risk was worth it. He honestly thought he could do a better job as king than the current monarch, who was widely unpopular due to his arrogance and repressive policies. He seemed to believe that he could make economic and social issues resolve themselves just by issuing a proclamation to that effect.

Aspet sat down at his terminal and punched up the immensely complex schematics of the RNet. He needed to be able to navigate this maze with his eyes closed if he were to have any chance of success in the upcoming challenge. That meant memorization of the network architecture from every conceivable angle, like a medical student cramming for a gross anatomy final. He was so engrossed in his task that he didn’t notice at first that a message had popped up in his inbox.

To: Asp37!cholinergia!goblinopolis

From: boogla!boogla!boo

Subject: Ur tim3 has com3

I just wanted to be the first to congratulate the new king on his imminent accession to the throne of our great nation. For too long Tragacanth has been ruled by elitists with no connection to the common people. Stay true to your roots, Aspet, and you will achieve greatness.

We will be watching you.

Aspet stared at the screen for a few moments, startled by the unexpected message. Finally he sat back, musing. “She’s nothing if not an optimist,” he mused out loud, “Unless she knows something about this that I don’t.” He had to admit that was entirely possible. The whole process was still mostly a mystery to him, despite The Seminar and countless hours spent doing research online and in libraries. The Royal Protective Corps did a thorough job of scouring the available resources and purging them of information deemed to be of a classified nature. Much of this information concerned details on the challenge ceremony or even speculations thereon.

Of course, the underground was constantly mutating and evolving, so as quickly as the RPC could bring down a site, another popped up to take its place. Tracking them all was a bit of a headache, even for those who knew precisely where to look. Fortunately, Aspet had been at this for a while and had developed some automated tools to help speed things along. They didn’t do all the work for him, but they narrowed the scope of his search. More importantly, they helped obfuscate both his own location and the location of the rogue servers by channeling everything through a constantly changing series of zombie machines, the owners of which weren’t even aware they were part of an elaborate electronic cat-and-mouse game.

Aspet sat and savored the dawning irony of the fact that, were he actually to win the throne, he would be on the other side of this struggle—trying to prevent aspiring challengers from gaining intelligence that could help bring him down. That was just the way things were, though. There wasn’t much he could do about it, even as king. Or was there? He didn’t get too far with this line of thinking before the urgencies of the present moment recaptured his attention, but a little seed had been planted.

• * • * • * •

He was seated alone on the pinnacle of a narrow cylinder seemingly made of glowing stonework, grass-topped and ringed with unfamiliar vegetation. He was impossibly high; the cloud tops lay spread out far below him—mounds of gossamer curds as far as the eye could see. It struck him that he’d never seen the tops of clouds before. They were beautiful and somehow otherworldly; foreign, exotic, yet compellingly familiar.

As he stared out over the majestic panorama, Aspet noticed a stirring in the clouds directly below his vantage point. Something slender and steel blue emerged from the cloud deck, rising slowly and steadily, leaving behind ripples that spread slowly to the horizon. It was soon joined by a ring of lesser pointed shafts, all of which proved after a few more seconds to be attached to an enormous ovoid shape. The ovoid had eyes: it was in fact apparently a head, though if so it was the largest one Aspet had ever seen or even imagined in the grip of a high fever.

The behemoth continued to float upward toward him, revealing ever larger areas of itself. Aspet could now make out the titanic neck which attached the enormous head to the staggeringly stupendous body. The thing was easily the size of the entire Royal Complex, if not bigger. Even after most of it had emerged into the clear air, it was very difficult for Aspet to grasp the true expanse of the manifestation. It seemed to stretch into the unimaginable distance. It was approximately at this juncture that he noticed that retreat was not an option. There was nowhere to flee but down, and flight in that direction would involve more plummeting than experience had taught him was healthy. He had little choice but to face the Brobdingnagian creature and hope it was in a relatively good mood today.

When he and the gargantuan entity were eye to eye, as it were, it ceased to rise and just floated there serenely, staring at him with unblinking slitted pupils. Aspet stared back at first, but after a bit began to get uncomfortable about the creature’s placid countenance. What did it want? Surely it didn’t come all the way here, wherever here was, just to challenge him to a staring contest. There was never any doubt about the outcome, anyway—neither of them had true eyelids, but at least Aspet could look away.

