Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2

by Robert G. Ferrell

  “Quarter hour check, Your Highness.”

  “I am well. Thank you.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Since Hobert had recommended an increase in Boogla’s protective detail, RPC were required to check in on her every fifteen minutes around the clock while she was alone, in addition to the heavy perimeter and interior security present in the Palace at all times. She had finally come to terms with being constantly under protection and even found it somewhat reassuring now. She returned to her work and was soon engrossed in it.

  The Royal Palace of Tragacanth was an elongated “u”- shape with the throne room and receiving halls located at the center of the bend. The Royal Residence occupied two-thirds of the right-hand wing; offices, conference rooms, and similar spaces filled out the rest of the right-hand and all of the left-hand. There were private underground tunnels connecting the Royal Residence with the most frequently used areas of the remainder of the Palace, as well as nearby buildings. The tunnels had both rail carriages and pedestrian walkways, so the Royal Family had an option for traveling them.

  The downside of this convenience was that the tunnel system provided additional difficult-to-secure avenues of access for all locations thusly connected. While the RPC were aware of the vulnerability, the existence and exact mapping of the tunnels was a state secret, known only to those with need for the knowledge. The Royal complex was vast, and the RPC had only so many agents.

  When Aspet was in the Palace, Boogla most often ate lunch with him; either in his office or in one of a half-dozen private restaurants scattered around the complex reserved for the Crown, high officers of State, and their guests. When she was alone, however, she preferred a working lunch, brought to her by a member of the Royal Household staff, all of whom were closely vetted by the RPC. Today was no different. She ordered a mixed-greens salad with leggen nut oil dressing and a cup of steaming herbal infusion from the Royal menu. Ten minutes later there was a knock on the door.

  She waited for the security card to slip into the slot, which would tell her on the view screen next to the door who was knocking. Even the maids had those. She had very specific instructions from the RPC not to open the door without that confirmation. The very highest-echelon RPC agents could open the door from the outside in an emergency with their access cards, but protocol was that they announced themselves this way first if circumstances allowed.

  After ten seconds when the automatic confirmation screen had not activated, she walked over the panel beneath it and turned on the camera outside manually. It was blank: either the camera itself was dead, or someone had intentionally blocked it. She wiggled it back and forth; the blurred image did not respond relative to the movement, meaning that it was a static piece of fabric or parchment taped over the lens.

  She hurried back over to her desk and hit the panic button hidden underneath. That would put the Palace on lockdown and mobilize a whole lot of RPC. She waited for the alarm status on the screen to turn red. Nothing happened; somehow it had been sabotaged. Boogla was on the verge of panic herself, which in her case was good: that’s where she thought the most clearly. With every nerve fiber active and her adrenalin at peak levels, the world seemed to slow down for her, such that she saw and could react to every action appropriately.

  She knew something was going down outside: something dangerous. The RPC had everything in the Palace wired with sensors and under surveillance at all times. If this threat was real and not just some colossal systems failure, she might not have anyone to rely on but herself. She stood against one wall and waited.

  Suddenly there was a buzzing noise at the door and sparks began to fly from the space inside the door frame. That convinced her once and for all that this was an active threat. She walked over to a painting on the wall and pulled it down and over with a strong jerk. A nearby bookcase slid to the right and she slipped into the narrow hallway it revealed, securing the escape entrance behind her. She quickly followed the tunnel to a ladder that led down. At the bottom there was another tunnel with several branches. She was heading for RPC Central Security Station, where there were at least a dozen agents on duty at any given time.

  All RPC agents were heavily armed, as well as experts in one or more martial arts disciplines. She had surprised them once at an inspection by revealing her own third degree black belt in correcting the technique of a particular takedown being taught. Much to Aspet’s initial concern, sliding smoothly into amusement, she then went on to spar and easily hold her own with both of the instructors. The Royal Consort was not without her own defensive resources.

  She was running almost full out now, every sense straining for information. She heard a faint sliding noise that brought her up short. She stopped just before a tee intersection and waited in a crouch. After two seconds a hobgoblin clad all in black shot around the corner and leapt at her with some sort of weapon. She met him with a strong, braced kick to the sternum that knocked the wind out of him audibly. He staggered back and she followed through with a hand thrust to the neck that fractured his trachea. As he gurgled with hand over throat she elbowed his face and when he fell she slammed her foot on his neck, fracturing it fatally.

  She left the hob dying in the hallway and kept running. There was now no doubt that the RPC security apparatus had been compromised deeply. She couldn’t rely on anyone for assistance: she would have to take care of this problem herself. A few meters further on another black-clad goon intercepted her. She side-stepped his attack and put her knee in his solar plexus exceptionally hard. He doubled over and she grabbed him in a headlock and then, bracing herself off one wall, leapt up into the air and used her own body’s mass in addition to a well-timed twist to break his neck. No time for being subtle or elegant here.

  She dispatched a total of four of them along the way: three with cervical fractures and one with massive cerebral hemorrhage when she took away a metal pry bar he was carrying and used it on him. Finally she reached another ladder that went both up and down; she figured they would be expecting her to go down to the carriage station, so she went up into the Royal Residence instead.

