“Noble of him, I’m sure. What became of him?”
“I killed him, of course. He was distracted by a vile creature who looked a lot like you.”
“Oh ho! You were jealous, then.”
“I know not this word, jealous.”
“I think you do.” She accompanied this with a flurry of off-hand swipes followed by a vicious rising thrust that changed direction at the last possible second and impaled the specter beneath the right arm and into the chest. Or would have, on a living creature.
“That’s two,” she said, grimly, executing a standing backflip to avoid the phantom’s counter-attack.
“Yes. Two. What fun! Now, the only thing more entertaining than an apparently immortal opponent is...”
“Two of them!” answered a duplicate specter behind her.
True martial arts masters have two levels of defensive capability: the kuori, or outer shell, and the ydin, or core. The ydin is rarely accessed, as it comes into play only in life or death situations, in which people at Jadean’s level rarely find themselves due to their superior skills. With the appearance of the second sword-specter, however, Jadean snapped into ydin.
In the core there is nothing but you and your opponents; all else fades. There is no sound, no speech, no background. Only you and the foe exist, in high-definition, ultra-clarity. Each movement is in slow-motion, each reaction exquisitely choreographed by brain strata unreachable under any but the most extreme circumstances. In this state Jadean was quite simply an unstoppable killing machine.
She leapt high into the air and in one blinding, blurred cascade of motion as she descended slashed both opponents hard across the face, feinted immediately to draw them offside, cut them both across the midriff, feinted once more as she touched down, and finally continued into a crouch and sprang forward, impaling each with a different weapon. Both opponents abruptly vanished.
She drew back into the en garde position and waited, her breathing tightly controlled. Every muscle in her body was on high alert but relaxed, ready for whatever it was called upon to do. Nothing happened for a few pregnant moments, and then the specter reappeared, more solid than before.
It stood in front of Jadean and slowly slid rapier into scabbard. It bowed formally and said, “Most impressive, Mistress. I hereby declare the malediction lifted.”
With that, rather than fading away, it dissipated like smoke from a dying fire. In a few seconds there was nothing left. Sensing that the threat was past, Jadean finally dropped her guard. She stuck her head out of the coach.
“All clear. You can come back in now.”
Tol returned. “So, is it over?”
“I believe it is. The apparition declared the curse lifted,” replied Jadean, exhaling fully for the first time since the battle began.
Tol smiled. “I knew you were the right person for the job.” He walked over to the ledge and picked up his pen. “Petey, here, probably has some amazing footage for us. Am I right?”
“You are absolutely correct, Sir Tol-u-ol. Would you care to see it?”
“Yes, Petey, that would be most appreciated.”
A tight, rapidly scanning beam of light emanated from the pen to form a small cube of high-resolution video in the air before their faces. In it was a three-dimensional depiction of the battle, complete with surround-sound audio.
“That’s one heck of a pen you got there,” observed Jadean as they watched the spectacle. “I’m guessing you didn’t buy it from some mail-order catalog.”
“Yeah, it’s really useful, once you get past the abrasive personality disorder.”
There was a snort of derision from the pen. “Projection,” was all it said in reply. Tol and Jadean both laughed at the embedded pun.
“That was an almost unbelievable display of skill,” Tol said after the cinematics were done. “There is no way I’d face you in a fight, even a friendly bout.”
“Well, I don’t kill people—or things—ordinarily, you know,” Jadean replied, “This was something of a special circumstance. Besides, you’ve killed a lot more people than I have, I’ll wager.”
“Probably so. But all of them were trying to kill me.”
“The same is true for me. One never uses deadly force unless it is a matter of one’s own survival. Even then it must be the avenue of last resort.”
Tol reached into his pocket for a small card. “This contains your payment, as promised. I think you’ll find it acceptable.”
She took the card and pressed the edge with her thumb, to show the amount. Her eyes got wide. “I...I had no idea it was this much. This is enough to pay all expenses for the Academy for an entire year. I can buy new equipment and perhaps expand. Tol, I cannot thank you enough; I and the Academy are forever in your debt.”
