Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 (11 page)

“I very much appreciate that, Your Majesty.” She added, after a moment,“They are, of course, yours to disturb.”

Aspet and Boogla strolled away, leaving Reoksa cataloguing what looked like miniature eating utensils. Boogla wanted to take another look at the layout of the buildings; Aspet was contemplating the possible explanations for the disturbances. They stopped in the center of the unknown structure and sat on work stools brought in by the RSCA crew.

Suddenly the small stone chest Aspet was holding in his hand began to glow and vibrate. He stared at it for a moment and then decided, as the RPC looked on in alarm, it would be prudent to set it down on a table. As he did a series of differently-colored smoke trails launched from the interior of the chest, filling the immediate area with chromatic smog. Boogla came over and stood by Aspet, as did two of the RPC detachment, who all at once drew their weapons.

“There are things moving around in there, Your Majesty. Get away from them.”

Aspet was too fascinated to respond. Indeterminate bipedal figures had materialized from the smoke. They weren’t hidden or obscured by so much as composed of it. They gestured toward Aspet and pointed to a spot on the ground, but otherwise made no threatening moves. After a few moments a breeze came through the ruins and the smoke began to dissipate, taking the apparitions with it.

After the RPC had declared the area safe again, Aspet went over to the spot the phantoms had pointed at and began to dig carefully. About twenty centimeters down he ran into the lid of a much larger stone chest. Enlisting the assistance of some of the site workers, Aspet finally got the chest excavated. He and Reoksa lifted the lid slowly and gently, setting it with great care off to one side. There were three separate hermetic seals around the contents, which almost unbelievably contained intact parchment from, apparently, forty centums ago.

Aspet let the more experienced Reoksa handle the documents wearing gloves and a mask to cut down on moisture contamination from her exhalations. The parchments contained both text and areas of symbols, but neither was in any known language. Reoksa took detailed photographs of each page and then packed them away for shipment back to the RSCA lab in Goblinopolis.

“I’d like a copy of those documents as soon as practical,” Aspet said.

“Certainly, Your Majesty. May I ask why?”

“I know someone who would find them interesting.”

“That person is welcome to look at them at the RSCA archives.”

“I’m aware of that, but I’d rather show them to him personally, here on site.”

“I’ll send them off by special courier and have the facsimiles back in no later than 44 hours, Your Majesty.”

“Splendid. Thank you, Doctor Reoksa.”

After she walked off with the crate of manuscripts, Boogla wandered up. “Why did you want copies?” she asked.

“I think one of Tol’s transcendent archmage buddies may know something about this place.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I got a good look at those drawings. Some of them resemble magical glyphs. If that is what they are, this site may have something to do with the earliest magic users on N’plork. One of those mages is over 900 years old. He might have at least heard of the place.”

“Sounds reasonable. How are you going to get hold of him?”

He held up his comm.

“You can call The Slice on that thing? Talk about long distance charges.”

Aspet chuckled. “No, I can’t call The Slice directly, but I can call Tol. He knows how to get in touch with the transcendents. He has an amulet or something.”

“Handy thing to have.”

“I suppose so.”

Two days later the high-quality facsimiles were delivered to Saltchitterington and an hour or so after that Plåk suddenly materialized. The RPC went for their weapons out of reflex but Plåk ignored them.

“Greetings, Aspet. Imagine meeting you again.”

Aspet looked hard at him. “
Have
we met?”

“Oh yes, though I doubt you’ll remember it. You had a dream injected into your mind prior to the throne challenge and I helped you navigate through the difficult parts toward the end. My name is Plåk. I’m the archmage who’s over nine centums old.”

Boogla giggled. “I’d like to say you’re looking well for someone that age, but I don’t know what your species is supposed to look like when it’s old.”

“I
am
quite well-preserved, thank you.”

“Well met, Archmage Plåk,” Aspet said,“I called Tol to have him ask you to come here. I want to show you some manuscript copies and see if you recognize them. They’re probably close to four thousand years old.”

