Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2

by Robert G. Ferrell

  “Ah, I forgot the most important part,” Ballop’ril continued in response. “As with the comm unit, arcanic essence is linked by a form of quantum entanglement to the person from whom it was derived. If the crystal is energized, the life force of the donor still exists. The crystal, as you can see, is glowing. Were he demised, the crystal would be a dull red. Therefore...”

  “I am very happy to know this,” Selpla said quietly.

  “Here,” Ballop’ril handed her the glowing cylinder. “Keep this in a safe place and you will always know that he is among the living.”

  Selpla’s eyes got wide. “What if I...drop it or something?”

  The archmage laughed. “So long as it is filled with arcanic essence it is quite indestructible, I assure you. These crystals possess an intrinsic inviolability enchantment that is activated when they fill.”

  She cradled it in her palm as though it were a fragile, precious living creature. “I will keep it close to me always.” She pulled a fine, strong chain from around her neck and threaded it through a hole in the wire enmeshing the crystal, placing it back over her head.

  “It will never be further away than a hair’s breadth.”

  Knowing Tol was alive was a great comfort, of course, as was knowing approximately where he was located, but not knowing precisely why he was there ate at her tremendously. Back in Goblinopolis she set up her own comm unit to override any existing call with an incoming from Tol’s number and made his ringtone a loud alarm sound. When she built a little shrine to him, with his picture at the center, she realized she was in love.

  Chapter the Sixteenth

  in which a healing ritual inadvertently creates a lethal swarm of monsters

  Tol did call, at last, and relayed his adventures in abbreviated form. He was on the way to Cladimil, there to take the carriage back to Goblinopolis, back to her. She could not remember happier news. Her entire universe suddenly brightened up, as though the sun had come out from behind thick, enveloping clouds for the first time in weeks. She bought new clothes and did everything she could think of to maximize her attractiveness for him. The reunion would be, she hoped, epic.

  Then the call came in from Kurg, her boss: the crew will be by in ten minutes to pick you up; the titans are having some sort of disagreement that threatens to turn violent and I want you there to cover it. No ifs or buts.

  She slammed the comm down and steamed for a moment, but in the end her journalistic instincts came through and made the outcome inevitable. She sighed and picked up the ‘go bag’ she kept on a shelf near the door and headed out to meet the guys. The trip would only make their reunion even sweeter.

  She called Tol to tell him the news and discovered that he was dealing with a rather bizarre situation involving a ghost haunting a carriage. She shook her head. He could certainly wriggle himself into interesting predicaments. The very thought of wriggling excited Selpla so much she had to conjure up something sad immediately. She remembered a treasured lapspider she’d had as a child that was mashed against the wall when a door blew open during an intense storm. Sad, and a real mess to clean up. That helped.

  It was a long way from Goblinopolis to Hellehoell, so far in fact that Kurg grudgingly sprung for third-class carriage fare, which Selpla immediately upgraded to first on her expense account. “We’re not bouncing and scraping all the way to Fenurian in the third-class coach,” she explained to Lom, her lighting tech; Drin, who took care of her audio; and Fob, the camera jockey replacing Prond.

  “Won’t mister Kurg be upset that you’re spending that money, Miss Selpla?” asked Fob.

  “We just call him Kurg,” explained Lom, “Mister is wasted on him.”

  Fob looked bewildered. “But, he is our supervisor, yes?”

  “He’s the city desk editor who gives us news assignments. Supervisor is a bit misleading.”

  “I think he a big bully sometime,” added Drin.

  Selpla laughed. “Kurg is just Kurg. He’s a big lug with a gruff exterior, but deep down he’s really, well, still a big lug. Respect him when he’s around, but don’t get carried away with it.”

  “Yes, Miss Selpla. I will try not to get carried away.”

  “Don’t call her ‘Miss Selpla,’ either,” Lom said, annoyed, “Makes her sound like somebody’s maiden auntie.”

  “I am sorry, Mister Lom. I did not mean to offend you.”

