Chapter 139 - Habberport

  I adjusted the nose for a fly-by and led my wing mates in. As we grew closer to the sea, so too did the city grow from a simple scar on the horizon to a sprawling metropolis of black stone. When Rufus described Habberport, I had imagined a rugged frontier dock down, low and small. This looked like a city out of a book of fairy tales, full of towers and pointed spires that threatened to pierce the sky. It stretched for miles, and by the time we passed over the tree-line and into the clear-cut fields outside the city, I had given up trying to count the individual spires.

  Layered walls wrapped the city, stepped up and with platforms for archers and artillery like onagers and ballistae. Wooden spikes were driven in along the base of the walls to deter the Lanclovan beasties from making a climb of it. I kept us clear of the firing arcs, and we roared through the city proper.

  Rooftops sped by underneath, and I banked to fly between two independent towers of black stone while Eileen split to the left and my other companion to the right. A city this size had to have humans in the tens of thousands, maybe more. Not all of the spires reaching up were stone, either. Dozens of tall-masted ships floated in a harbor that stretched along the coast. I could see people on the streets pointing up at us, though I couldn’t make out individual features.

  “I don’t like this place, boss. Too rigid.”

  It certainly had more right angles than a goblin was used to.

  “It has grown much since an Ifrit last came,” said Tamaho. “It now rivals the size of the City of Brass. The King must be told of this.”

  That’s humans for you. They might not have had the spontaneous reproduction of a goblin, but they had a way of latching on and digging in. If they were anything like the humans on Earth, then they were the sort to go anywhere, claim everything, and be too stubborn about a planted flag and who planted it to ever be dislodged.

  We flew above the harbor and out over the ocean. In the deeper waters, several heavier mast-less boats were making their way to the port city through some other means of propulsion. I spotted a pink glow near the back where water churned and frothed. Their wide, ark-like hulls didn’t scream warship, but the number of shining figures milling about on the deck could only be soldiers with spears and armor. Troop transports, I realized. More soldiers from the mainland. With beasts, too. I saw a reptilian creature sunning itself on one of the decks, and it unfurled large, green-scaled wings to stretch as twisted its serpentine neck to track us. Were those dragons? I hoped not, because that creature had a saddle on its back.

  I pulled back on the stick to build a little altitude, then hooked us around for a second flyover, where we saw lines of sailors unloading massive black blocks from barges in the harbor. They loaded them onto wagons and hauled them past a massive palace complex ringed with its own walls. We flew overhead, only a few-dozen meters above the pennants and banners blowing in the wind atop the walls. Men on duty pointed up at us as we passed, and more still scrambled to get to their battle stations.

  “Looks like they’re shoring up,” said Eileen. She was right. Those stone blocks matched the material of the innermost wall, where work parties stacked bricks and planted spikes. “I hope that’s not for us.”

  “Can’t say,” I said. “But eyes up ahead, I think that is definitely for us,”

  In the heart of the city, one tower rose high above the competition, dark and looming, with strange light glowing at its windows. I’ve seen enough movies to know a wizard’s tower when I see one. Storm clouds began to gather around its black, crenelated peak, and lightning flashed from within.

  “Time we made scarce, my friends,” I said. I pushed the throttle all the way forward and kicked on the after-burn’ems. Lightning forked across the sky from the clouds cresting at the top of the tower, right through the air I’d just occupied. The bolt had struck close enough that I felt my fur stand on end from the charged air, and both my techs hammered on the engine to goad every bit of power they could from the strained device. We passed the tower, then passed beyond the layers of walls as lightning flashed around us—but none close enough to strike our vehicles.

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  Habberport looked like it was on a war footing, which was bad news for us. It felt like just as we’d finished dealing with the elves, an even greater threat loomed on the horizon. So far, Lanclova had repelled all human attempts to settle it and penetrate the interior, and I hoped the land itself would continue to be our shield as we worked toward our goal of leaving it. One thing was clear: Habberport was not building up their walls and importing dragon riders to negotiate.

  I glanced over my shoulder, angling my jet just enough to see the city shrinking as we raced away. Even from here I could see both the palace and the wizard’s towers. I didn’t want to fight humans, and I certainly didn’t want to kill a bunch of them. But if they attacked, I didn’t see that I would have much choice. The prince of that massive sprawl had been an indirect cause of many of my problems since coming to Rava. He didn’t seem inclined to stop being a thorn, either.

  Well, if he thought he was going to roll through the jungle and sweep us aside, I had just given him reason to pause. The goblin king that had swept down from his homeland’s mountains at the head of a horde of hungry mouths had likely not done so propelled through the air by turbine engines. Any delay would benefit us. This technological speed run meant every extra day to grow the tribe was further and further we would pull ahead of what looked to be a late medieval or early renaissance culture—albeit one with the benefit of magic, might, and powerful creatures at its beck and call.

  We passed once more over the lake and retraced our route through the mountains. Eileen had spent a good deal of her short life navigating the hills and bluffs north of Tribe Apollo, so I let her take lead of the formation and guide us back over the jungle until the floating rings of the bluff came into view—as well as Gemini-II, moored but still smoking from where the fight had crippled her. It had been a long flight to the coast and back. We were practically running on fumes by the time we lined up with the runway and the goblins worked the cranks to lower the landing gear. I guided us down to the uneven surface and managed to touch down without destroying the interceptor.

  Buggies were already lined up and waiting, but I held off until Eileen dismounted as well, pulling off her goggles with a grin.

  “That’s the furthest I’ve ever been, boss!”

  “Jet aircraft have a way of making the world a smaller place,” I said. “But it’s not the furthest we’ll go, not by a long shot.”

  I turned my attention south. I hadn’t built these jets to fight night haunts. I’d built them to appease an orc’s desire to be the greatest hunter on Rava. And somewhere beyond the badlands, deep in the dunes, a devil awaited.

  We piled into the buggies and headed back to the base of the bluff. As we bumped down the uneven road, I looked out to the north, where other bluffs penetrated the canopy all the way up to the mountains we’d just flown through. Flying over Habberport wasn’t just about taking a peep at the humans. It was also sending a message—that message being we can reach you before you reach us.

  10 days round trip across land for a badger was now a few hours by air. Humans hadn’t managed to penetrate the Lanclova interior, but the interior could come meet them at the coast. I huffed a laugh at that thought. I was already beginning to think of myself as a Lanclovan native.

  I looked down at the brass jar where the Ifrit rested after the adventures in the jet. “Tamaho. Do you consider goblins to be newcomers?”

  The flame stirred. “We do not remember a time when goblins did not roam the jungles of Lanclova. But we do remember what they were like before the Great Spirit began to gift them levels and skills. Wild and feral creatures led by cruel and brutal kings.”

  I glanced at the goblins hanging off the sides of the buggy for the sheer joy of it. “Yeah, night and day difference with these goblins.”

  I sometimes forgot that the System itself wasn’t a permanent fixture in the history of Rava. How had it come to be? Was it simply a Sysadmin who got a little too bored just watching a simulation and decided to stick his finger in the pot and stir? Was it an omniscient deity? Or was it something else entirely? Some other entity with its own unknowable goals, and what we thought of as the System was simply its means of achieving them?

  Even having access to my thoughts, System stayed silent on the matter, as it often did when I mused about its nature. Maybe it was also bound by rules of its own—hard-coded with certain limitations to what it could or couldn’t say. But its secrets weren’t safe. Like any scientist, I would poke and prod until I found the limits.