Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2

by Robert G. Ferrell

  “So would I, to tell the truth,” replied Tol. “It wasn’t exactly my idea.”

  “Well, I hope you’re prepared to write a full report, as soon as possible.”

  “If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a lifetime in EE, it’s how to write a report.”

  “I can’t wait to read it. I expect it will be a best-seller.”

  “Yeah, ya know, maybe I will write my memoirs one day. They’d probably sell, at that.”

  “They might even make a cinematic of your life story.”

  “A Hard Day’s Knight,” said a mechanical voice from his overjack pocket.

  “Smek me, Petey. I forgot you were in there. Did you get banged up any?”

  “There were a few moments in which I expected to be flooded by salt water, but on the whole I’m still relatively intact.”

  Sergeant Yunbah nodded knowingly in the direction of the voice. “I, um, accidentally ‘misplaced’ mine.”

  “It’s in the rear of your upper-right desk drawer, stuffed in a sealed manila envelope with the words “Do Not Open: Biohazard” written on it in red permanent ink,” replied Petey, scornfully.

  The sergeant sighed. “Thanks. I’ll… um…look there as soon as I get back to the office.”

  Yunbah dropped Tol off at the carriage station. “You can take the regular cross-country back to Goblinopolis or request a Crimson express: your choice.”

  “This isn’t an emergency situation; I’d rather not abuse the Crimson privilege. Those expresses are really expensive for both the carriage line and the taxpayers. Besides, the cross-country will give me more time to write the report.”

  Tol had about four hours to kill before the West-Tragacanth Limited pulled into Cladimil Central Station, so he decided to take in some of the local sights. He could only remember ever having been in the city once prior, when he was a young cop taking an EE workshop held here. He didn’t have much time (or billmes) for sightseeing on that occasion, the per diem provided by the Precinct being barely enough to cover room and meals. He wasn’t blessed with a lot of time now, either, but at least finances weren’t an issue.

  Cladimil is not nearly far enough south to be in the actual tropics—that region starts in southern Galanga, in fact—but it likes to pretend that it is. Vegetation, buildings, and even lifestyles are finely calculated to give off a tropical aura; even street vendors operate under a strict code of visual and gastronomic ‘tropicality.’

  Tol had never been to a tropical region, so he was quite happily taken in by the ruse. He bought some souvenirs for Selpla, ate some good seafood at a dockside restaurant, watched random young people frolicking in the surf, and was in a generally jovial mood (and slightly sleepy) when he finally boarded the Limited for Goblinopolis.

  There were only two routes around the Masrons: northerly through Krubber Pass or the desert route to the south through Asga Teslu. Since the northerly route ran through Fenurian and Dresmak, Tol chose the shorter, faster desert run, although it was less scenic. He wasn’t interested in scenery so much. Besides, he intended to sleep most of the way.

  Once the Limited made the Zongat crossing and swung around the southern edge of the Masrons, the landscape turned harsh but strangely beautiful. There were soaring spires of sandstone, deep canyons striped in red, yellow, and orange, and vast tabletop mesas. Giant succulents that store hundreds of liters of water and guard that treasure with motile fire thorns dotted heat-distorted horizons in every direction. During daylight hours the air was hushed except for carrion-bugs and blowing sand, but at night a cascade of activity and sounds flowed into the desert world, bringing it to life.

  Most of this was lost on Tol, however, who crawled into a bunk in the sleeper coach and was snoring before the Limited was ten kilometers outbound. The arid wastelands whizzed by him completely unheeded until a curious thing happened. Without warning the brakes locked and the carriage ground to a prolonged, screeching halt. The noise finally woke Tol, who sat up in his bunk in annoyance was promptly catapulted to the floor by the final braking action.

  He got up, slipped boots on, and wandered down the stairs of the double-decked sleeper to investigate. He stuck his head out between the sleeper and lounge and saw several carriageway employees walking around with torches. He jumped down and walked over to them.

  “What’s going on? Did we lose a wheel or something?”

  One of the officials came over to meet him.

