Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 (4 page)

“My mom was from a farming family. She grew up on a mixed-grain spread in the northern Espwe foothills. She and dad met when she came into Sebacea with her parents on a supply run. Dad was the assistant manager of
Furgo’s Feed ‘N’ Seed, the largest feed store in the Goblinopolis municipal area
, as he was fond of telling people.”

“Did you work there as a kid?”

“Yep. I liked stocking the shelves in the supply room best. There was something about making sure every item was on the correct shelf and displayed properly that I found satisfying, I guess.”

Tol paid the check and reached across the table for her hands.

“I have to go soon. I have a meeting at two back at Justice Hall.” He smiled his best smile. “So, are we go for another date?”

Selpla beamed back at him. “I think I can work that into my schedule. I get to pick this time.”

“Fair enough. Got anything in mind?”

“Oh, yes. Rock-climbing. Northern Bungash.”

“
Rock
-climbing? As in, climbing up the side of big rocks?”

“Of course, silly. It’s a blast. I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager.”

“Rock-climbing...Well, as long it’s with you, I’ll do just about anything. Rock-climbing it is.”

“Great. I’ll meet you tomorrow at your office right after work and we’ll go gear shopping. There’s an excellent extreme sports store two blocks from Justice Hall.

“Extreme sports, eh? Sounds like just another day on the beat.”

in which Sir Tol-u-ol answers a summons and meets a real live titan

The northern margins of the Bungash Mountains form one of the hotspots for rock-climbing in Tragacanth. The three northernmost peaks, Bikosh, Basgule, and Bejlog, were each uniquely suited for the sport in their own way. The northwestern approach to Bejlog was perhaps the most difficult of them all, as it involved two significant overhangs, the uppermost of which sported a good ten- meter undercut. This approach, nicknamed “The Hanging Judge,” was the one Selpla chose for their second date.

Tol was a genuine tough guy, with a reputation for tackling anything and anyone that needed tackling, but as he stood at the base of Bejlog and stared up past the two overhangs to the summit, he wondered why anyone would climb this thing voluntarily. To rescue someone, yes. For fun, no. Yet, that’s what the little videoz reporter standing next to him was cheerfully suggesting. She must be tougher than she looks, Tol thought.

Tol couldn’t see any point to it, but if it was going to happen he would do it right. He’d been forced to do a fair amount of rappelling in the military, as technical rescue had been one of his specialties, so he figured he could at least grasp the basics of getting down. Getting up would be somewhat more problematic.

Selpla was an experienced climber, and she turned out to be quite adept as an instructor, as well. She gave Tol an intensive hour-long lecture on equipment, procedures, and safety, followed by some hands-on instruction—which led to something else for a while—but eventually they got back on track.

Properly equipped and rigged, they started up the mountain. After about a quarter hour of hard climbing, Tol’s comm suddenly started beeping. He couldn’t answer it right away, so he let it go to messages. When they took their first breather, he listened to the messages. Sliding the comm back into its protective case, he turned to Selpla. “We have to go down. Now. I’ve been ordered to report to Fenurian.

“I thought you were on leave,” Selpla pouted.

“I am. It has been rescinded.”

“Rescinded by whom?”

“By the king, to whom I owe a knight’s fealty. He’s more than just my brother and my king now; he represents the Crown to which I have sworn my life, and as a common jlok I take my oaths very seriously. We have to go. I’ll drop you off in Goblinopolis and hop on the train to Fenurian.”

“I want to go with you!”

“I know you do, and I’d love to have you along. But this is an official Crimson Deployment, which means battle may be imminent. No civilians allowed, for safety reasons.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Fairness has nothing to do with it. We have a responsibility to protect civilians from potential injury or death. A Crimson deployment could well involve that sort of threat.”

“I could use my press pass.”

“That’s between you and the Crimson Knights Public Affairs Officer. If you do show up and put yourself in danger, though, you may distract me, which could get
me
killed. Think about that.”

“Okay. I don’t want you to get killed. That would be a very bad thing.”

“I have to agree.”