“I’m excited about any artifact that makes me feel young by comparison. Lead on.”

Aspet slid the facsimiles from their sheath and laid them out on a table. Plåk studied them with ever-increasing concentration, moving back and forth among several repeatedly. At length he sat on a stool at the end of the table and looked up.

“I need more time with these, but I can’t stay here much longer. Can you leave them out like this? I’ll come back just as soon as I can recharge in The Slice.”

Aspet nodded. “They’ll be just as you left them. Hurry back.”

“That, I most assuredly shall. Farewell for now.”

He faded away in a fine shower of sparkles.

“I wonder what he thinks we have here?” asked Boogla.

“I don’t know, but whatever it is sure seems to have captured his attention.”

“What did he mean by that dream reference?”

Aspet exhaled audibly. “CoME injects the neuroelectrical field of throne challengers with a specially-designed entangled stream of signals while they sleep that is interpreted by the candidate’s brain as a dream. They monitor the response to the puzzles presented in that dream to determine various aspects of the candidate’s personality and intellect. They can weed out psychopaths and utter lunatics quite effectively this way, even if they are adept at disguising those traits in personal interactions. There is a disentanglement trigger provided to each challenger afterwards to allow them to shed the dream from their short- and long-term memory. Otherwise it takes up so much space in the brain that it runs the risk of driving the person mad.”

“So, you can’t remember any of it at all?”

“I have occasional flashes of recollection; they told me that would probably happen the rest of my life. But for the most part, no.”

“Meaning you don’t know if Plåk is telling the truth or not?”

“Not absolutely. But I have an intuitive impression that he

is. Something just... rings true about his claim. At any rate, he helped Tol out quite a bit during the Pyfox business so he’s not intrinsically evil or anything, no matter what might have happened in Morianella. Hey, let’s go grab some lunch by the waterfall.”

“Marvelous idea, my love.”

“Of
course
it’s a marvelous idea,” Aspet replied, grinning widely.

After a cold lunch fit for a King and his Consort, Aspet and Boogla were walking hand-in-hand along a charming gravel path that led from the fruit orchard up to the waterfall when the air in front of them began to shimmer. The RPC went on guard but Aspet put out his hand for them to stand down. Plåk was back.

“I finished analyzing the manuscripts,” he said, as soon as there was enough mouth to talk. “What you’ve got there is a journal of the parasciencers: the ‘protomages’ who suspected magic existed but didn’t know how to invoke it. It is, as far as I am aware, the only extant written records from that ancient period. Even during my youth nine hundred years ago these would have been incalculably valuable historical artifacts. I cannot even begin to image what they are worth now; probably more than the Royal Palace itself.”

“How were you able to decipher the manuscripts? What language was that?” Boogla asked.

“The script is now called
Arcanis Symbolis Anciens
; those parasciencers probably invented it. A form of it is still in use in some esoteric magical academic circles, although it is not generally taught in arcane academies as it only applies to some very specialized magic of interest to mages who study early incantation forms and a few others. I used magic to read and comprehend it through the principal of transharmonic coupling, meaning that once I worked out the intended magical effect of any part of the writing I could derive the rest of the meaning by following the harmonic resonance lines of arcane force until I found one that coincided with another magical action on the page. When I made that connection everything between those two points became comprehensible to me. I repeated this process until I understood the entire manuscript.”

Aspet shrugged. “Sounds good to me. So, what does this manuscript say that is of interest to a non-mage?”

“Apparently they had encounters with transient energy streams originating in The Slice which brought them to the realization that magic itself existed. Their early attempts to make use of it seem crude and awkward now, but you have to put yourself in that situation to make sense of them. Imagine living on a world where the air is always perfectly still at the surface. Then one day you notice the smoke from a campfire rising straight up for a certain distance before making an abrupt ninety degree turn and streaming away. You deduce from this that the air at that elevation must be moving. You have just discovered the existence of wind, although you can’t feel it directly yourself. This is roughly equivalent to the philosophical impact of magic on those pioneer mages.”