  “Sorry, sir, this is a carriageway matter. Please return to the carriage.”

  Tol pulled out his badge and held it under the goblin’s face. The official’s eyebrow ridges shot up. “Sorry, investigator; I didn’t know you were on board. We got a report from two different passengers that someone had jumped off the carriage.”

  “While we were movin’? Probably not a lot left of them, then.”

  “That’s what we’re afraid of.”

  “If you’ve got an extra torch I’ll help you look.”

  Tol joined in the search. They had done some math and come up with the area indicated. The passenger had jumped from near the front of the kilometer-long carriage. He or she could be anywhere from this point to a half-kilometer back, assuming no rolling under the carriage itself. They formed a line and started walking slowly towards the rear. As they trudged along Tol found himself next to the official he’d first encountered.

  “Did the witnesses say anything about why the subject jumped off a carriage moving at 100 kilometers an hour?”

  “Only that the subject—apparently an elf—was very pale and suddenly screamed something about ‘the curse has followed me,’ just before he jumped.”

  “Yeah, I’d call the urge to jump off a fast-moving object a curse, all right. Not a long-term problem, though.”

  Just then one of the others yelled “Sir! There’s something over here!”

  “Something? By that do you mean something we’re looking for?” the conductor yelled back.

  “I...I’m not sure.”

  Tol and Wijuvva (‘Wijjy’), the conductor, hurried over to where the other search team members were gathered. There was an elf there, on the ground. He was obviously deceased: so far, no surprises. Tol bent down and examined the body. It was completely intact: not a bruise, abrasion, or laceration to be seen. There was neither blood nor tissue in evidence. The elf looked perfectly healthy, with only one minor exception. He wasn’t breathing.

  The rail employees brought the body back to an unoccupied car under Tol’s supervision. A company doctor declared the elf officially deceased. That just left three questions: why did the elf leap from the carriage in the first place; why wasn’t he all bunged up from the high-speed impact; and since he wasn’t bunged up, what killed him?

  The put the deceased on ice for the remainder of the trip, as Tol had ordered him taken to the National Forensic Lab in Goblinopolis for post-mortem examination. The remainder of the trip gave Tol an opportunity to reconstruct the event. The conductor moved all passengers back and sealed off the first car as a potential crime scene. Tol interviewed the witnesses in depth. What they told him did not make sense.

  The elf got on at the farming village of Upupa, the only stop between Goblinopolis and Dresmak. (The Limited made a loop, starting and ending up at Goblinopolis. One carriage looped clockwise, the other in the opposite direction.) He kept to himself up until the last half-hour, at which point he began changing seats every couple of minutes, growing increasingly agitated. He asked people if they saw someone or something following him, but no one did. Toward the end he was holding a very strained conversation with an invisible ‘ghost’ companion and pacing back and forth. People moved away from him and who/whatever he was talking to; he did not seem to notice.

  Finally, the elf broke into a sudden run for the door, yelling something garbled about a curse. One of the witnesses said it sound like he said “ancestral curse,” but none of the others could make out any details of what the elf was babbling hysterically as he ran. “Crazy as a ni
ght-screamer,” Tol muttered, as he read through his notes. He was on the verge of simply calling the case closed due to ‘mental aberration of the subject’ when a shadow passed over, or rather through, him and it suddenly got very cold.

  Tol looked around instinctively for an open window, but then remembered they were in the Asga Teslu where in the daytime it got hot enough to coagulate a red-throated rock crawler’s blood. The carriages were cooled, yes, but not by any process powerful enough to create that level of temperature differential. Tol smiled as he realized once again how potent was the power of suggestion. Of course he felt cold: that was the traditional means by which ‘ghosts’ made themselves known. Ghosts and curses and phantoms were all manifestations of an active imagination, but that didn’t make them any less real to those who truly believed.

  Tol wasn’t one of them. He had long since concluded that people were the only things that go bump in the night. He went to take a sip of the nice hot tea he’d been drinking while writing out his preliminary report and was shocked into temporary immobility by what he discovered. It was frozen solid.