  “Leave the kid alone, both of you,” Selpla warned, “He can call me Miss Selpla if he wants to. I think it’s sweet and respectful.”

  “It give me stomach ache,” observed Drin.

  They rolled into Fenurian station just before dawn. While third class berths would have been cramped, uncomfortable, and virtually sleep-proof, the first class sleeper coach was downright luxurious. As a result, they were relatively well-rested and ready to get to work.

  It was a further ninety minutes by rented pram to the Hellehoell excavation site. As they drove up, Selpla’s news team couldn’t help but notice that the air seemed to be full of gigantic flying monstrosities of types none of them had ever even imagined, let alone seen before. The behemoths swept angrily to and fro, like colossal agitated bloodbuzzers. No stranger to chronicling conflict, Selpla immediately found a sheltered location to observe the goings-on without unduly endangering herself or her troops. It was shaping up to be quite a spectacle, whatever was going on.

  The titans appeared to be arrayed along two long, opposing fronts facing each other across the broad boulevard leading into the underground metropolis of Hellehoell. Every ten meters or so there was an outrageously outfitted shaman waving some elaborately carved staves outfitted with a wide variety of feathers, brightly colored strips of hide, and what looked like some form of dried plant materials.

  Swooping majestically and at a rather disconcertingly low altitude were gargantuan creatures with multiple heads, wings, and tails: some of them spouting fire, some emitting ice clouds, some crackling with electrical charge, a few even spitting clouds of roiling toxins. While they all appeared to be bilaterally symmetric, aside from this there was no uniformity of physiognomy. The sky was the limit.

  While the aerobatics of the behemoths were impossible to ignore, not so easily discernible was the purpose behind them. They weren’t exactly doing combat, but neither did their intentions appear to be on the whole peaceful. The titans beneath them were silent and stony-faced, almost as though they were standing at attention in formation.

  After observing the shamans for a while it became apparent to Selpla that they were each controlling one of the dive-bombing monstrosities as though they were enormous puppets. All at once the monsters stopped swooping and hovered in midair quietly. She looked over at Fob to be certain the camera was rolling. Something was about to happen.

  One of the most elaborately-dressed shamans stepped forward and pounded the butt of his staff on the pavement. In the dead center of the assemblage, in the air perhaps twenty meters above the boulevard itself, a tiny but extremely intense ball of light appeared. Jiggling and wobbling, it grew steadily larger but less intensely luminous, taking the form of a sphere with hundreds of vicious-looking spines of varying lengths protruding from it. The apparition inflated to a good thirty meters across before the expansion slowed and then halted. It hung there, the air pregnant with anticipation.

  Without warning the titans all began to scream in defiance and shake their fists as the monsters rose up and ripped into the glowing sphere. Fire, ice, smoke, steam, and fumes sprayed and swirled in a huge, billowing mass. The aerial creatures attacked with savage fury, ripping stalactite shards off and casting them to the ground viciously. The sphere spun wildly, reversing direction with every other blow and steadily losing mass. All the while hundreds of titans were pumping their arms and yelling in abject fury. It was the most riveting demonstration Selpla had ever witnessed, though she had not the faintest idea what it represented or what triggered it.

  With one final swipe of a mighty paw the sphere disintegrated, the
remaining fragments falling to the ground with glowing trails tracing their paths. As the fiery tracers died away, so too did the flying apparitions—along with the screams of the titans. Now there was but a single voice, the shaman who conjured the sphere, keening mournfully.

  At length even his voice faded, leaving faint reverberances that lapped one another like pond ripples as they echoed off the canyon walls on their way to silence. When the last detectable vibration had ceased, the titans turned as though on cue and filed back into the mouth of Hellehoell. The ceremony, if that’s what it was, was over.

  Having captured it all with the camera and microphones, Selpla figured now would be a good time to ask someone what it was they had witnessed. She approached one of the shamans, but was intercepted by a more conservatively dressed titan who introduced himself as Tartag.

  “Hello, Tartag, I am Selpla from Goblinopolis Video News. Can you explain what we just saw out there?”

