By the time Aspet and Boogla rolled up in the Royal limousine from the carriage station, Saltchitterington was as secure as the RPC could make it. Part of the challenge of VIP security was transparency: it was important to keep as much of the security apparatus as possible invisible or at least low-profile to those being guarded.
The estate was modeled along the lines of those popular with videoz and music celebrities: large main house with several wings, pool with waterfalls, elaborate pool house, several guest houses, and riding stables. On the rear margin of the property, overlooking the bay, stood the ruins of one of the first goblin keeps built in nascent Tragacanth, nearly four thousand years ago. It was estimated that it had been continuously occupied for at least a millennium afterwards, perhaps longer. That still left nearly three thousand years since the last inhabitants moved out, which of course led to a plethora of ghost stories also attached to it.
Aspet was fascinated by the carvings and close-fitting dressed stone accomplished with only primitive tools. Even a few of the original roof and floor timbers were still extant and in place. He liked to sit in the ruins and try to imagine life in this spot thirty-five centums ago, during the heyday of its habitation. Upon consulting with the RSCA and finding that little was really known about the everyday life of people in that era, His Majesty Tragacanth had an idea.
Aspet knew from his ‘freelance’ hacking days that there were a number of underground groups whose membership overlapped somewhat with the hacking community. These ranged from people who collected comic journals to those who were involved in live action role-playing games. One of these groups hosted a series of historically-themed parties annually; Aspet had attended a couple some years ago.
He contacted the head of the group, the ‘seneschal,’ by computer mail (voice was usually awkward, as the other end had to adjust to the fact they were talking to the King of Tragacanth) and made him a proposition: if the group would agree to use it and keep it maintained, he would fund the restoration of the site as historically accurately as possible and give the group a long-term lease for its use, provided that at least two weeks of the year in the summer they would open it to the public as a ‘living history village.’ The King wanted people to be able to walk through and see first-hand how their ancestors had actually lived and worked.
He knew the members of the group did their best to wear period clothing and eat and drink from period utensils, play period games, and use appropriate language to the extent practical. While the site was some distance from Goblinopolis, where they were headquartered, there was frequent inexpensive carriage service available.
Thus was the Society for Historical Re-creation propelled from an obscure urban social clique to a Royally-sponsored organization with funding and instant prestige. The seneschal was actually a gaming buddy of Aspet’s named Hekka, although His Majesty had forgotten that until he was reminded. In the SHR everyone adopted names that historically could have existed, so in fact Hekka went by ‘Abfabra Foe-Thumper.’He had gone by that name for so long now that even people outside the SHR called him ‘Abfabra’ or ‘Abfab’ these days.
The first step was to get a reputable history scholar out here and draw up a realistic plan for the keep and settlement. Once that was done they could choose and locate the correct materials and begin restoration work. It was during this work that the strange events began.
At first they were innocuous and easy to mistake for coincidence or just practical jokes: tools moved a meter or two from where they had been left; opened doors were now closed and vice-versa; architectural drawings were taken from drafting tables and replaced upside down or backwards; lunchbox contents were mysteriously exchanged. The workers grew accustomed to this activity and even found it somewhat amusing.
After several weeks, however, events took a darker turn. One of the workers was injured when a wall suddenly collapsed on him. The wall in question had been certified structurally sound by an engineer only the day before. Then nails began to shoot across rooms randomly, at velocities sufficient to pierce goblin hide, although no one had yet been punctured. This was the point at which all involved had to face the fact that someone or something atypical was behind these occurrences. Nails can’t simply propel themselves through the air like that.
They set up conventional cameras to record the perpetrators, but got nothing. Then they tried infrared cameras and for the first time garnered some evidence in the form of cold spots, vaguely bipedal in shape, moving across the field of view. They left the cameras running for a full week and when they reviewed the video got the shock of their lives.
Aspet stared at the communiqué in disbelief, as though it had just grown lips in front of him and asked for a breath mint. “They’ve discovered what?” he asked no one in particular, who happened to be standing nearby. He continued reading. “An exorcist? They actually want to hire an exorcist?” He rolled his eyes. “Sweetheart, I’m going to take a ride to the ruins and find out what in the smek is going on down there. Wanna come along?”
Boogla thought about it. “Sure; why not? Might be interesting, given that they apparently believe them to be some manner of haunted.” Aspet told the RPC where he was going and they escorted him and Boogla down to the all-terrain prams used on the estate. The RPC were a little nervous about the expedition.
“We’re not sure if we can adequately guard you from this threat,” the captain of Aspet’s personal guards told him.
“Surely you don’t believe the ruins have actual ghosts in them, do you?”
“We don’t know what to believe. If they do exist, however, it is our sworn duty to prevent them from harming you. Somehow.”
“Captain, if I am harmed in any way by a ghost, I will hold you and your team blameless in the matter.”
“We appreciate that, Your Majesty, but it would constitute a violation of our oaths nonetheless.”
“Well, I strongly suspect you won’t need to violate anything today. If there are any ghosts I will sic Her Highness on them. She could probably face down the entire population of the underworld: one at a time, or en masse.”
“Are you creating work for me?” Boogla asked, giggling.
“I doubt it would be much like work for you. More like recreation, which is, after all, why we’re here.”
Despite the putative supernatural activity, the reconstruction team had made impressive progress. They framed out a half-dozen buildings using hand-cut timbers, laid floor mosaics, cut a huge pile of slate roof tiles, and began manufacturing tools and utensils common to everyday life back then, at least according to the history scholar in residence. Aspet started asking around concerning the supernatural occurrences, but most of the workers were too embarrassed to admit to the Monarch that they had experienced anything of the sort.
Fortunately, the site foreman was something of an amateur ghost hunter and had kept a detailed log of the events, times, and locations. Aspet and Boogla backtracked over them, one at a time, looking for commonalities. As they studied the records, Boogla suddenly spoke up.
“Even though the events themselves were occurring pretty much all over the site, notice that they all seem to coincide with significant work being done in one area: that building in the corner.” She pointed at it.
Aspet looked at her notes and nodded. “Do we have any idea what that structure was used for?”
“Let’s ask the scholar.”
Doctor Reoksa was Northeastern Regional Director of the Tragacanth Historical League and the scholar charged with interpretation of the site. She was not very tolerant of this ghost nonsense, but since it was the King asking, she cooperated.
“Your Majesty, my best guess based on the layout, artifacts recovered, and contemporary accounts is that this structure was a teaching facility or possibly some sort of laboratory.”
“Laboratory, eh? Maybe there was a tragic accident that killed some people who are still hanging around.”
“Your Majesty, may I speak freely?”
&nbs
p; “Of course, Doctor Reoksa. Go right ahead.”
“I know of no empirical evidence, much less a theory or even plausible hypothesis, which could account for a spirit somehow living on after the death of its host organism. The energy requirements and intelligence source necessary simply do not add up. It is possible that ghosts exist as something completely outside our realm of experience or scholarship, but the odds against that are rather steep.”
“Agreed, Doctor, although I saw something I could not personally explain that was identified to me as representing ‘spirits’ in the Kopyrewt Forest. Be that as it may, we’re mostly just being entertained here. Taking some time off from reality, as it were.”
“Very good. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the occasional flight of fancy.”
“Thank you for your time and expertise, Doctor. We’re going to explore on our own now. We promise not to disturb any artifacts.”
“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 Bo
ogla 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.”
Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 Page 8