Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2

by Robert G. Ferrell

  He decided that he needed a diversion to make this work. Surveying the crowd, he spotted a table of ogres. He picked up a scrap of paper from the floor and scribbled something on it. Passing near them, he dropped the scrap on their table unnoticed. Tol retreated to a position near the halfers and waited. It didn’t take long.

  One of the ogres spotted the paper and picked it up. His face turned bright green as he read it before leaping up from his chair and making for the nearest group of elves with obvious felonious intent. The elves were taken entirely by surprise and scattered before the onslaught like leaves before a sudden gale. He chased one down and began to pummel the hapless fellow while everyone else either booed or cheered. When the other elves tried to defend their brother the solo beating suddenly exploded into a free-for-all, as Tol had expected. He felt for and quickly located the expected release catch under the lip of the nearby bar, slipping quietly through the cryptic opening at the height of the melee.

  He found himself in a darkened corridor, narrow and musty from disuse. He had to stifle the sudden urge to cough as he crept down the hall toward a set of heavy drapes framing an opening at the far end. He parted the fabric ever so slightly and peered through into a non-descript room containing a bed, dresser, and washbasin. The furniture was plain and unadorned. Lying on the bed with her back to the door was a goblin that met Frem’s general description, apparently sleeping.

  It was way too easy. Tol looked around the room for subtle signs of a trap. He found them when he noticed very fine wires leading from the bed frame into the wall. The figure on the bed was only a mannequin, rigged to trigger some most likely fatal action if disturbed. It was a booby-trap; Tol was not a booby. He gave the bed a wide berth and cautiously approached the door beyond. Rather than a traditional square knob, it was fitted with a peculiar form of closure known as a spade-latch, which allowed for speedier operation when rapid exits were a necessity. Another clue that something unusual was going down.

  Tol cracked the door and stepped back in case it, too, was trapped. He pushed on it carefully with a broom leaning against the wall. He left it standing wide open for a full thirty seconds and then when nothing lethal had appeared, slipped in.

  The second room was larger than the first, with more elaborate furnishings. It appeared to have been recently occupied and hastily abandoned: there was a half-eaten meal on the table next to a book on the history of Tragacanth. It was lying open to a chapter on the Royal Family. Several passages concerning Aspet were underlined. Tol felt himself getting angry and his reluctance to carry out the mission receding. There was only one door in evidence—the one he’d come through—but it was obvious there was another exit.

  Tol decided to search the room thoroughly. He went through the drawers of the bureau, looked under the table, rummaged through the cushions of the armchair, and lifted the throw rugs. Finally he checked out the adjoining bathroom. At first it looked normal, but something about the toilet didn’t sit right with Tol. He walked over and lifted the lid. It was of the ‘direct-drop’ variety— where the toilet emptied straight into the sewage line—common in the lower economic urban areas where the builders sought to save a little money: hygiene and foul odors be hanged. As he stepped away, the entire apparatus vibrated slightly and caught Tol’s attention. He walked back toward it and the vibration recurred. He got down on his knees and inspected the area around the toilet. It was circumscribed by a barely-visible line.

  Directly in front of the toilet there was an ornamental tile in the shape of a jublybud, a common architectural motif in Solemadrina as the plants were one of the more exuberant native wildflowers. He examined it, poking and prodding around the perimeter. He pushed down hard and the tile popped up from the floor. Tol twisted it and the crack around the toilet grew suddenly wider as the entire assembly lifted. He pulled up on the tile/handle and the toilet platform swung around to reveal a hole just big enough for a goblin to fit.

  He pulled the pen out of his overjack pocket and whispered.

  “Petey, is there anything sentient alive down there?”

  “I see evidence of two beings, probably goblins. One is three meters from the opening, the other a further two meters in the same direction. Both will be to your right if you pass through in the same orientation as present,” the pen replied at very low volume.

  Tol sighed. “Hold on. Could be a bumpy ride.”

  “Your ‘rides’ tend toward that direction.”

  Tol stood there a further moment cursing his choice of career before reluctantly dropping down into the pitch-black and decidedly aromatic opening. He swung as far to one side as possible to avoid the sewage itself. He landed on a concrete apron that formed one bank of the sewage channel.

  Tol hugged the first wall he encountered and crouched. He waited for his eyes to adjust to the almost absolute dark. When his vision was as good as it was going to get, he crept forward, continuing with the wall mere millimeters to his right. He heard a slight scraping sound ahead and drew his disruptor.

  No more than three seconds passed before he heard a goblin voice utter some odd words and then a flash lit up the passageway. Tol cursed under his breath as he grabbed at his left arm, which now sported a neat perforation spurting arterial blood. The projectile had pierced the muscles of his triceps and exited cleanly, without hitting bone. Some kind of magic slug, he guessed. He slapped a healing patch on it and the blood flow trickled to a stop.