  “Wait, if it really was some ancestral curse, why would the spirit or whatever still be on board the carriage after the victim offed himself?” Tol was talking to Doctor Millmoss, the paranormal psychologist the EE Bureau used as a consultant on cases like this, on his comm.

  “Residual energy? Are you on the level? I thought energy made things hotter, not colder. Negative energy? Is there really such a thing? No offense, doc, but I just can’t buy into this malarkey. Thanks, anyway. Bye.”

  Tol sat and stared at the ceiling of the carriage in thought. He wasn’t focused on anything up there, just fixated on one spot while his mind went over recent events analytically. Suddenly an impossibly black shadow moved across his field of vision. It took a second or two for it to register; when it did Tol leapt to his feet reflexively. He spun completely around, taking in the lighting and calculating the necessary position of an object in order to cast that shadow.

  There was no object, and no strong source of light in the direction necessary to cast the shadow even if there had been. It must be some form of optical illusion.

  Tol decided to conduct a simple experiment. He had been sitting in the same seat the witnesses said was occupied by the elf for most of the trip. He relocated to the other end of the now-empty carriage and waited. After a full hour there had been no shadows, no temperature fluctuations: nothing. He returned to the original seat. This time he hadn’t been sitting there for more than a couple of minutes when it felt as though two strong hands grabbed his throat and were trying to choke him. Tol jumped to his feet and spun to dislodge the attacker. The choking sensation immediately ceased. He suddenly had an idea.

  “Hey Petey,” he said, taking the pen from his overjack pocket, “Got any clue what’s going on here?”

  “My presumption was that you were suffering from some form of neuromotive palsy,” came the metallic reply, “Although your EEG readings were not abnormal. Allow me to rephrase that: not abnormal for you.”

  “Har, har. Please tell me you’ve also been following the bizarre little saga unfolding here.”

  “Yes. I see a spike in overall electromagnetic radiation concurrent with the manifestations of the shadow, but I cannot pinpoint the origin or even the precise nature of the field generated by that radiation. It is as though the source is extradimensional, which may well be the case—improbable though that sounds.”

  “Extradimensional…you mean like from The Slice?” Tol asked.

  “Not exactly. Dark energy such as that siphoned from The Slice has a characteristic signature. This signature is very unusual in that it shows no consistent pattern; or rather, the pattern is there, but parts of it seem to be located in an energetic continuum that does not register on my sensors.”

  “So? Maybe you just haven’t got the right sensors?”

  “Perhaps, but I am equipped with sensors for the full spectrum of known radiative emissions. That means this energy is of a type unknown to engineers.”

  “Yeah? How can that be?”

  “I have no answer for that question.”

  “I never thought I’d hear those words coming from your little electronic mouth.”

  “The number of questions to which I do not have the answer is infinite. My knowledge base only seems vast in comparison with your own.”

  “If the obligatory derogation period has concluded, I’d like to return to the anomaly under discussion.”

  “Your increased vocabulary is somewhat anomalous in itself and will, I might add, make the ‘derogation periods’ less frequent and of shorter duration. Returning per request to the discussion, the elf committed suicide based, apparently, on a belief that he was the victim of some form of malediction. If he experienced and misinterpreted the anomalous energy, and was predisposed to rash action based on some perceived prior intimidation, his reaction might be explicable on that basis.”

  “I’m not comfortable with the reliance that explanation places on irrationality,” Tol replied, “Can we construct something a little more empirical?”

  “I am deeply impressed. Perhaps I have misjudged you all these years.”

  “Nah. I really have been trying to expand my vocabulary lately.”

  “And you’ve made noticeable progress. As to the chain of events, it might be helpful if you carried me around while I scan for more encounters with the mystery energy. The more samples I have, the better a characterization I can develop.”

  Tol clipped the pen to an outside pocket to avoid any shielding effect from the lined overjack and transected the carriage methodically. After one complete survey they had found nothing and were considering the possibility that whatever it was had returned to wherever it had come from when Tol suddenly felt something: an intensely malevolent presence.