  At the top of the stairs was another secret entrance; this one came out in the study next to the master bedroom. She rolled a sofa over to the entrance and jammed it into the access bay to slow any pursuit. She stopped for a moment to consider the most defensible spot in the residence and decided on her home office where her computers were. She had her own array of sensors linked into there that were not in the RPC network and not mapped by anyone but her. She had triple bar locks on the door and a lot of homebrew software running to control everything.

  She sat at the monitor and had just managed to use her own personal account on the RPC master server to trigger a ‘Royal Personage Under Attack’ alarm centered on the Royal Residence when a slight noise behind her caused her to roll out of her chair to the right and come up in defensive stance. A voice from the darkness said, calmly, “Very impressive, the way you handled my minions, Miss Consort. I assure you I am quite convinced that you are more adept at martial arts than I; I have no intention of engaging you in a battle.”

  “The very fact that you are here, in my private quarters, means you have forfeited that option, hobgoblin scumbag.”

  “Such language from a member of the Royal Family and Officer of the King’s Cabinet. The reason you are mistaken,” he paused while a dart sped silently from a gun he had hidden in a fold of his clothing and lodged itself in her shoulder, “Is in this tiny, inoffensive dart.”

  She yanked the dart from the place it had penetrated her hide and was about to launch a vicious attack on him when she suddenly paused as the world went spinning.

  “My very sage advice is that you restrain yourself. The poison with which you have been injected is quite deadly, but how quickly it kills you is dependent to a certain extent on your physical activity. The more you move around, the more rapidly you will expire.”

  “Assassin!” she spit it out at him: a label and a curse all r
olled into one.

  “Well, yes and no. If you do not cooperate, then yes. If, on the other hand, you do perform one simple task for me, I will administer this antidote,” he waved a small blue glass vial in the air, “And you will wake up in a few hours with a respectable headache, but otherwise none the worse for the experience.”

  “What,” she asked in a rasp, as her respiratory system was beginning to falter, “Is this ‘simple task?’”

  “Go to your little computer keyboard over there and use your Royal Family override code to release just one ship from embargo in Cladimil, and this unfortunate little episode will be merely one of those stories you tell your grandchildren as they sit upon your knee late in life. Fail to do that, however, and your life will end in less than ten minutes. The king will be so disappointed in you, not to mention your precious Royal Protective Corps, which I found pathetically simple to disable, incidentally.”

  “How did you accomplish such a tremendous feat?” Boogla gasped.

  “No time for chit-chat or foolish flattery, goblin: do as I ask, or die. You have very little time left to make the correct decision. Imagine how distraught His Majesty will be if you make the wrong one.”

  “If you’re trying to start a war between Tragacanth and Solemadrina, Aspet is far too intelligent to fall into that trap.”

  “I want nothing of the sort. Bad for business. I simply want you to release some goods that have been promised to certain merchants in the international market.”

  “Going to rather extremes just to get some merchandise delivered, aren’t you?”

  “My employer has a reputation to uphold. Nothing is too much effort where that is concerned.”

  “All right. You’ve convinced me.” She rolled somewhat erratically over to her computer desk and logged into the Cladimil Port Authority. “Which ship are we talking about?”

  “I believe you know perfectly well which ship,” the hobgoblin replied.

  “Yes, I know which ship by name. But something—maybe it’s pollen in the air—is making it very difficult for me to focus my eyes and I need you to point out which ship that is on this Port Authority Manifest. There are a dozen or so embargoed at the moment.”

  The hobgoblin cautiously approached. “That one. Third down. The vessel named Saltwater Skipper.”

  “This one?”

  “No, two down from that. I told you, the third one!”

  “Uh, I thought that was the third one. My vision’s getting pretty blurry. Can you just click on it for me? I’ll enter the passcode when you do.”

  The hob reached across her shoulder and positioned the cursor over the correct ship.

  “Much better,” she said, gritting her teeth. “Thanks.” She suddenly pressed a three-key combination that turned off the lights and simultaneously pushed off against the desk in an explosive move that propelled her into the hob. They fell together and landed with her on his chest. She had her fist positioned for a fatal blow to his throat when the room around them positively exploded.

  Chapter the Seventh

  in which a Royal vanishing act results in a visit with an ancient forest spirit

  At first Aspet couldn’t figure out what was happening. Everything suddenly felt wrong, but he couldn’t identify precisely what that meant. It occurred to him at last that everything was moving in fast forward: the leaves were red on the trees one second and then brown, green, gone the next. The trees themselves seemed to be growing taller and giving off branches as he watched. The entire world was moving much too fast. He couldn’t help but wonder how long it would be before his own death when a voice that seemed full of life, wisdom, and all of the elements in soil, rain, and sun at once spoke.

  “Welcome, great king, to the Eldest Grove. I’ve had to pull you through the Shroud of Equilibrium in order to be able to communicate in your native time scale. Mine is much, much slower.”

  “I...thank you for your kind welcome. I am called Aspet; may I have a name by which to call you?”