  Tol was in pain, but he didn’t really mind. Pain kept him focused; kept out distractions. The brief illumination had given him a clear fix on his assailant’s location and appearance: a relatively heavy-set male goblin, about ten meters further down. He pretended to be mortally wounded and fell heavily to the floor, gambling that the gob mage would simply flee and not try to make certain he was finished off in the blackness.

  His gamble paid off: the assailant began to move away from Tol, feeling his way in the dark. Tol got noiselessly to his feet and edged along in pursuit, holding his throbbing arm. Whenever he sensed the gob had stopped, he stopped as well, holding his breath. Finally they came to a doorway with pale light spilling from it. Tol flattened himself against a wall out of the direct line of sight from within, watching and listening.

  “Did you lose the tail?” said a female voice without warmth or emotion.

  “I did better than that. I hit him with Bayren’s Ballistic Bullet.”

  “So long as he is incapacitated.”

  “I am sure of it. I heard him fall.”

  “Good. We need to get moving. I have to meet with Honto in half an hour.”

  “I will locate the key to the main sewer grate. We should leave that way, in case the pub is being watched.”

  “I just hope there’s not too much yuck in there.”

  “This end rarely gets any. The level has to be quite high for the main flow to reach this far out.”

  They walked away from the door. Tol recognized the second, female, voice as belonging to his quarry, Frem. He had found her, now he had to make certain he did not lose her. He slipped through the door and once again hugged the wall, this time on the left. He moved quietly, without audible footsteps.

  The male goblin came back after a couple of minutes. “Found the key,” he said.

  “Good. Let’s get going.”

  They headed for a metal door set into an irregular opening in the far wall. Tol crept as close as he dared; while he wanted to remain out of sight, he could not afford to stay so far behind that a door could shut and lock before he was able to grab it. He leapt for and caught the metal door just before it latched. Slipping in quickly, he let the door close with a loud click to reassure Frem and her companion that the way behind was secure.

  They were in a brick-lined sewage tunnel with the light of day shining through a narrow opening about twenty meters further along. About halfway there two larger tunnels led off to the right and left. Tol wrapped himself in his dark overjack and crouched to stay as invisible as possible. He heard
a muffled roaring sound coming from the four-way intersection: water flowing some distance away. He knew that the noise would be louder there, and waited until Frem and her companion had reached the confluence before hurrying after them. The gurgling of rushing sewage made it impossible for them to hear Tol coming up behind them.

  Tol set his disruptor on Stun, thought better of it, and ratcheted up to Solid Bonk. He didn’t want to take any chances. He aimed carefully and hit the male dead center back of the head. He went down like a bale of wet straw as Tol quickly flattened himself against the wall. Frem heard her escort fall and without even checking to see if he was still alive took off at a dead run down the left-hand sewage tunnel.“Touching display of concern,” Tol muttered as he ran in pursuit.

  Frem was in excellent shape and far more acrobatic than Tol on his best day. She knew he was following her and steadily drew further away. As she rounded a corner in the tunnel she suddenly slowed, then stopped along the bank of the sewage trench. Tol heard her stop and narrowed the distance between them warily in case she was setting him up. All those years on the street instilled a healthy paranoia into anyone who survived them. When he came around the same corner Tol immediately saw why Frem had stopped: there was something—something very behemoth-like—blocking the tunnel.

  Frem was standing there gaping up at the thing, and Tol could find no fault with her response. It was huge, slimy, scaly, stinky, and pulsed indecently. It had a variety of circular indentations that could have been eyes, a horrible proboscis of sorts, and a mouth full of something very much resembling spines. That maw opened and emitted a most disturbing sound: a combination roar, whine, and gurgle. Both Tol and Frem took a step back. Frem turned to flee, but when she saw Tol standing there she abruptly reversed course and slung a wicked spike-ball at one of the creature’s eyes. It roared out in pain and she breezed past Tol, shouting, “I only have to be quicker than you!”

  Tol took out after her, ignoring the monster, but it was coming now too, at an alarming clip. As it closed on Tol, he wondered how something that large and bloated could move so quickly. A powerful, mucous-coated tentacle took a vicious swipe at him; he ducked but was grazed, which sent him tumbling into the odiferous muck. Tol stood up, dripping with unspeakable slime, and felt the anger building. This obese blob had pissed him off.

  Heedless of the danger, Tol set his disruptor to full power and started shooting at the creature’s presumptive eyes. Each time he hit one the beast would roar in pain and rage, swiping at Tol with a tentacle or spitting a high-velocity bolus of some noxious expectoration that went blasting down the tunnel and disappeared into the darkness when Tol dodged. As he obliterated the last of the eyes the monster reared up as far as it could within the tunnel’s confines and then came crashing down with a tremendous wet thud. The resultant sewage tsunami overcame Tol; he floundered in the muck, gasping for air and fighting against the urge to projectile vomit.