  “Yes, Selpla, I can. It will take a few minutes to do it properly, however.”

  “We have plenty of time. I just want to get the story accurate.”

  “A noble aspiration; very well. You are standing in the entrance to the ancestral titan homeland: the underground complex of Hellehoell. We have not occupied this demesne for millennia; the way in was lost as a result of some ancient cataclysm and we have wandered the world nationless since that event. Now that we have reclaimed our ancient homeland, we must exorcise it of accumulated negative spiritual energies and imbue it with a uniquely titan aura. So, our shamans held a summoning of the traditional titan totemic beasts and then drew the negative energy—we call it malisucci—out of both substrate and superstructure to be absorbed and thereby rendered inert by the totems. That is what you witnessed.”

  “It sure beat the pants off a Weekendsday ball game,” Lom offered.

  “I found it breathtakingly dramatic,” said Selpla, “And I am honored we were permitted to watch. Is it permissible to broadcast this ceremony?”

  “We have no prohibitions or taboos concerning such a thing, so long as proper context is provided and our people are shown in a positive light,” answered Tartag after a moment’s consideration.

  “That I can promise,” said Selpla, “I’ll be doing the reporting and I’m certainly positively impressed.”

  “Amazing. Made eyes open up wide,” Drin enthused.

  “I had to go to 2.35:1 to keep the frame coherent,” remarked Fob. Everyone looked at him curiously. “What?” he asked, “It would have worked better with a crane shot, but I didn’t have the right dolly.”

  “He was a cinematography major,” Selpla explained, quietly, averting her eyes.

  Everyone nodded and regarded Fob sympathetically.

  “What?”

  By this time there were approximately thirty thousand titans in residence at Hellehoell, with new groups or individuals streaming in almost every day. The restoration work was progressing apace, now that an understanding had been worked out between the titans and RSCA scholars who were charged with preserving as much of the ancient cities as practical. The titans had a keen respect for their own heritage, so for the most part the cooperation was effortless.

  After the Malisucci ceremony most titans went back to their labors deep inside the cities. The shamans gathered for a final ritual that would seal the cities from evil influences, the Operimentum Malum. That ritual had been developed millennia earlier by the first generation of titan shamans to have recognized their innate arcane abilities and formulated magical practices around them. Consequently, the Malum ritual drew upon the rawest, most primitive magical energies available.

  Planets embedded in the dark energy continuum exhibit what might be referred to as a ‘dark magnetic field’ associated with the movement of the planet’s metallic core through the dark energy stream. On worlds where magic is in very heavy use over a period of tens of millennia this field is gradually weakened by cumulative absorption. On N’plork, in contrast, significant magic use has only been in place for a few millennia and the native dark magnetic field strength is still quite high. It was on that plentiful latent energy which the Malum ritual drew. The easy availability of that energy was also the reason Phaeon Timeskin chose N’plork for a habitation. He superimposed his own personal energy absorption regimen over the existing complex of fields and energy patterns, effectively integrating himself into the cyclic energetic totality of the planet itself. Unfortunately, the Malum ritual disturbed that totality in ways no one could have predicted.

  The deepdrakes were creatures of dark energetic origin. Not only were they constructed from perturbations in that field, they drew their power, their existence, from eddies produced in that structure by natural planetary mechanics. The Malum ritual temporarily squeezed those eddies; elongated them into thin ellipses that no longer conformed to the template upon which the deepdrakes had been designed. This created an unstable imbalance in the non-sentient deepdrake population that manifested itself in several significant ways, the most immediately disturbing of which is that half the population ceased to exist and the other half began to grow uncontrolled in both size and temperament.

  When the deepdrakes outgrew their cave habitats, they began to break their way into larger spaces, eventually encroaching on the lower regions of Hellehoell and driving the titan reconstruction workers before them as they advanced. As the alarm spread, the titans formed ranks and began to fight the deepdrakes off, but their efforts were complicated by the chaotic nature of the energy instability that imbued each deepdrake with different offensive and defensive capabilities.