Aspet couldn’t think of much else to do, so he sat cross-legged on a small patch of soft grass and regarded the levitating colossus. He had to admit it was truly a magnificent sight to behold: a floating mountain with a flesh-like covering and soaring ridges of bone and horn framing deep crevasses lined with steel blue scales, each the size of rooftops. It had thin membranous wings, too, although they didn’t seem to be playing any real part in keeping the beast aloft.

Just when Aspet decided that nothing further was going to happen, he noticed that the beast’s mouth was beginning to open. It was barely detectable at first, but after a minute or so the gap widened to impressive proportions. The effect was decidedly unnerving; Aspet could feel the sweat running down his supraorbital ridges.

Instead of horrible decaying meat stench, however, the air flowing out of the creature’s now wide-open oral cavity had a rather pleasant odor—for levitating behemoth breath, anyway. Aspet stared down into the cavernous opening. It really didn’t look much like the alimentary tract of an animal, not that he’d spent a lot of time investigating that particular subject. Instead of a barbed and quivering tongue, the glottal region resembled a rather smart stairway leading down into the cool darkness of the creature’s pharynx. There even seemed to be a little handrail of sorts running along inside one cheek. He blinked and stared hard at the incongruity, suspicious that it was some sort of illusion meant to encourage prey to walk right into the predator’s mouth, as it were.

The monster didn’t seem to be trying to force him into its gullet, however. It floated there serenely, jaws cranked open in a perpetual gape. Aspet realized with some incredulity that he could hear faint music coming from somewhere in the black depths. It sounded like blandly insipid instrumental versions of current and past popular songs. Well, that definitely blasted his “attracting prey” hypothesis into tiny, tiny particles.

After a few minutes it became apparent that nothing else was going to happen. The creature had reached some sort of equilibrium. It made no further effort to move, except for a slight but definite regular expansion and contraction that Aspet decided must be the result of the thing breathing, or at least appearing to breathe. It was a standoff, or rather, a sit off, since he’d decided that sitting was a more comfortable posture from which to contemplate this weirdness. Come to think of it, the monster wasn’t exactly standing (or sitting) on anything at all. OK, it was a
faceoff
, then. Satisfied with at last coming up with an acceptable term, Aspet sat back on the small patch of grass and waited. He didn’t know what he was waiting for—a sign, maybe.

• 9
  Patience.
  

In the end it was boredom and curiosity that forced his hand. The sheer monotony of being stuck on this tiny pinnacle with no other avenue of escape wore him down mentally until he was ready to entertain the proposition of actually entering the massive mouth. He had noticed that, despite the considerable time which had elapsed since the jaws first parted, no drool seemed to have built up anywhere. That had to be a good sign. Maybe this thing wasn’t really here to eat him, after all. Some part of his mind knew he was rationalizing now, and told him so, but Aspet decided to ignore it. Logic and reasoning had gotten him in some pretty tight jams themselves in the past; he saw no particular reason to rely on them now.

He stood up and wiped the thin dusting of soil off his pants, took one last look around at the dizzying vista, and stepped tentatively into the monster’s mouth. Nothing happened; this encouraged him a bit and he took another step. Still no reaction. He figured he would pause there a moment and see if the creature started to salivate in anticipation of the coming feast—not that Aspet would provide more than a bite-sized morsel.

When no secretions were apparently forthcoming, he took a deep breath and started descending the stairway of the tongue. The decor took a turn toward wholly inorganic in the larynx, starting with the elegant rose-radiant crystalline globes of the epiglottis chandelier. The deeper he went, the less like the inside of an animal his surroundings became. By the time he was halfway to the stomach, the esophagus had morphed into a richly carpeted passage, lined with high gothic windows and framed by magnificent vaulted archways. Pretty impressive interior design for an alimentary tract. Aspet was beginning to believe that he wasn’t inside a living creature at all, but some sort of giant conveyance made up to look like one. He wondered what powered it, and how it achieved levitation.