***
The air inside the goblin dockmaster’s office had an almost suffocating quality. The atmosphere felt thick as oil, smelling of ink and rough, cheap paper. Tallyflop’s dockmaster’s office was built inside a hollowed out section of the giant oak’s skin. Its walls rose steeply into a dark, shadowy place with no ceiling in sight. Goblin helpers and staff could be seen running atop tiny overhead railings and metal grates; they passed through glass pipes, along rope bridges and wooden ladders. The almost always insidious-looking creatures appeared suddenly and disappeared just as quickly through small trapdoors built in the wooden walls. Sniggering like madmen at times, many of them carried large stacks of papers strapped on their back; they were all invariably naked.
Lernea’s look darted around uncomfortably. It was as if she felt soiled by her mere presence inside that room. Parcifal wore a brooding expression; her hands were stuffed in her armpits. She was pouting like a child scorned.
Winceham looked intently at the stacks of papers and scrolls rising up into nothingness. He could make out the goblins above, criscrossing the room with all the fury of rats in a cage. Stroking his fine beard, the odd look on his leathery face meant he still couldn’t make up his mind about the goblins genitalia. He looked committed; he just had to know.
Bo sat on Theo’s shoulder idly. The bunny rabbit was practically asleep; the flames on his eyes were nowhere to be seen. Theo was silently trying to count the books and ledgers surrounding them; he had managed to start over and over again more than a few times.
Ned sported a troubled look and a screwed up face. He was trying to understand what it was exactly they were dealing with.
“What do you mean the ship’s impounded?”, said Ned as calmly and clearly as possible. The goblin sitting down behind an oversized desk in front of him, had earlier identified himself as Tallyflop’s dockmaster who went by the name of Zed.
The goblin was wearing nothing more than a smudged, shattered monocle. It was very doubtful that the monocle was able to serve its original purpose, but Zed nevertheless straightened it out before giving an answer.
“I mean, it’s being withheld,” said the dockmaster without looking up from a huge ledger that was easily three times his size. Ned allowed for a small pause before he cleared his throat.
“On what grounds?” demanded Ned. Parcifal’s eyes narrowed; her focus turned on the goblin’s head.
“As per contract,” replied the dockmaster tersely with a shrilly voice, flipping some of the pages almost at random.
“We never signed any contract!” exclaimed Parcifal and red hot anger poured from her voice. The dockmaster raised his head and looked at her through the monocle, blinking eratically and trying - impossible though it seemed - to focus for a moment or two. He dived into the huge ledger in front of him again before answering; he waved a bony hand dismissively.
“That’s irrelevant.”
“How is that even possible?” shouted Ned, his face trying to express a righteous beffudlement words could not.
“Under statutory law,” said the dockmaster calmly, shooting a straight eye at Ned for the first time.
“Meaning?” asked Ned with and threw his hands in the air with exasperation.
The goblin took a moment to himself; he then looked at all of the party crammed inside the little space that remained in front of his desk. With a raised brow he said flatly before returning his attention to his ledger, dipping a pen in some ink and adding a smudge that highly resembled goblin genitalia on the side of a page:
“The ship’s being impounded.”
“I can see that. Where does it say you have the authority to do that?” said Ned pointing to the goblin crew outside the tiny window on their back. The goblin wrecking crew were hoisting down the sails. Lernea looked behind her shoulder and saw a large metal barrel-like construct on wheels, pushed on a ramp. It had a number of saws and hatchets attached to it and left a trail of smoke as it vibrated violently on the Mary Whatchamacallit’s deck. The next moment, it exploded with a dumbed-down thud, senting perhaps a dozen goblins flying off into space. A rush of maniac laughter and snot-brained giggling followed suit before the wrecking crew went back to what appeared to be just another day’s work for goblins.
“They really seem to be going out on a limb,” said Winceham with a grin and Ned looked at him as if he felt his coinpurse had suddenly gone missing.
“Same place it says you can take it off Mr. Culliper there,” replied the dockmaster and barely nodded to the shackled figure of Culliper, his mouth gagged with a very unhygienic-looking rag. Culliper was propped upright, tightly pressed between Lernea and Parcifal; he rolled his eyes but no-one was paying any attention to him, except perhaps for Ned.