  Some had grown armor plating; some sported chemical or pyrotechnic projectile weapons. Others had unusual strength or extreme resistance to magical damage. A few were even able to levitate or cling to walls like a climbing reptile. The sentient deepdrakes were not affected by the energy surge, except inasmuch as they lost any control over their feral brethren. Even Phaeon seemed negatively impacted and took refuge in the dark material plane.

  Eventually the mutated deepdrakes could not be contained in the lower reaches any longer and began to spill out into the inhabited areas, bringing destruction and chaos with them. The combat was often one-on-one now, with the more aggressive monsters pushing harder and faster than the others. The civil guard was called out, but as a newly-formed unit with little actual combat experience they were minimally effective. Finally the ruling council felt it necessary to ask the government of Tragacanth for formal assistance.

  “High priority diplomatic dispatch from the titans, Your Majesty,” explained Boogla, holding a sheaf of parchment in her hands. “It seems they are being overrun by deepdrakes. Mutated ones, at that. They request mobilization of the regional security forces.”

  “Is it really so bad that thirty thousand plus titans can’t handle it?” Aspet scratched his chin. “Those must be some vicious deepdrakes.”

  “They are formally requesting assistance, Your Majesty. What are your orders?”

  “What does my Consort and Magineer Liaison think?”

  “I think that if we don’t send them some troops, we’ll be risking both another meltdown in Hellehoell and a definite cooling of the relations between us and the ruling caste of the titans.”

  “Very well, I do so order it. Muster the 3rd Civil Defense Brigade in Fenurian and then march them to Hellehoell, there to be temporarily under the directive advisement of the titan Ruling Council for the duration of the crisis. Tell Colonel Goile to be respectful but exercise his tactical control firmly and at all times. We will help the titans in their time of need, but we will not meld with them.”

  “By your command, Majesty.”

  “I have another command.”

  Boogla giggled. “Let me transmit this directive first. I’ll be back in a moment.”

  “Affairs of State should not be delayed. Hurry back.”

  Colonel Tun Goile was a career soldier who had served in a variety of capacities in the Tragacanthan military, both on land
and at sea. He had been in his current command, the 3rd Civil Defense Brigade, for only a few months. Previously he had served as the executive officer to the commander of Ft. Ullglava and as Northeast Commodore in the Tragacanthan Coastal Patrol. He could trace his ancestry in unbroken line back to the first settlers of Esmia, four thousand years ago. His family had been proud members of the esteemed Society of Firsters since its inception more than a millennium prior.

  His social pretensions made Goile a bit of a prima donna, but he kept it under control most of the time. The only time it manifested itself was when he was forced to deal as an equal with persons he felt were clearly beneath him in the social hierarchy. As commander those situations were mercifully rare.

  He had, in the course of his military career, encountered myriad enemies, from pirates on the high seas to insane militants who wanted to impose Scarya Law—a bizarre set of edicts that basically took away all rights from people who refused to acknowledge publically that the Supreme Being was an enormous nocturnal three-legged marsupial named Tata—in the Paradiddle Islands. As a result, he felt fairly confident that this latest menace would prove no great challenge.

  The entire brigade was currently staffed at 3,200 soldiers, but of course it wasn’t going to require that amount of strength for this simple suppression action. As far as he could tell they were talking about wildlife control, more than anything else. He was a little insulted that he’d been called out by the king to serve as what amounted to an animal exterminator, but orders were orders.

  When the first wave, his command pram and seven drays full of soldiers from the 16th Regiment, 3rd Brigade, pulled up to Hellehoell, Col. Goile was gritting his teeth in preparation for being placed under ‘directive advisement.’ He hated oversight by non- soldiers; they invariably did not understand military objectives and wanted things to run in ways contrary to the stated mission. He was pleasantly surprised, then, when the ruling council leader came out to meet him and turned full control of the situation over to him. The titan was plainly frightened and just wanted the problem solved by the most expeditious means possible.