“On the contrary, Randora Jadean, the debt falls squarely on the shoulders of the Greater Tragacanth Carriage Authority. You have restored to them the use of a carriage worth ten times the price they paid you.”
“And you?” Jadean asked, “What payment have you received from this victory?”
“The taxpayers of Tragacanth pay my salary, but far greater coin for me is the satisfaction I get from helping citizens in need. And in this case, I was gifted with the privilege of watching one of the greatest warriors of all time at the top of her game. That’s worth more than I can even count.”
“So is the number of fingers on two pairs of gloves,” said a voice from inside his overjack pocket.
Jadean looked at him quizzically.
Tol grinned. “Remember the personality disorder thing?”
Chapter the Fifteenth
in which Selpla tracks her lover with the help of an archmage
Selpla took a sip of her greatfruit infusion and closed her eyes. She had just finished filming a segment on a new self-cleaning undergarments invention for the morning broadcast and now sat in the studio canteen relaxing. She was waiting for Tol to call so they could plan their upcoming date to Lake Streblor across the border in Galanga. Tol had never been and she was anxious to show it to him. Streblor was world-famous for its crystal clear waters, teeming avian and piscean life, and due to a particular mineral present in the water, it smelled like roasting meat. Avid carnivores from all over the world came just to sit on the beach and sniff.
By the time Selpla was ready to leave for home, Tol still had not called. She checked her comm to make sure she had not inadvertently turned off the alert tone. It was still on, and no message from Tol. He must have had difficulty getting that titan kid onto the boat. She called him up. It went immediately to voice record, which meant that his comm unit was unable to receive calls for one reason or another.
Selpla still wasn’t too concerned: Tol was, after all, a cop who sometimes went incommunicado to get the job done. Turning off his comm accidentally wasn’t all that unusual. He also did it intentionally every so often just to get some peace and quiet, although that reason probably wasn’t going to apply here. He would call her as soon as he got the chance; she had no doubt of that.
The next morning she was full-blown worried. She checked her messages on every conceivable device and found nothing. She grabbed her always-ready overnight bag and headed to the carriage station to buy a ticket to Cladimil. All along the lengthy trip to the west coast she continued to try contacting Tol. She left messages at his office comm, and the Tragacanth Edict Enforcement headquarters; she even asked the Royal Residence staff to have Tol call her as soon as possible if they heard from him first.
The harbormaster in Cladimil was an old ogre named Nid. He didn’t much like goblins, and he didn’t have time for a pretty young female one with a bunch of questions. “You are welcome to file a Manifest Discovery Request,” he said, without looking up, “Shouldn’t take more than three weeks, if the Records Keeper isn’t out with the croup again.” He wasn’t impressed that the missing person was a Knight of the Crimson, nor even that he was Royal Family. Nid shooed her out of his office; Selpla stood there in the hallway
only for a moment considering her options before striding briskly away.
An hour later she was back with a camera crew from the local affiliate station. She told Nid she was fascinated by his glamorous job and wanted the people of Cladimil and in fact all of Tragacanth to know more about him. He was naturally suspicious at first, but Selpla was a difficult person to resist over the long term and eventually Nid gave her the interview, and more.
She remembered that Tol had said he was he was going to escort a young titan named Korq onto the ship and see that he was well-treated on his way to be with family in Solemadrina. Based on the slip, time, and destination, she decided the ship must have been the Grollnash, although that wasn’t a certificated passenger vessel.
There was no Korq on the passenger manifest, but that wasn’t surprising, she learned by talking with the local cargo jocks. Ships not officially certificated as primary passenger haulers were actually allowed twelve paying passengers per sailing; any beyond that would be traveling ‘exconsigno’ or off-manifest.
