Chapter 55 - Swamped

The glider carried me up and up, over the burning well-spring. I kept hold as I climbed in altitude, still in pain from the burning and explosion. The sounds, sights, and smells of the swamp faded away and I was just left with the sound of air rushing past. I’d come by air, and I was leaving by air—albeit this time I’d done so by burning myself at the outset in some sort of weird reverse-icarus situation. Would someone eventually write mythology about me? Perhaps Earth and Rava would share Apollo as a mythical figure.

With the problems of the swamp below me, I got my bearings and got the glider pointed southeast, where a dot in the sky soon resolved into a glider. It spotted me and angled my way, flying close enough that the goblin inside could recognize me—at which point it turned and ignited its booster back toward the bluff. Huh. So, Sally had been launching them with a rocket pod for speedy return. Smart.

From the air, it was easy to spot the finished tower on the jutting peninsula a few hundred meters back from the water’s edge. I passed over croc-knockers basking on the beach, glaring down. Now I knew their secret. All I had to do was find one of the tesla wasp nests, and we’d have a method of deterring the crocs long enough to get iron. And now I knew there was oil—or the next best thing—in the bog. All the parts for internal combustion were within reach. We could have a working prototype in a matter of weeks if the igni were worth their chooms at metalurgy. Yes, the bog was still dangerous. Yes, we’d lose goblins along the way.

Hadfield had finished the tower and started a sprawling network of tree platforms connected by rough rope bridges, effectively turning the tower into a small village worth of elevated terrain. Defensive emplacements lined the towers and I saw two turtle shells from the large carnivorous beasts being used to collect rainwater—one for drinking, and one for bathing. Though I imagine the goblins would forget which was which with alarming regularity.

The goblins on lookout spotted my glider coming in and raised a ruckus, shouting and jumping and pointing me out to their companions on the ground. Quite a few goblins worked on tasks down there, including a kiln being worked by a larger goblin in a ceramic mask with a stack of ceramic plates and helmets next to him, and a huge basket of charcoal nearby. It seemed like extra goblins had been brought in to aid the man—er, goblin hunt.

I angled toward the tower, where they’d apparently bagged another night haunt and put a new totem up. Bringing the glider in, I flared off for a landing. Before I could hit the wood and stone top of the structure, goblins flooded out the opening and packed tightly on the platform, such that there was nowhere to land but on my tribe and tilted the top of the tower to a worrying degree. It created a huge tangled mess as I fell among them, and they equal parts tried to catch me, loft me up like crowdsurfing a metal concert, and embrace me.

I lost the glider in the kerfuffle, and then the whole gaggle of goblins rolled, surging toward me—which then had the effect of spilling a good portion of us over the side and onto the ground in a blue, furry cascade of screaming, panicked goblins. Thank goodness for fall damage immunity, because we just ended up a pile on the floor of the bog, a tangle of flailing limbs and gnawing teeth. Until a pair of strong hands thrust through the pile and wrapped around my leg remnants, hauling me out.

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Even up-side down, I recognized the two hobbies. “Chuck, Armstrong!”

“Good to see ye, king,” said Armstrong, rotating me upright.

Chuck just looked somewhere between relieved and constipated. Fair, considering what I’d put my lieutenants through. I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. “Not your fault. You can’t be everywhere, and I made a stupid, rash decision that cost this tribe too much. I won’t put myself at risk of being isolated again.”

Chuck relaxed and looked away. “I just want to see us reach Raphina, boss. We can’t do it without you.”

Someone must have been cutting onions because my eyes started to sting. I cleared my throat. “Armstrong! Put me down!” I ordered.

He placed me gently back on the ground.

“Armstrong, I am officially making you captain of my guard. Where I go, you go. If I try to go somewhere stupid, you have the authority to prevent me from doing so until I have time to get my head right.”

Armstrong froze as a glazed look passed across his face.

What circumstances?

Haw haw, System. Very funny. I sighed. Oh well. Armstrong shook himself out of his stupor and flexed his prodigious biceps. “I won’t let you down, King! Consider me your shadow.”

I opened up the tribe hierarchy window and assigned a few goblins underneath him.

“As for you, Chuck,” I said.

The hobgoblin perked up as I continued. “From now on, in my absence, you have my authority. I want to know that if I’m not around, the tribe is in good hands: yours.”

Chuck scowled. “Boss-man, if you’re not around, I’m having the entire tribe out looking until I can drag you back.”

I huffed. “I don’t doubt it. Even if you lost half the tribe pulling me out of the fire—er, metaphorically speaking, of course.”

We both glanced down at my singed fur and both elected to ignore it. But really, it was the logical choice. Chuck was super mobile between gliders and cliffords. He could be places I wasn’t, and had good judgment—for a goblin, of course. Which was somewhere between the judgment of a toddler and that of a golden retriever given explicit instructions not to eat the bacon left on the table.

“Anyway, if croc-knockers are the only obstacle between us, it’s not going to stop you much longer. Grab your wranglers. We’ve got bugs to catch. But first, I want to meet our new variant.”

Chuck left to wrangle his wranglers—who I noticed were not on mounts. He must have figured out that whatever that strange swamp spirit was, it was taking all our cliffords. I walked toward the kiln, glancing up at the signal balloon currently being lofted with a goblin holding a flag—a yellow one, this time. They must have expanded the semaphore codes while I was gone, too. I had no desire to learn what the yellow flag was dyed with.

Working the kiln was a porcine brute of a goblin with a fleshy pot-belly protruding from beneath his blue, furry chest. His thick sausage-fingers wrapped around a hooked pole that he looped around the front access for the kiln.

“You must be the new ignis taskmaster,” I said.

The ignis tipped his mask to me with his offhand, which rather than a skull-mask was one of the ceramic plates fitted to a leather hood with a small slit for his eyes and bulbous nose. “Aye, boss. Ya’ll had some strange notions on how to work this thing. I smoothed ‘em out for you.”

“Oh, you got the ceramic parts to fail less?”

He swung open the hatch and pulled out a rack, much to my amazement, a rack of what looked like pork ribs.

“Well, yeah, that too, s’pose. The clay should go further now. Stronger plates, less exploding when you put it in cold.” he set the rack down. “But that can wait. Reckon you must be hungry after being stuck in that bog. Javeline rib while you spin your tale of how you got back to us?”

“I think we’re going to get along just fine, Prometheus,” I said. Maybe I just had Greek mythology on the brain, but naming him after the man who had stolen fire from the gods seemed appropriate.

“Call me Promo,” he said, scraping salt onto the rack of ribs. “Now what’s this iron stuff these boys been telling me yer on about?”