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For far too many years, I have maintained an apartment - a small one with not very much style - in one of the rather less fashionable caverns. For me, it's just somewhere to sleep, hang up my clothes, make early-morning coffee, and to store a very few mementos of purely sentimental value - although some of those sentiments are pretty confused and strongly-felt. In another cavern, similarly low-rent, I have a small office with my name painted on the glass of the door: Findo Gask - Private Investigator. For no readily apparent reason, I am still trying to keep my work and what passes for my personal life separate. The office is a single room, furnished with worn furniture inherited from the previous tenant or bought cheap from the thrift store. I advertise the office address and phone number, so most of the junk mail and itinerant clients find their way to me there. The door is never locked; these cheap joints have flimsy locks anyway, so this policy just saves on the repair bill. I store nothing of real significance at the office either; just a few dusty files in even dustier filing cabinets. I do have some much more important things - things variously valuable, illegal, magical or just deadly - which are carefully stored in a variety of unlikely places - some of which are on the surface. Things put aside for a rainy day, for a genuine emergency; some things that, quite frankly, I would rather never have to use at all. But it was a reassurance that they were stored securely but I could still put my hands on them quickly in the case of need. It was too early to go home, far too early for dinner, and just too late to get to the bank before it closed. The cheque would have to live in my pocket until tomorrow. I shouldered my way through the crowded transit tubes, scanning the streets and alleys automatically. I had decided to head for the office, to check the mail and ignore the bills, and to conclude my notes of the case now closed - notes soon to be buried in one of the filing cabinets, never to be seen again. The cavern where I rent the office space is mid-level, both physically and socially. It is not so close to the surface that most Goblins start to feel just a little insecure, nor is it so deep that one is at risk of encountering any of the stranger creatures – not all of which being Goblin-shaped – that inhabit the lower caverns and the even stranger regions further below. My cavern is distinctly low-rent, and therefore tightly packed with shops and residences – a far cry from the spacious mansions occupied by the rich and famous – but here at least people are usually able to pay for their own accommodations. I was trudging up four flights of stairs when I first noticed the odour. Goblins have a much better sense of smell than humans - their noses are entirely useless appendages, in my view – and mine was telling me rather more than I wanted to know. From two floors down, I could identify the stench of dirty skin and unwashed clothes, overlaid with the acrid esters formed by the breakdown of alcohol in the body. From along the corridor I could detect the cloud of cheap cigarette smoke emanating from my office doorway, accompanied by a sullen muttering interspersed with an occasional racking cough. I knew who it must be before I could see him. Nether Gask, my ne'er-do-well older brother: a dissolute drunk, a disappointment to my dear departed parents and, until this very moment, one who had completely disappeared from my life. He was sitting in the squeaky swivel chair on my side of the desk. He had managed to track down the office whiskey bottle, the one I normally keep not-very-well hidden in the deep desk drawer. It was probably the first place he looked. At least he was using one of the accompanying shot glasses, rather than just taking a slug directly from the bottle. "Neth," I said, using the conventional diminutive that I knew he had grown to loathe over the years, "What in all the Hells are you doing here?"
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Part 3