“At least tell me what’s going on in Fenurian.”

“I honestly don’t know. All the message said was that I was to report to Fenurian immediately by the most expeditious means available and that a briefing would be supplied on arrival. That probably means that whatever is going on is state secret. In peacetime most of our missions are state secret, in fact.”

“I accept that, but I don’t have to like it.”

“No, you don’t. I’m kind of happy that you don’t, actually.” He kissed her. “Don’t worry; it’s probably just some investigative thing where the actor or actors have already fled. As a Knight Protector I don’t actually get involved in purely military matters. I’m sort of the king’s personal cop, really.”

“Yeah? Well don’t forget that you’re my personal cop, too.”

“
You
just like the handcuffs.”

Selpla blushed furiously. “No comment.”

Tol and Selpla raced all the way back to her house in Goblinopolis with Tol’s light bar flashing. He dropped her off and headed over to the carriage station.

“I need a ticket for an express to Fenurian as soon as possible,” he told the ticket clerk.

“The only express to Fenurian doesn’t leave until nine tonight.”

“Then I’ll need a private carriage.”

The clerk looked at him and frowned, “We don’t dispatch private carriages just because someone asks for one, sir. It isn’t that easy.”

Tol flashed his Crimson Knight badge. “Understandable, but I’m not asking.”

“Wha…what time would like to leave, Sir Knight?” the clerk stammered.

“
Now
works for me.”

“Please have a seat. I’ll arrange it. Departure will be in about fifteen minutes.”

“See how
easy
that was?”

Even with a private express carriage benefiting from Crimson right-of-way, it still took the rest of the day to get to Fenurian. The carriage terminal had been destroyed by an aftershock; there were a couple of military tents serving as the station for the time being. A driver and two officials met Tol there. Koxo Nilred of the Royal Engineering Corps and Dosk Belbomit of the Royal Society for Cultural Antiquities sat in the back of the government diplomatic pram with Tol to brief him on the situation.

“Apparently,” explained Koxo after introductions had been completed, “One of the magically-induced quakes opened a chasm along a major fault running parallel to the Masron Mountains near the northern end. A child had fallen into the chasm and, while not seriously injured, required a technical rescue team to extricate. The team had glimpsed what appeared to be evidence of non-natural structures further along in the chasm and notified the RSCA, who dispatched Bosk, here, to investigate. The next day a trio of titans suddenly appeared and claimed the area inside the chasm as their own, on the grounds that it was an ancient titan city that contained a burial site and was therefore subject to the Ancestors Graveyard edict.” He motioned for the other passenger to continue.

“The RSCA does not look favorably on this petition, for obvious reasons: the area contains a potential treasure house of antiquities and must be explored and catalogued with that in mind. Preliminary reports are that it consists of multiple large underground complexes, each filled with who knows what manner of historically valuable artifacts.”

Nilred finished up. “The titan position does not appear flexible and more of them arrive every day. This has the potential to turn ugly, so we asked the king for help. He sent these sealed instructions for you.”

Tol broke the Royal Seal and opened the single sheet. It read:

Greetings, Sir Tol-u-ol, from His Majesty Aspet I.

You are hereby assigned to a high-priority diplomatic mission, the essential details of which should have been revealed to you by now. I want the titans handled with utmost respect and diplomacy, but bearing in mind the almost inestimable historical value of
this newly-discovered site at the same time. Find a compromise acceptable to all, and don’t get yourself or others hurt in the process. I do not trust anyone else with this mission, which is why I yanked you in off leave. Selpla will get over it.

Any supplies or personnel you need for this mission will be handled by Crimson Logistics. You have an unlimited writ, but please spend with discretion. The writ is unlimited; the treasury is not.

Thank you for your service, Knight Protector. You have my respect and affection, always.

Aspet I, King of Tragacanth

Tol folded the missive and tucked it into his overjack pocket. There was something else in there. It was a pocket he hadn’t used in a while; he wondered what it could be. He felt around and realized it was a pen. Not just any pen, though: it was Eyejay. He chuckled. “I thought you were sent back to the Quartermaster’s Office when I got promoted.” There was a pause as the long-dormant audio systems came back online. “No such good fortune,” was the somewhat shaky reply. Tol smiled. This assignment just got a little more interesting.

