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“Are there any soldiers in town?” he asked a schoolchild, the only human who didn’t intimidate him. The girl pouted and began to suck her thumb in reply.
“No soldiers when you need them,” remarked the child’s chaperone, a teenage sitter. “The town is crawling with angry trolls, so are we supplied with a military presence this week? No. Of course not. Naturally.” She dragged her charge off into a side street. “Come, Gritzolga. The nasty trolls will eat you if you don’t behave. They like bad children like you.”
The Lion asked a question or two of some jittery shopkeepers who were folding up their shutters early. They didn’t stop to reply. At one emporium, however, where a shipment of porcelain was being unloaded from a wagon, the doors remained open so the workers could haul in the wares. A few of the more chattery of the townspeople were converging there. The Lion stooped to enter.
“Traum: the crossroads to nowhere,” said a young clerk with a voice that broke in midvowel. “Or everywhere: it’s the same thing, en’t it?”
“I don’t know Traum from Tenniken, or a troll from a trolley car,” said Brrr, admiring his own cleverness.
The clerk rolled his eyes. “Looking to buy a good map?” He pulled out a colored chart of the district.
Brrr had never seen a map before. He struggled to make sense of the scraped lines and shaded patches. A wispy gentleman, in looking for some snuff, leaned over the counter to see. “I taught geographics and natural civics to unteachable boys for thirty years,” he said. “Allow me to explain.”
The Lion learned that Traum had sprung up in a gentle valley between folds of forested hills. The valley allowed for a train line originating in distant Shiz, to the southwest, and running to Traum and beyond. To the northeast, the line was built on steep and inhospitable ground. Trellised and buttressed in precipitous style, the tracks climbed upslope until they reached the quays of the famous Glikkus Canals.
“Famous to some but not to all,” said Brrr.
The old fellow took a pinch of snuff. He was warming to his subject.
“The Glikkus channels are carved by some natural event of such mind-numbing antiquity that their origin can be explained only by myth. They serve as a merchant’s route to the emerald mines in the western Scalps of the Glikkus. The mountain natives—called Glikkuns, though none can deny they are anything but trolls, really—take advantage of those natural waterways and our industrial rail line to bring their emeralds to market.”
“Yes, but which way is Tenniken from here?”
“Traum is the trading post for the whole emerald industry. Why do you want Tennikin?” asked the clerk. “We have quite a line of emerald souvenirs, including a kind of fudge peppered with emerald dust.” The lone box of fudge wore a mantle of ordinary dust upon it, suggesting that the delicacy was more a novelty than a necessity.
“Is Tenniken on the rail line?” asked Brrr.
“Look, there’s some stumpyfolk now,” said a burgher’s wife, clutching her shawl about her, as if to preserve her respectability, even at this distance. “Stars and stitches, but they give me the goosey shivers!”
Brrr regarded the Glikkuns through the open door of the establishment. They were stout and stubby. Like many creatures who spend a good part of their lives underground, they were bleached out.
“If we Gillikinese are pale, at least compared to the darker tribes of the Vinkus and the ruddy bloody Quadlings, Glikkuns are downright albinoid,” murmured the doddery gentleman, who apparently couldn’t resist a spontaneous lecture. “Am I right? Am I right about this?”
“They look like walking farmcheeses to me,” agreed the goodwife.
A Glikkun family group loitered outside, deciding whether or not to venture into the shop. A blond moss capped the scalps of them all, from the papoosed newborn to the elders. The eyes of trolls, what Brrr could make out through their perpetual squint, glinted like steel, the pale white irises appearing to rise in blue albumen. Both males and females sported hunches pronounced enough to need wrapping in dedicated hunch-coats, each secured by buttons and straps and elasticized hems.
They carried short, stout dirks in skarkskin sheaths.
“That’s their chief,” whispered the schoolmaster. “A woman named Sakkali Oafish.”
A troll woman in leather leggings and a grey scarf rubbed the belly of her pregnant companion and scowled around her.
“She’s just got wind of the scam—I mean the scheme,” said the clerk. “Oooh, dark night, alley, that carving knife: not for me.”
“When their babies want to suck, the Glikkuns offer the knife instead of the tit,” said the goodwife. “Puts ’em off milk at once and stunts their growth, making ’em more Glikkuny than ever.”
“The Wizard of Oz wants emeralds, he gets emeralds,” said the schoolteacher. “The Wizard of Oz makes the laws. In this case, the law of supply and demand. He demands it, they supply it. End of discussion.”
“The Wizard of Oz,” said the Lion, remembering the question of the Ozmists. He wished he had the nerve to say “The WOO” in a superior, derogatory tone, but he didn’t trust himself to be able to carry it off.
“The Wizard of Oz, yes. You just crawl out from under some rock?—the chief potentate, if self-proclaimed, of the whole beloved country, thank you very much. He has recently kicked off a schedule of public works in the Emerald City that requires a goblin-hoard of emeralds. A fourfold increase from the usual amount requisitioned. The Glikkuns have stepped up production in their mines and arranged for
transport of the emeralds to Traum. Here they collect their fees in cash and grain and medicine.”
“And vermouth,” intoned the clerk, knowingly.
“You serve trolls in here, don’t you,” said the goodwife.
