Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (37 page)

“We’ve triggered an alarm. Everyone be ready to fight or fly.”

“I wish I
could
fly,” said Lom.

“We glad to help you out with that,” replied Drin, scowling.

“Shut up, both of you, and look for some kind of weapon,” said Selpla, brandishing a bakkla melon-sized chunk of rock.

• * • * • * •

While he generally manifested on the physical plane as an old man in a long cloak with white hair and wild eyes, in his adopted native habitat—The Slice—Namni’s appearance was nothing short of awe-inspiring. Depending on where you stood in relation to him, he appeared as a fiery jungle hunter, a magnificent predator avian with shimmering silver wings, or a towering iron-muscled rock titan with fierce glowing slitted pupils. The visual effect was a bit muted by the eye-twisting sight of The Slice itself, however. The fundamental geometry of The Slice was fractal in nature, with every discrete feature composed of infinitely recursive branchings of itself. Color was infinitely mutable here, with all chromatic information dependent entirely on the perception and visual acuity of the observer.

The fundamental underlying architecture was magic. Gravity, friction, thermodynamics, and all the other basic forces of the physical plane were superimposed on a magical manifold. Even the physical laws of the rest of universe were ‘pseudo-fractal’ here in that they seemed chaotically implemented on the macroscopic scale but were actually rigidly uniform at the microscopic level.

The landscape itself was breathtaking. Since geological features—if the term geological really applied to a realm not built on any solid substrate—were not constrained by gravity or structural integrity considerations, the sky was literally the limit. There were pillars and columns and spires in great number visible in all directions. Some were no more than ten or fifteen meters in height, but a few soared so far into the firmament that their upper reaches were invisible to even the sharpest eye. Between them were nestled great halls, temples, ziggurats, pyramids, towers, and other imposing structures whose very walls and buttresses seemed fluid and insubstantial until one approached quite closely.

The flora and fauna of The Slice were not readily apparent, but they were there in abundance for the careful observer. Most of them seemed to be corollaries of creatures and plants found on the physical plane, created perhaps by homesick transcendent mages, but a few were quite obviously native to the magical milieu. There was, for example, a whole family of species of photon-frogs who resembled small-to-medium irregular globes of light and fed on the regenerating fabric of The Slice itself. Their usual motion was a slow and deliberate creep, but when alarmed or excited they could leap up to ten meters away, leaving a glowing arc of charged, crackling atmosphere tracing their path.

The skies were populated by a variety of aerial creatures and several floating plant forms. The aerials were mostly delta-shaped squamous things with whiskers and feathery forked tails that seemed to employ some form of negative gravity for lift and propulsion. They whistled and screeched with abandon as they swooped among the spires.

The floating plants, in contrast, were the epitome of stately grace. They could change altitude, and did on occasion, but the transitions were extraordinarily gradual, on par with the elongation of a growing tree trunk. They were oval, sack-like, hued in warm colors, and shiny in a leathery sort of way. The bags would have been filled with hydrogen or helium on the physical plane, but here in The Slice their means of levitation was almost certainly more magic than simple positive buoyancy. Some of them had long, twisting tendrils that sparkled as though they were laden with precious jewels which proved on closer inspection to be spheres of some colorful liquid clinging to the string-like tendrils.

There was also weather of a sort in The Slice. At least, calling it weather was more descriptive than calling it much of anything else. At intervals fronts would move through, strewing fragments of old sloughed-off Slice fabric (The Slice shed its ‘skin’ on a regular basis) and leaving puddles of a substance that resembled runny legume-butter dotting the landscape. Rather than rain down from above, though, the precipitation seemed either to ooze up from the fabric or just congeal out of the atmosphere directly. On occasion all of the spires and columns in a given geographic area would suddenly begin to bend and sway in unison, as though a gale was raging, but no wind movement would be felt. It took some getting used to.

Namni was presiding over an operation that would give him unquestioned control over The Slice in its entirety. Scattered throughout the realm were twenty-four
specula arcanis majoris
: ten pins ball-sized orbs that were known colloquially as ‘magic markers’ because they delineated the boundary between The Slice and the physical plane. Each of them also guarded a portal to the physical plane, although those shunts did not correspond to any single location but rather were available on demand to any mage for drawing magical essence from The Slice.

In truth there were only twenty-three specula remaining, as one had been destroyed by a metaquantum contraction. These events were exceedingly rare; this was, in fact, the first instance since the specula had been put in place by the founding generation of mages over four thousand years earlier. Contractions were The Slice equivalents of major earthquakes, caused by unstable interactions between the magical fabric and the space-time continuum. The magical realm splintered off from the physical plane femtoseconds after the breakdown of stable supersymmetry at the dawn of the current cosmic cycle.

When the first mages discovered how to tap into The Slice (the name of which is actually a corruption of
Ta’slizh’I
,
which meant ‘energy source’ in ancient protogoblish), they established permanent channels connecting it to the physical plane and kept them open with the specula, which had non-reversible inviolability spells cast on them to ensure that no future mages could alter them in any way.

Namni and Oloi were transcendent mages, magical practitioners of such great skill and knowledge that they had been able to leave their physical bodies behind and cross the magical boundary to live forever in The Slice, subsisting by extracting energy from its infinitely regenerative fabric in the same manner as the native inhabitants. They were able to visit the physical plane for short durations by filling their persistent remnant shells with enough magical energy to render them semi-solid, but when their substantiality reached the minimum necessary for maintaining a physical presence as the magical fuel was depleted they reverted to The Slice.