  “You see anything on the sensors?” he asked Petey.

  “Yes. ‘Pegged the meter,’ as you might say. An energy signature I’ve never seen before that isn’t even possible with the limits of engineering as we know them. To put it into context, were it thermal energy this coach and in fact the entire carriage would be molten. The level is now approaching the full-spectrum radiative output of a small star. If some form of harmonic or feedback loop is established with ‘normal’ energy something dramatic and most likely catastrophic will occur.” Petey’s volume was increasing at the end to compensate for a rising thrum in the coach.

  “What can we do to prevent that from taking place?” Tol yelled.

  “Jump!”

  “I meant, and survive the experience!”

  “Oh. In that case I would suggest contacting your transcended mage friend. The energy signature here is closer to dark energy than anything else. He might recognize it.”

  “Good idea,” Tol muttered while fumbling in his pocket for a talisman Oloi had given him. He squinted at the tiny lettering, which obligingly began to glow a bright golden as the talisman heated up in his palm. “Ulul...” he started, before remembering he was supposed to read right to left...” Veniteet ululaverunt!”

  Nothing happened for a few moments, except that the oppressive feeling in the coach grew so incredibly intense that it seemed the walls themselves would surely give way. A golden swirling mist appeared and an odd bipedal creature with smooth light brownish-red hide and shocks of startling thin white fur on its head assembled itself therefrom.

  “Nice to see you, Oloi,” said Tol, when enough of the apparition had materialized for him to be confident that hearing was possible.

  “Yooouraaaang?” Oloi replied in an artificially deep voice.

  “Yeah, I guess I did. Do you feel that?”

  “What, precisely, am I expected to be feeling?”

  “An incredible sense of evil, oppression, and foreboding.”

  Oloi sniffed the air and waved his hand back and forth. “Smells like a Duellomortu.”

  Tol glared at him. “Whatta ya mean ‘smells like?’ And what the sme
k is a dwellomor...whatever?”

  “A Duellomortu is revenant who can only be killed in a duel. With a sword. A dueling sword, to be exact: rapier, colichemarde, or sabre, usually.”

  “This sounds like a monster from some role playing game,” said Petey, drily.

  “That’s precisely the origin of it, old boy. When you’re an archmage with a very high fever and a very potent Artifact of Instantiation within easy reach of your bedside, these sorts of things happen.”

  “How do we make it go away?” screamed Tol over the almost intolerable din.

  “Oh,” replied Oloi, “You really can’t, now. Not until you set a time and place for the duel. The best you can do is move to another coach. It won’t follow you.”

  They all moved to the next coach in line and huddled in the first berth. “You mean that coach is now haunted?” asked Wijjy, who had joined them when they changed coaches.

  “In a sense, yes. The Duellomortu will remain attached that physical location until someone completes the geas by challenging it to, and fighting, the proper form of duel.”

  “What happens if you lose the duel?”

  Oloi shrugged. “You die and take the Duellomortu’s place.”

  “And if you win?”

  “The Duellomortu dissipates.”

  “How is any of this possible?” Tol asked.

  The archmage crossed his legs. “Do know what a wheel boot is?”

  “Yeah,” replied Tol, “It’s a locking collar we clamp on the wheel of prams or drays to keep them from moving until we’re ready for that to happen.”

  “Precisely: a revenant is a malevolent spirit held in place by a magical ‘soul boot,’ not to be freed until a specific trigger releases it. In the case of a Duellomortu that trigger consists of being defeated in a sword battle using the rules of formal rapier combat.”

  “You said ‘in the case of a Duellomortu.’ Does that mean there is more than one in existence?” asked Wijjy.

  “Unfortunately, yes. An artifact is so-called because of its great power. An Artifact of Instantiation burns a permanent template into the interface between the prime and arcane realms that generates whatever was programmed into that template more or less forever. It dissipates eventually, but only after millions of years. As a result, Duellomortu will continue to appear throughout N’plork for quite a long time to come.”