Ned shot the pirate a hard look. His jaw tightened and his face became ashen gray. Ned’s mind went back a few days; it was a very misfortunate series of events that had led them all the way to space and Tallyflop. The matter of Culliper’s fate remained still a matter to settle. Ned felt the pressure piling up; he looked like he was about to grab the dockmaster by the throat when Zed cleared his throat just in time to prevent that.
“Says on section eight, paragraph fifteen dash seven of the ‘Bloody Infamous and Rather Fair Codex of Ethical Piracy’, and I quote: ‘Once ye take a ship, ye partake in all it is ridden with, be it bloody tax, bloody berthing charges, bloody refitting and in any bloody way legal or not so much investments or expenses accrued in relation to the ship’s hull or bloody floating bits thereof’.”
Ned took a deep breath and cringed his face with a hand. He appeared to gather every iota of self-control and shouted at Zed, barely constraining himself from having a go at him.
“Meaning?”
“The ship owes us money,” replied Zed flatly.
A loud creaking sound was then heard, followed by a couple of thuds and reverberating knocks. The floor vibrated a little, grabbing almost everyone’s attention, except for Ned and the dockmaster; their gazes were locked in a silent, mysterious struggle. Outside, at the pier, the goblin wrecking crew had just chopped off the main mast and were trying to peel off it what had previously been a somewhat less flat, more alive, goblin. There wasn’t much laughter involved, at least not until the moment one of them brandished a literally bloody spatula, much to the merriment of his co-workers.
Parcifal exploded with a shout, condemning the lack of logic behing the wrecking of the Mary Whatchamacallit, rather than simply stating the obvious.
“But you’re bloody wrecking it!”
Theo was now trying to count goblin parts and limbs flying off from the ship now and then, while Winceham’s fascination with goblin genitalia seemed to finally come to an end. There was a glad look of relief on his smiling face when he shook his head as if everything finally made sense to him.
“It’s one bloody size smaller then!”
“Ah, I see your friends here like to talk legalese. We’re wrecking it because it’s our bloody prerogative, ain’t it?” said Zed with what could’ve been a smile if it wasn’t impossibly lopsided, the dockmaster’s saw-like teeth failing to follow the geometry of the mouth.
“How are you going to get anything worthwhile from that ship by hacking it to pieces?” said Parcifal frustrated, while Ned looked engrossed in thought, his eyes wide shut.
“You’re not very experienced in the shipping business, are you?” remarked Zed and added another blot of ink in the shape of goblin genitalia on some page on his ledger, before he turned the page and went back to trailing some other piece of text.
“Is there a problem with that?” said Parcifal sharply and tried to approach the goblin threateningly. She moved about a couple of inches before bumping onto Ned’s back. Her sister shook her head disapprovingly and motioned her to just stay put.
“Ned can handle it,” she said and after a look at Ned added, “For the time being.”
Ned swallowed hard and nodded thoughtfully to himself before turning to look at the ship be
ing hacked and sawed without a lot of regard for the craftmanship or the safety of the wrecking crew.
“You’re selling it for scrap, isn’t that right?” asked Ned pointing at the dockmaster.
“If by scrap you mean firewood, that’s right,” replied Zed.
“Firewood? Isn’t that liable to catch on fire? Fire is a dangerous thing, isn’t it?” said Theo suddenly and everyone looked at him as if realising for the first time he might not be actually aware of his surroundings most of the time. On the other hand, Bo seemed quite alert and perky; yet his eyes weren’t lit up. He simply wiggled his nose and scratched an ear with a hind leg.
“It doesn’t make much sense to hack down the whole supporting structure on top of which this city is built upon. It’d be like turning a castle’s foundations into a quarry,” said Lernea nodding thoughtfully.
“Still, it can’t be all that valuable. I mean, how much firewood does a city this size need, really? It’s not like it’s that cold in space,” said Winceham with a shrug of his shoulders that went largely unnoticed, especially since he stood smack in the middle of them all, hardly able to breathe properly, crammed as they were.
“Steam engines,” said Ned with a sudden flash of insight. The goblin nodded affirmatively and tried to smile congenially; the end result though was less than inviting.
“By steam, you mean that thing that’s like smoke, except it only appears to be around baths and hot springs and such?” asked Winceham, a very uncertain expression painted on his face. He absent-mindedly scratched his chin, breadcrumbs falling off his beard. None bothered to answer him; they were rather trying to absorb the implicit declaration that the smell about Winceham wasn’t just a matter of unfortunate timing, but rather a way of life. The minimal space inside the dockmaster’s office made it all but impossible to ignore.