  The voice paused. “The giving of names is not a common practice here, but I suppose you may call me Arbus the Barktender.”

  “Well met, Master Arbus. To what do I owe the singular honor of your esteemed company?”

  “You are a civil one; I’ll give you that right off. That is well in a leader. I have brought you here today, as Sovereign of the Hurriers, to...”

  “I beg your pardon, but ‘Hurriers?’ Aspet interrupted.

  “Yes. We refer to your race that way because you do everything with such great speed: move, talk, reproduce, grow, live, and die.”

  “Ah. Apologies; do continue...”

  “I have brought you here to sue for protection, quite frankly.”

  “Protection? What sort of protection could I give to one such as you?”

  “While these woods as a whole are of varied age—some of the younger trees are scarcely a centum old—the forest at the center, demarcated by the large roots that rise up out of the ground in such glorious fashion, is actually much, much more ancient. We have achieved, as you might say, some degree of self-awareness and a desire to prolong our existence in peace.”

  “I believe all sentient creatures have that inalienable right. How can I assist?”

  “We know that Hurriers harvest the outer fringes of the forest for wood; we have achieved peace with that. It is part of the natural order of things. However, we are very much afraid that they may eventually work their way into the center and try to harm the Eldest Grove. That, we would be forced to oppose in any ways at our disposal, for the sake of survival. Any such confrontations would undoubtedly lead to enmity on both sides; we would dearly wish to avoid such. Therefore, we are asking that you declare our little area of the forest off limits for any cutting, pruning, or burning. We welcome visitors, so long as they carry neither axe nor flame, at least with the intention of employing them.”

  “That is certainly not an unreasonable petition. In fact, the purpose for my visit to your forest to begin with is to create such a preserve. May I see more of the Eldest Grove, for my own edification?”

  “I would be honored and delighted to show off our wonderful community, wise King. Look around you and I will move the images past.”

  The forest surrounding him began to flow from one scene to another. The view shifted to the tallest treetops: fully 150 meters from the forest floor. In this amazing tangle of limbs, branches, and vines—that stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions— lived a staggering complexity of animals and insects, many of which Aspet had never seen nor read about before. There were simians, avians, rodents, leafhoppers, branchleapers, buzzers, climbing reptiles, rope-reptiles, viper-worms, and more. Aspet had never stopped to consider the ecological diversity in treetops; it was an eye-opening experience for him.

  Next the scene morphed into mid-tree. Here, different avians and climbers scrambled up and down the trunk, extracting insects and larvae from the bark folds. There were peckers who braced themselves against the trunk and used their heavy beaks to drill small holes in the bark, from which sap leaked. They then visited those areas periodically to harvest insects trapped in the sap. Here and there multicolored rope-reptiles curled around the trunk like vines, searching for climbers or unwary avians to make a meal of.

  The roots and, below them, the forest floor were moving carpets of life. Large numbers of creepers, crawlers, scrabblers, slimers, ground-avians, various reptiles, peckers, pokers, viper- worms, and many, many others swarmed there. Also on the forest floor, mostly in and around two-meter barrows covered in heavy sod, were visible the spirits of creatures that resembled a cross between dwarves and goblins. They milled to and fro, but were not in any way threatening. Aspet was enchanted by them.

  “Who are these languid specters?” he asked.

  “They are the first of your kind to live here,” Arbus replied, “In the days before the different Hurrier races appeared. They were closely allied with the forest; the Eldest Grove and they lived in perfect
symbiosis. Because of that connection their spirits linger and we support them with our own energies.”

  “Master Arbus, you have more than convinced me. The Eldest Grove shall not be subject to incursion or development by any over whom I hold authority. This is a place of wonder and ancient beauty that must be protected at all costs.”

  “Pleased I am that a creature of such wisdom holds sway over the Hurriers,” replied Arbus, “May I ask also that cutting of live trees in the margins happen only under two conditions: the trees are relatively young—say, under three hundred turnings of the seasons—and they are immediately replaced with saplings of the same species. It is not, I suspect, at all apparent to you, but each tree must fight hard for its spot in the grove; when that spot is lost giving another similar tree the opportunity to take it over keeps the forest balanced as well as possible.”

  “Why only young trees?”

  “It takes many, many turnings for the community of plants and animals that depend upon each other to develop. Once it is fully matured, that community may remain active and healthy for millennia. Cutting down such a tree does far more damage to the forest as an organism than simply removing one tree. Thousands of creatures are left homeless and without a source of food or shelter.”

  “I see. Very well, your request is granted. Also, there is a group of dwarves—hurriers—who want their shrine not far from here protected. Do you know of it?”

  “The shrine marks the location of a very ancient thing I do not understand. It was here before the first tree: although it manifests only rarely, the latent energy field it radiates is enormously powerful. I myself have on occasion drawn some strength from it, and that pool seems bottomless. You would do well to grant their wish if only to guard it from other hurriers who might accidentally encounter that energy pool. The last time it activated, it disgorged a creature not of this world.”

  “So I have been told. The dwarves call him H’esh’tuk. My brother calls him ‘The Exalted One.’”