They were more than just mages, however. The gods that rule The Slice, created in the same quantum event as the gods that rule over the physical plane, had selected a few of the most powerful transcendent mages to serve as their ambassadors and peacekeepers throughout the magical realm. Both Namni and Oloi had been chosen for this elite company, known formally as the Noil Emissaries. Namni had forfeited his place in the ranks of the Noils by abandoning its principles and violating his oaths in his own pursuit of power, but he retained most of the abilities they granted him as an Emissary by dint of some very dirty dark magic.

Oloi was aware of Namni’s plots, but chose to let him hang himself with his own rope, as it were. In doing so, however, Oloi was taking a calculated risk. If Namni’s military actions in Tragacanth actually succeeded by some mischance, his power in The Slice would be unmatched by any but the gods themselves. There was no way for Namni or Oloi to damage the specula by magic, but Namni had discovered a way to channel unimaginable kinetic energy by triggering geologic fault zones in Tragacanth through magical conduits directly into the specula, eventually igniting metaquantum contractions in them one by one until only Namni’s personal speculum—the last of the original twenty-four—remained. While this would result in Namni controlling the flow of magic between The Slice, that was not the worst effect: it would trigger twenty-three major quakes in Tragacanth, causing a staggering loss of life and property. This, even more that the loss of magic, was why Oloi was determined to stop Namni. His ace in the hole back on N’plork was a simple cop. 

Chapter Twenty-Two:
Collateral Damage

“G
ood morning, Your Excellency. I trust your voyage of discovery went smoothly?”

“Yes, Your Majesty. I would say that it did. All four of the provincial Magineers have received your greetings and instructions. Three of them were genteel and professional.”

“And the other?”

“The Oria Magineer has seen the error of his ways, I believe, and will treat Royal Functionaries more in keeping with their station in the future.”

Aspet chuckled. “Kryptoq can be a handful, it’s true. You didn’t hurt him, did you?”

“Only his pride.”

“That will heal in due time. Job well done, Magineer Liaison.”

“Thank you, Your Majesty. Shall we retire to the ‘war room’ for my briefing?”

“Lead the way. I’ve arranged for a suitable selection of pastries and drinks.”

“I believe it is the perks of this job I love the most.”

The briefing lasted into the afternoon; most of it spent talking about the secret project at the Norda Duber. Aspet had also received some disturbing intelligence concerning anomalous magical activities at seemingly random spots scattered about Tragacanth, none of them near any communities or dwellings where magic was known to be practiced. Not that mages didn’t wander around and ‘freelance,’ of course, but the sudden upswing seemed suspicious and worrying to him. He plotted the locations of the activity on a large wall map of Tragacanth and he and Boogla puzzled over them.

“Not on trade routes, along rivers, a certain distance from population centers, or any other commonality that I can perceive. How about you?”

“Doesn’t seem to form any magical sigil, glyph, or other symbol that I’m familiar with.”

“Good. I hadn’t thought of that one. What we do know is that each of these locations has some connection with a notorious inner-city hobgoblin hood known as Pyfox. What he’s plotting here, if indeed he is behind this, is a mystery. Hobs are not generally known for their magic.”

At that point there was a knock on the door. One of Aspet’s personal guard detail leaned in. “Sorry to bother you, Your Majesty, but here is an urgent message.” He handed a sealed envelope to Aspet.

“Thank you, Sergeant.” The smartly-dressed soldier gave a crisp salute, turned on his heel, and resumed his post next to the door.

Aspet opened the envelope and read the missive. He looked gravely concerned, stared off into space for a moment, then handed the note to Boogla. While she was reading it, he walked over to the encrypted intercom system on the wall. He punched in his Royal passcode and spoke into the microphone. “This is Aspet. Scramble the Royal Disaster Corps. I repeat, Scramble the Royal Disaster Corps. I want encoded progress reports from each division chief to my Incident Tracking System account on the hour.” A voice from the other end replied, “As you command, Your Majesty.” A few seconds later sirens went off in the surrounding communities.

Four near-simultaneous major quakes had occurred, one in each of the outlying districts. A substantial part of the Northern port city of Fenurian had been destroyed. There were villages and hamlets throughout Ferrocs Sutha and Osta that had been totally leveled. The death toll was unknown at this point, but it would be considerable, especially in the Fenurian metropolitan area.

Aspet sat with his head in his hands. “What could possibly have caused four major quakes at once? They’re not on the same fault lines. Smek, one of them wasn’t even
over
a known fault zone.”

Boogla had carried the message over with her to the map. She held it up and compared it with the geography of Tragacanth.

“I think I might know.”

Aspet looked up. “You might? What’s the common factor?”

“Pyfox.”

The king’s jaw dropped. “
Pyfox
? How can a small-time thug like him be orchestrating geological disasters? And for what purpose? We haven’t received any ransom notes or other evidence of extortion from him.”

“His known base of operations is Sebacea. Why don’t you ask your brother?”

“Tol? I haven’t spoken to him since before I challenged for the throne. Do you think he even knows I’m the king?”

“He’s an edict enforcement officer. I expect he’s read the news feeds.”

“He hasn’t tried to contact me.”

“Have you tried to contact him?”

Aspet looked a little sheepish. “No, but he’s always been hard-headed and never understood why his little brother got involved with all that computer nonsense. You might term him ‘provincial’ in that respect. I sincerely doubt he’s impressed.”

“Impressing him is high on your list of life goals then, I take it.”

“No! Well, yes, I suppose it is. Or was. I’ve got a kingdom and its people to worry about now. Tol doesn’t cross my mind very often anymore.”

“With all due respect, you’re a liar, Your Majesty.”

“Don’t talk to me that way. I’m your king!”