“Well, now that we’ve got everything sorted out, would you be bloody kind enough to leave? Work just keeps piling up,” said the dockmaster and as luck would have it, a goblin passed overhead riding a small unicycle on a rope and tossed an impossibly thick book on a huge stack that came crushing down barely a moment later, adding a little bit of height in a small hill behind Zed made entirely out of paper.
“What’s a steam engine?” asked Parcifal with a quizzical expression; it was obvious she had never heard of such a thing before.
“It’s an apparatus that creates force applied to a system that can create movement through the use of the properties of water or other liquids in their gaseous forms,” said Theo matter-of-factly and petted Bo behind the ears. The bunny seemed to concur, if one were an expert on reading whiskers. Theo’s answer once again drew some weird looks but this time those were looks of surprise, coupled with the usual failure to really understand what he was talking about.
“It’s what makes the ships fly,” said Ned with a face shaken by a sudden, acute realisation. He looked at Lernea and without uttering a word, he saw that same look mirrored in her face. She was at a loss for words for a moment. Zed was trying to look inconspicuous while eyeing a strangely illustrated centerfold page dangling from his ledger, containing fancy, dressed up goblins of indeterminate sex.
“You’re not selling the metal bits as well?” asked Lernea with a rather off-beat tone, as if she was being merely curious. Ned picked her train of thought, nodded and went a step farther:
“We’ll sell you Culliper in exchange for that metal chair belowdecks.”
Everyone, except Parcifal, even Bo, looked at Ned like he had just admitted to being a large, furry whale dancing in a pot. Culliper did not even flinch; his stabbing stare was stuck on Ned.
“What chair?” asked the goblin looking suddenly quite intrigued; he then started shuffling the pages in the ledger in front of him with furious speed, one eye searching the text on the pages and the other not daring to leave the naughty centerfold page out of sight.
“Ned lad, that’s bloody slavery,” said Winceham with a hushed, almost fearful voice. Lernea looked troubled, while Parcifal was smiling, either lost in thought or staunchly approving of Ned’s decision. The former queen of Nomos for a day looked at Ned with a pang of worry and told him:
“Are you sure?”
“Unless they throw him into a fire or something, that probably counts as slavery,” said Winceham out of turn.
“Yes. I’m sure,” said Ned and shot a bland look at Culliper. The pirate’s eyes looked like small, glistening beads. He made no effort to so much as croak a muffled pleading voice. Instead, it looked as if his mouth curled up in a wicked, sly smile.
The dockmaster traced a very curly line of goblin handwriting with one crooked finger and mumbled loudly:
“Mary Whatchamacallit... Six pence and seven tiblings... Shoddy crufty rudder... Trimmed sail... Bronze thaumaturgic device... Propensity to drift when not handled... Broken Grog dispenser...”
“You’re selling Culliper as a slave for a grog dispenser?” Winceham asked Ned with a feeling of awed respect in his voice and Theo, who rarely jumped in to actually help someone else understand, helpfully added with a smile:
“The grog dispenser was the strange barrel with the lever and the tap near the lavatory, down below in the hold; not the one in the back with the odd slot.”
“There was a lavatory?” asked Winceham, sounding mildly suprised but otherwise unshaken.
The goblin gave the matter a small amount of thought while drool with the viscosity of tar started dripping off his mouth. He was looking at the centerfold page intently wild-eyed and frenzied when he suddenly cried “Done!” and offered his hand to Ned. After a moment of reflexive hesitation, Ned shook it firmly; he then couldn’t help but look at Culliper for a long, tense moment before he turned to leave. He fell on Parcifal and realised she was blocking the narrow, short exit. She was still lost in her own, grin-inducing thoughts.
“What have you done, Ned?” asked Lernea while Ned slid past Parcifal who was trying to squeeze herself into the wrong amount of space at the wrong moment. Once past the exit he looked at Lernea with what must’ve been guilt and told her:
“It’s better than the alternative.”
“Is it? That’s not justice served, Ned,” she told him with consternation, her head raised slightly above the others as Winceham tried to squeeze through everyone else and out of the impossibly small onto the promenade boardwalk.