After she’d pumped the Harbormaster for all the information he apparently had to offer under the guise of interviewing him for a high-profile news spot, Selpla and her crew moved on to conducting dockside interviews. The dock denizens came from almost every race and nation on N’plork, so asking them if they’d seen a goblin get on board the Grollnash would have been pointless except for Korq. A titan, even a young one, was certainly a novelty even for the dock workers. Many of them hadn’t seriously believed that titans existed until then.
“Bleeder was taller than an ogre on growth serum,” one of them exclaimed.
“Tall en skinny ez a needle-arbor,” said another.
“Did you see who he was with?” Selpla would ask them hopefully.
“Was ‘e wit’ summun? Dint notice,” was the most common reply.
At last, one of the loadmasters indicated that he’d seen Tol get on the boat.
“Tough-lookin’ goblin,” he related, “Like a cop er retired soljer. Funny thing is, I never seen ‘im git off—an’ I was here until long after th’ scow pushed away.”
Selpla tried Tol’s comm again. No connection made. It was either destroyed or no longer in range of a signal repeater: even when powered off, a functional comm unit sends out a “busy” beacon. No signal at all was bad. Selpla thought about the problem for a moment and then suddenly brightened. She thanked the crew for helping her little information-gathering sham succeed and raced off into the approaching darkness.
Roadway T-1 made a giant loop from Goblinopolis to Cladimil to Fenurian to Dresmak and back. T-2 wound its way from Goblinopolis to Port Zog to Lumbos. The T-3 ran almost in a straight line from the capitol city down through Ft. Ullglava and then to Tillimil. The T-4 ran from Tillimil to Dreadmost. Finally, the T-5 ran from the T-4 just south of the River Tud Bridge to Qoplebarq. There were dozens of smaller roads, of course, such as the one from Cartlug to Strix in the Southern Reaches or the road from the T-1 to Upupa in the District of Northmia. The T-level highways were maintained by the Royal Engineers; the small byways by the local Road & Bridge Districts.
Selpla took the T-3 and stopped in Ft. Ullglava to eat lunch. Despite the military installation for which it was named—the largest single active reservation in the kingdom—the town itself was surprisingly charming. A small river, the Feqlo, ran through the heart of the hamlet and emptied finally into the Bay of Sorrows, named for the abundance of sharp rocks and unpredictable gales that sent many ships and sailors to their dooms over the millennia.
The residents of Ft. Ullglava the town, originally a retirement community for soldiers but now with a thriving population unrelated to said military, had built a most marvelous shopping and dining district along the river, with multiple stone-arched foot bridges interconnecting a cohesive collection of shops, restaurants, theatres, and art enclaves that made for an absorbing (and for the proprietors, profitable) tourist experience. Selpla found a darling little cafe on the southern end of the river path where she sat with her favorites: citrus-leaf infusion and ogrecress sandwich.
Tol’s comm was still dead. She had never been the pessimistic sort and swore that this setback would not convert her. He was out there, somewhere, and she would find him. Alive. Tol was nothing if not a survivor. She knew the odds were with him, whatever he’d gotten himself into. She decided to put the brake on this line of reasoning because it was scaring her a little. She did not like to be scared. This episode made Selpla realize just how much she cared about Tol. She’d never felt this way about anyone outside her family before.
She arrived in Cartlug in the late afternoon and went straight to the Mages’ Lodge. She carried with her a small amulet given to her by Ballop’ril. When plugged into a slot in a ceremonial console in the Cartlug Mages’ Lodgehall, it was supposed to summon the archmage somehow. After exchanging a few pleasantries with the resident mages, she was led into the corridor of ceremonies where the receptacle in question was located. Selpla slotted the carved talisman in place and waited. After a few seconds a faint glow appeared in the air before her. As she watched, it intensified until she could make out that it was some sort of command or notice. It said:
Hang On!
She was still puzzling over the meaning of this cryptic instruction when the world seemed to contract and rush toward her, fuzzing as it went. She gave out with a little scream that ended abruptly when she found herself back in Ballop’ril’s elaborate mountain cavern, with the wizened little bugbear himself standing there. Just behind and to his left was Prond, with a new silver sash.
