Chapter 107 - Birds of a Feather
So, what do you do when you successfully hunt a whistler near the end of the Stampede? You party. For the five days it took to process and carve the bulk of the whistler, the orcs drank and celebrated and cheered both the Flock’s kill and their withdrawal from the Stampede. Sourtooth strutted on his new prosthetic blade, wearing a necklace of whistler teeth across his bare chest. His skin was marked with the grey and white bands of his hunting team. I thought he would be eager to put both my tribe and the Stampede behind him, given the state I’d found him in. But learned this was not the case.
Now that Tribe Apollo was officially part of the Flock, the reverse was apparently also true. The temporary partnership between Sourtooth and myself seemed to become permanent.
“Or does this road of kinship but one way travel?” he asked, eyebrow raised.
“Of course not!” I said, waving my hands ahead of me. “I’m just surprised. I’m ecstatic that you want to see the village and help me with Lura’s task.”
“For the Flock, was the task,” Sourtooth reminded me. “The Flock could complete it not, were we not of a mind. Besides, I wish to see more of your artifice.”
“And I’ll be glad to have your smiths working with my igni. Orc metalworking and composite materials are going to be invaluable in our next generation of tech. Two days by over-land travel will see us back at the village. I have tests to run and lots of new materials to work with. It’ll take weeks, if not months, to haul everything the Whistler had to offer back to the bluff.”
Plus, if there was one way to get back in the good graces of the King of the Ifrit, it was to uncork their city by helping Lura take down the magic devourer. I wondered if the desert would turn back into a verdant area once it was gone. In the meantime, we would send a batch of ceramics as a peace offering, along with an explanation. But Taquoho said the method for arbitrating conflicting information within The City was long, arduous, and resulted in the splitting and reforming of various unions along political lines—a process that often created more problems than it solved. Haughty-Von-Haughty had really done us dirty by lying about what he found at the village.
Between the orcs and the Ifrit, we were building a monstrous menagerie of our own. The irony wasn’t lost on me that if this were Earth, we’d clearly be the heels of the villainous faction. But then, Sauron was never interested in space flight. So, we at least had that going for us.
The morning of the fifth day, the Stampede resumed. The various teams went their separate ways, and Lura with them. She still had a tournament to win before she went after the biggest trophy of them all. Tribe Apollo, the ifrit outcasts, and the remnants of the Flock headed west toward the lake-side waystation—which was already started to become a fuel depot and rest stop for goblins hunting plains creatures and harvesting edible plant-life that grew in the grasslands.
The taskmasters of Tribe Apollo were proving deft hands at keeping the logistics lines moving. An innate understanding of the technology itself apparently came with a keen sense of where raw materials needed to go to be processed, and where refined materials and devices needed to go to be utilized. I had shored up a few of those processes myself, but largely the logistics engine was self-sustaining.
A perimeter fence of wood backed by mud bricks was going up to protect the central tower that anchored the site. I spotted a platform jutting out the side of the tower that was definitely an airship dock, though it was currently empty. Just outside the fence, a stretch of relatively flat land had been cleared of brush and small debris to serve as an airstrip, and two small biplanes were fastened down with weighted lines.
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Sourtooth looked up at the structure as we stopped for water and shade in the daily eclipse. “Underestimate the size of your tribe, we. Believed it numbered some 200 or more, did Lura. And perhaps that is true—here on the open steppe. But such a number you could feed in the jungle, if just. Pray, what is the true counting?”
“After 5 consecutive days of no catastrophes and full bellies, we’ve replenished what we lost in the Stampede and then some. We may break 1,000 goblins soon, if we don’t suffer any huge losses,” I said. I pulled up my population window and looked at the various assigned goblins and their tasking. “I can use the System to track them and manage everything from spawn rates to productivity.”
Sourtooth looked at the goblins scrambling about the fuel depot at their various tasks. “1,000 goblins,” he said. “That is a tribe of troubling size, yet still easily quelled. Err caution, little brother. Goblin kings are feared even upon Kelembog. Even one such as you that seeks peace, others will yet see as a pestilence.”
I took a drink of water. “Are goblin kings typically war-like?” I asked. I didn’t want to mention that I only knew of one other. My knowledge of Ravan history was still murky, at best—and neither ifrit nor orcs kept written records that I could reference. Ironically, my canoneers were making the closest thing to a history book on Lanclova, as far as I knew.
Sourtooth rubbed his chin. “A goblin uprising swept across the Duchy of Habbe—though of when, the songs are not clear. Before my grandfather’s time. Some 30,000 ravenous maws descended like locusts, having scraped bare every rock in the mountain of lichen, grass, or bug. Not each on their own dangerous, you see. But in aggregate… and starving… it left a devastated duchy for some time.”
I sighed. “I at least have plans for that. Hunting secures us in the short-term. Gives us enough time to maybe start seeding crops and planting orchards for when the tribe grows as big as I need it to be to reach my goal. But the tribe hasn’t taken to agriculture. It’s like it doesn’t even exist in the tree.”
Sourtooth laughed. “Pray, little brother, from where will you gather seed to plant? The humans will not trade it to you. Ifrit have no such thing. Even the Lanclovan soil taints and twists whatever is planted in it. You’ve seen burst-fruit, I assume?”
I took a pause in my drink and raised an eyebrow at the orc. “Those aren’t typical elsewhere?”
The old orc shook his head. “Not meant to grow in the shade of the moon, were the beasts and birds and trees of Kelembog. ‘Tis a cunning eye that warps all it watches. Look no further than the creatures of the steppe.”
“I see,” I said, frowning. Maybe my goblins weren’t to blame for the failures of our early farming attempts after all.
We continued on, hoping to reach the village before nightfall. I saw it before we even entered the jungle—or rather, the several globular balloons lofted above the village and the various wooden structures suspended between their lines. Buzz and Javier had been busy at work. Rufus must have arrived with the canvas for my taskmasters to make so many of them, and I spotted glider launch rails, flex-a-pults, windmills, houses, and countless other goblin devices in the towering complex that Buzz had begun to erect. It looked like little more than the floors of a skyscraper under construction without the benefit of the supporting structure. What’s more is that a cloud of orbiting shapes I’d originally taken for birds were in fact goblins on personal gliders transitioning from level to level or dispatching to tasks in the forest below.
“By foul elders,” muttered Sourtooth. “Such a sight, eyes never beheld.”
It was a village no longer. That much was for sure.
“Welcome to City Apollo,” I said, a bit stunned myself.
We continued through the widened roads, passing traffic the other way who stopped to mob the king and see if the new orcs were A) edible or B) good anchors for sleeping mounds. Other goblins took advantage of the opportunity to ditch the buggies and run into the woods to look for grubs or streams to fish in. By the time we got to the base of the bluff, fully half the goblins who had been riding with us had cycled out for entirely new goblins. But such was their way.
The freight elevators had been upgraded. Rather than suspended by cordage and goblin counterweights, they’d been adapted to the wind-powered screws. While the platforms struggled and creaked against the weight of the buggies and their added cargo, the wind-powered lifts began to climb with slow, cyclical noises. Overhead, two biplanes flew between discrete levels of construction, before passing east on their way to (presumably) Camp Canaveral.
I’d worried that the village would stagnate in my absence. But under my taskmasters, it had flourished. That was perfect, because we had work to do. 30,000 goblins like the ravenous blue plague that had swept Habbe? I didn’t know that I would need that many. 10,000? Perhaps 10,000 could do the job.
Either way, we still had a long road to the stars.