“I see,” replied Boogla, “They could observe the effects of magic so they knew it existed; they just had to figure out some way to tap into that energy and make use of it under their control.”

“Precisely. I believe that once the manuscript has been studied at length by scholars, it will answer questions that have haunted the magic user community for forty centums: how did the parasciencers make the transition to true mages?”

“Speaking of haunting, that’s how we came to find the manuscript cache in the first place.”

Plåk looked puzzled. “Come again?”

“Haunting,” replied Aspet. “We came down here because strange things were going on that made people think the place was haunted. Objects relocated, doors opening and closing: that sort of thing. I opened a small stone box and these apparitions made of smoke led us to the place where the sealed chest containing the manuscripts was buried.”

“Fascinating. I’ve never encountered that sort of activity before. The dead no longer have access to this plane ordinarily; I wonder what is going on? Mind if I snoop around there?”

“Not at all. I’ll show you the exact spot.”

They led Plåk to the hole where the chest had been. He walked all the way around it.

“There’s a curious linkage here I don’t understand; something magical but not quite transcendental. Oh, and there’s more stuff buried deeper down, incidentally. You only uncovered the top layer. The lower layers are full of some seriously funky gewgaws.”

“Thanks,” replied Aspet, “I’ll make a note of that for the RSCA. I suspect they were planning to excavate further, anyway.”

“I believe once all of it has been dug out the ‘hauntings’ will cease. Rather than supernatural activity, this appears to me to be some sort of beacon left here by the earliest mages to make certain this cache was eventually found. Ordinarily such a manifestation would not turn violent, but if they instilled it with a geas to be noticed, it’s difficult to predict just how far things would go to achieve that goal. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must return to The Slice.”

With that he bowed and shimmered out of sight.

“I wonder,” Boogla mused as she stared in a kind of semi- trance at the spot where Plåk had disappeared, “What he meant by ‘seriously funky gewgaws’?”

“I expect the RSCA will discover that for us in due time.”

“I don’t want to wait,” said Boogla, and grabbed a shovel.

“Sweetie, what are you doing?”

“I’m digging, what does it look like? Stop being a stuffy ol’ monarch and help me.”

“Fine.” Aspet found another shovel and together they dug, to the consternation and bemusement of the RPC.

About half a meter further down they encountered what resembled a sarcophagus. Aspet was concerned: if this contained the remains of a person they needed to be extraordinarily careful with it, to avoid inadvertently desecrating a corpse and violating the customs of the race that buried it. Still, why would the parasciencers bury a body here? They had already discovered the burial grounds for the settlement; the deceased there were interred in coffins of various levels of workmanship and sophistication, but all of them were in a defined and recognizable area.

The finally agreed to pry open the lid and take a peek. The RSCA wouldn’t approve of course; the opening should be performed in a more controlled environment. They did have the presence of mind to grab a couple breathing masks in case there were unfriendly microbes hibernating in there.

What they found staring back at them was something neither had ever seen nor even imagined. It was a bipedal creature made entirely of different kinds of metal: an apparent automaton, in other words. It was vaguely goblin-esque in appearance, but in size it approached ogre. They cleared out all around it, rolled over a portable crane, and hoisted the huge casket up onto the ground.

One of the RSCA staff happened by and ran in, shouting, “You can’t do that! Put that down! That’s property of the RSCA.”

Aspet looked her in the eye, expecting a glimmer of recognition, but got nothing. She continued to fuss around, trying to undo the damage they’d done, as she saw it.

Aspet sighed and walked over to the RPC captain. When he came back he was wearing the Crown of Tragacanth. He stood in front of the casket.

“I don’t think I heard you correctly. This casket is whose property?”

“I told you, this casket belongs to...” At this point her eyes went up to the crown and suddenly got very wide. “...His Majesty Tragacanth, who may of course do with it as He pleases.”

“Thank you. I knew I misheard you the first time. Tell Doctor Reoksa we’ll try not to leave an irreparable mess.”