“I needed to do something about it,” said Ned and shrugged slightly. Lernea bit her lip and shot a look at Culliper who was already being whisked away using a harness and a pulley, ever higher and higher by goblins hidden from sight. His ice-cold gaze sparkled away into the darkness; Culliper and Ned locked eyes. A moment of gritty tension passed like glue becoming undone; Ned felt like he had already made a terrible, unavoidable mistake.
A moment later, Winceham asked Ned even as the others left the crowded office with more ease:
“Where are we going to find a new ship? What’s so important about that chair anyway? And why might I add, did the ship have a lavatory?”
“Maybe Theo can answer that,” replied Ned and Bo’s eyes suddenly lit up, even as Theo bumped his head on the doorway and silently nursed his head with a thoughtful yet promising look, as if something new and wonderful had just happened.
His fingers went for the crystal around his neck. The shimmer on its surface as light fell from all the thousands of lamps and fires around the innumerable tall branches all around, above and below, was the warm orange glow of a dear hearth.
As they stood outside the dockmaster’s office, Parcifal was the last one to come out. She asked without really looking all too worried, or indeed caring:
“I can’t find Culliper.”
The metal chair that had flown the Mary Whatchamacallit was being hoisted into the air and brought onto the promenade, near where they stood. At the same time a team of goblins fell into the void as the poor ship split in two after the last few beams that held its keel together were chopped off into splinters.
“Ned sold him to the dockmaster for that chair,” said Winceham, looking undecided on whether or not that was a good trading decision.
“Excellent,” said Parcifal and walked along the promenade that slowly turned below them like a corkscrew, leading to a brilliantly lit, brightly coloured neighborhood where rowdy cheers and song could be heard, accompanied by the heady smell of fuel quality grog and an indistinct aroma of badly charred meat.
“Where do you think you’re off to, young lady?” demanded Lernea with all the trained haughtiness of a queen and older sister. Her younger sister replied with her hands in her pockets, strolling about casually.
“To find a drink.”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Winceham with a mischievous smile and set out after Parcifal, trying to catch up with her.
“There’s things we need to settle first! We need to find the woodkin! We need a budget for lodging, we need to delegate tasks and agree to a course of action! We need to find out what this thing is!” she said and pointed to the metal throne and with one hand and the giant oak all around behind them, before pleading, “Ned, say something!”. She sounded slightly panicked; her voice suddenly carried a lot less authority.
“Let them be, Lernea. They need to blow off some steam,” said Ned and managed half a grin.
“It’s been a very boring journey, that much is true,” Lernea replied as she looked at the strange contraption in the form of a chair sitting squarely in front of her on the promenade, a couple of leather straps still dangling from it.
“I could have given a few more performances if you’d only asked,” said Ned in an apologetic fashion, looking suddenly all too self-conscious.
“I said boring Ned, not suicidal,” Lernea retorted and changed the subject even before Ned had time enough to protest.
“And how do you suggest we carry that?” she said and Theo, who had been feeding Bo a thick stick of limegrass from one of his many pockets, inserted the crystal around his neck in the slot on the chair and by way of magic, it floated easily almost a foot above the air.
“There. Nifty little thing this crystal, isn’t it? I wonder how it actually works,” said Theo and his eyes turned into thin slivers as he peered over the throne.
“With magic?” asked Lernea and raised an eyebrow. Theo replied after a moment absorbed in thought.
“It might be, it might be. But what kind of magic?” he said in all seriousness, while Ned touched the chair and pushed it forward using just one finger. He shook his head approvingly and said:
“Now all we have to do is catch up with Parcifal and Winceham.”
“My sister always tends to act before thinking. If she had just waited to exchange a few simple words, we wouldn’t need to spent more time finding her in that awful crowd down there,” said Lernea and pointed to the massive marketplace that was chock-full of people below.
“That’s Parcifal alright,” said Ned and walked beside Lernea at an easy pace, pushing the aloft chair alongside him.
“You mean near that blue bright glow dancing in the air down there?” said Theo without realising the full implications of what he was seeing.
Ned and Lernea exchanged knowing, troubled looks and sprang to a running pace, while Bo jumped off Theo’s lap, flames brilliantly wild in his eyes. The bunny easily outran them both in a few heartbeats. Theo then realised that something important was happening and decided he just might as well fly towards the glow instead of hopping along so inefficiently. He leapt off the promenade and into the vaccuum with the practiced ease of someone putting on his slippers.
By the time he realised something was slightly off, he was freefalling, trying to swim in the dead of space and doing a frightfully awful job of it.