Titans were semi-mythical to most of Tragacanth. Everyone knew about them, but very few had actually laid eyes on one, despite their enormous size. Titans grew anywhere from three and a half to five meters in height, yet they were offshoots of the same ancestral prototypical species on which all the other races of N’plork were based. For whatever reason, they began to grow larger and larger, leaving the other races far behind. Other than that they were ridiculously tall and, legend had it, capable of quite a lot of destruction when riled, no one knew much about these giants. That was all about to change.

Tol had never seen a titan before, so he didn’t really know the proper way to greet one. He wasn’t very good at formal, so he decided to go casual but polite. It’s difficult to be casual when you are accustomed to being thought of as a big, intimidating person and suddenly you’re shaking hands with something that could probably crumple you up and dribble you like a bouncerball. The polite part, though, comes quite naturally.

By the time Tol and the others rolled up, there were two dozen titans and twice as many government workers milling about. He stared in mute amazement at the sheer size and physique of the giants. He definitely did not want to make any of them mad. He only hoped they were sufficiently intelligent that they could be reasoned with. The legends made them sound like mindless brutes. He gathered his wits and approached with what he hoped was not too obvious trepidation. He held out his hands in friendship.

“I Tol-u-ol. I friend.”

One of the titans looked at him and shook his head. He turned to another one and said, “I don’t see how they expect us to negotiate when they keep sending over morons. This one doesn’t even understand basic verb conjugation.”

Tol dropped his hands. “I was trying to communicate at some minimal level in case you didn’t speak much Goblish. I can see now that won’t be necessary.”

The first titan sighed. “Thank the gods. We were beginning to wonder if the rest of Tragacanth was inhabited by idiots.”

“Well now that you’ve taken a whizz on my diplomatic approach, I’ll just drop it. I’m not much of a diplomat, anyway. Getting down to brass tacks, what are your demands?”

“We haven’t demanded anything. We are petitioning for the right to occupy this underground urban complex, built by our ancestors but lost in our surviving historical records, under the terms of the Ancestral Graveyard Edict.”

Tol’s detective sensibilities kicked in.

“If the city was lost, how did you know we’d found it?”

“You tripped the burglar alarm.”

“I don’t hear any alarm. Besides, titans are still arriving: that means some of them were days away when the entrance was violated. How could you hear anything from that far off?”

“Ultra-low frequency pulses,” the titan replied, “They can travel for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers. Since we have lived for millennia in small, isolated colonies, we developed the ability to hear and communicate with ULF pulses.”

“How do you generate them?”

“Most often by Tympanum Majorum. That’s a huge two- headed drum where the tension on one head is adjustable with a foot pedal. As the drummer hits the Tympanum with large, soft-headed mallets, he changes the timbre, pitch, rhythm, and tempo according to a code we developed millennia ago. The recipients, once alerted, wear odd-looking ear coverings that filter out everything else to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the pulse. To a goblin it would sound something like a faint distant
throom
.”

“How did you come up with the idea for that?”

“Sea Behemoths taught us. They have built-in Tympana and use them to communicate clear around the world underwater with ULF pulses.”

“Sea Behemoths...” Tol replied thoughtfully. He wasn’t sure he was buying that explanation, but he would give them the benefit of the doubt for now. The titan, whose name was Tartag, took Tol over and showed him the large Tympana colored to look like stones and mounted in natural-esque stone towers taller than the surrounding landscape. They were set to vibrating by strong puffs of air directed up through tubes from a pressurized chamber somewhere, presumably as a result of the intrusion by the lost child or his rescuers.

“That’s very clever,” Tol said, “You heard that from how far away?”

“Me personally? Only about fifty kilometers, in the north- central Masrons—but some of our kin from as far away as the Tudmash Marsh are expected to answer the summons.

“Wow. That’s about as far as you can get from here and still be in Tragacanth.”