“Hi Selpla! Great to see you. I made Mage, Second Tier. Isn’t that great?”
Selpla took a deep breath to clear her head and grinned at him.
“Yeah, that’s super, Prond. You’ll be an archmage before you know it.”
“Not so much,” he replied, “That will take at least twenty more years—if I’m lucky.”
“Luck has little to do with it,” Ballop’ril interjected, “Hard work is the key to advancement; scarce else matters. Now then, young lady: to what do we owe the great honor of your visit today?”
Selpla composed herself quickly and adopted her usual aplomb. “Greetings, Archmage Ballop’ril. Thank you for allowing me again into your fabulous home. Other than simply wishing to gaze upon all this magnificence once more, I need to trace down an inert comm unit and was hoping you could perform such a feat.”
The archmage stroked his chin. “If the unit has an arcane heterodyning module it might be possible. Have you misplaced it?”
“In a manner of speaking. I have misplaced the goblin carrying it: Sir Tol.”
“Sir Tol-u-ol is missing? This is most grievous news. How did such a thing come about?”
Selpla relayed what little of the story she knew.
“And you say your comm is priority-linked to his? That will simplify things a bit. Please set it on the table here, inside the circle of glyphs.”
While Prond stood nearby with a full speculum for providing additional manna if needed, Ballop’ril coalesced an energy sphere in mid-air, lowering it gently onto the table until one full hemisphere disappeared into the surface, leaving the comm encased in a semi- circle of pulsating blue.
“The comm unit is now located partially in arcane space and partially in physical space,” Ballop’ril explained,“A priority link uses a form of quantum entanglement: certain subatomic particles of this comm unit are inextricably tied to their counterparts in Tol’s. If I initiate a ‘Multidimensional Pinpoint’ spell on the comm, the entangled particles should act as shunts to their equivalents in the other device and feed us the precise location of them in the process. The trick will be to cast the spell with sufficient power that the trace takes place all the way down to the subatomic level. Otherwise we won’t get enough information back from Tol’s comm to ascertain its exact resting spot.”
Prond conjured a three-dimensional map in the air near them on which to display the tracking information. As the
spell took hold the energy in the speculum began to drain away until it was merely a transparent glass ovoid. On Prond’s map, little points of light began to sparkle and move about as the trace spell ran its course. A dense clump of red photoluminescence marked the spot on which they stood, where Selpla’s comm rested. As they watched, small green clumps began to form and move toward Cladimil, then in a relatively straight line away to the west, across the Noorprid Sea. They met at a spot roughly two thirds of the way across that ocean, on a trajectory that would seem to be taking them to Port Jool or Woklopen in Solemadrina.
“I guess he decided to tag along,” remarked Selpla after a few moments, “Odd that he didn’t call to tell me, though.”
“Odder still that an Edict Enforcement officer would turn off his comm. The model they use self-recharges through the Arcane Ether,” Prond added. “No need to turn it off, ever.”
“Way out there, though, there aren’t any repeaters for the conventional signals. Those comms are meant to use arcane mode for signal boosting only: you can’t make a call without the conventional radio portion,” explained Ballop’ril.
While they pondered these ponderables, Ballop’ril made them all a nice cup of hot Mages Special infusion (or ‘infission,’ as he called it).
“Tol-u-ol is alive,” he announced suddenly, voicing an answer to the question they were all thinking.
“How...how do you know?” Selpla asked, trembling a little.
“He left me this.”
He held up a small crystal with a pale yellowish glow coming from it.
“This is his arcanic essence. It’s like genetic material only derived from his arcane aura, not his biological chromosomes. It flooded into an empty crystal cocoon in my pocket when I touched him preparatory to teleporting him to the Royal Residence. I realized it sometime later and asked if he wanted me to destroy it. He said no, it might come in handy one day. Prescient of him.”
Selpla still looked puzzled.
Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 Page 17