  The wave generated by the blinded gargantua carried Tol far down the tunnel, at last scraping him off against a wall a hundred meters or more from his starting point. He was bruised, battered, bleeding, and possessing of an indescribable scent, but otherwise intact. Once his wits and proprioception had returned, Tol stood up to take stock of the tactical situation. The monster was nowhere to be seen; the same was true for Frem. He scraped as much of the awful offal as he could from his body parts and limped off along the tunnel. He sighed as he realized he would probably have to start over on the search for Frem. So close. He would have to miss the Avvolli’s sailing and book another way home. First, though, he desperately needed a shower or three.

  Tol figured the next sewer access hole was about fifty or sixty meters away, based on his experience in Goblinopolis. Most metropolitan sewage systems on N’plork were built on more or less the same template. As he limped along, he noticed an unusual lump in the placidly-flowing waste and stopped to examine it. He’d almost passed it up in the dim light. It was suspiciously goblin- shaped.

  The body, for that’s what it was, had grotesque disfigurement of the back side of the head and upper torso, as though it had been eaten away by some powerful acid. Well, this was a sewer and contained who-knew-what chemicals from a variety of industrial sources. This certainly wasn’t the first body he’d seen disposed of in this manner. Dumping a stiff down a sewer hole was in fact a time-honored method for disposing of evidence on the run. Not his jurisdiction; not his problem.

  He was about to shrug and pass on when a chance movement of sludge raised the left arm above the surface and Tol recognized it as belonging to a female. He knelt, dragged the body up out of the muck, and turned it over. It was Frem. She had apparently been struck by one or more of the monster’s acid spitballs. He searched the body and found a host of useful information concerning contacts and motives. He put it all in an evidence bag, filled out the label, and signed it. Then he took flash pictures of the body and was about to send a message back to HQ to notify local EE of its location when he remembered Yemmy’s advice: leave the body in a position where detection of the event will be put off as long as possible.

  Looked like he would make that return voyage, after all.

  Chapter the Nineteenth

  in which Tol foils an escape plan and once more tests his mariner’s skills

  Less than a full day out on the voyage back Tol noticed a brace of small vessels shadowing them. The ship’s crew probably noticed them as well, but there was no high seas edict being violated by such an act so long as the smaller ships did not encroach on the navigational zone around the Avvolli. There was a variety of reasons why the sloops might be there, but Tol had a hunch the fact that Lizgug did not show up for his rendezvous with whoever was waiting for him in Solemadrina had a lot to do with it.

  Two sailing ships didn’t seem like much of an immediate threat to the huge cruise liner as Tol sat and watched them. They could be scouts for some larger force, but he didn’t think so. He decided to stroll up to the bridge and have a word with the captain about it. The crew were polite but firm that this wasn’t the sort of thing passengers just did on a whim, but Tol was a hard gob to put off and, in a pinch, had that handy Crimson Knight badge.

  “I am aware of the sloops, Sir Knight. While such traffic is not common, we do occasionally pick up sailors who use our course as their own in order to facilitate navigation, as we ply this route continually and know it extremely well. They will probably peel off at some point as we approach Esmian waters.”

  “Do your occasional pick-ups routinely come armed with torpedoes?” Tol asked, staring at the distant vessels through the captain’s high-powered opticals, “’Cause these sure seem to be.”

  “What?” replied the captain, taking the glasses from Tol and sweeping the sloops. “Don’t be absurd. Those are either external fuel tanks of some sort or fishing buoys. I appreciate your concern, Sir Tol, but we have the situation well in hand here. There is no danger presented by these small vessels.”

  Tol shrugged. “It’s your boat.”

  “That,” replied the captain, turning back to his duties, “It is.”

  Tol wandered to the stern and stationed himself at one of the long-distance observation scopes mounted along the railing. He had a strange feeling about the stalkers, and his intuition wasn’t often wrong about such things. Nothing he could really do about them but watch and wait; if they made a move he would, well, figure something out.

  They took no action for the next few days, though: just kept their distance. Occasionally he would see someone out on deck— not fishing or sunning themselves as holiday-makers would be, but not doing anything threatening, either: just watching the Avvolli. Still, Tol couldn’t shake the impression they were up to no good.

  At dawn on the seventh morning, about a day away from docking at Lumbos, Tol went on deck and discovered that the shadowing sloops had disappeared. This fitted with the Captain’s prediction, so Tol reluctantly let go of his suspicions. He was relieved but still vaguely troubled, at t
he same time. He couldn’t say precisely why he was troubled, but something just didn’t smell right. He was willing to admit that it could be himself generating the off odor: even after a half-dozen baths the scent of the Erolossma sewage system lingered faintly. Whatever the source, it left him uneasy for no readily apparent reason.

  Two hours later Tol was eating a late breakfast on the forward veranda when he felt the ship’s engines slow and then cut out altogether. He strolled over to the port rail and saw one of the sloops drawn up alongside. He walked over to the starboard and there sat the other one. Every alarm bell in his body started clanging. He made his way to the bridge as quickly as possible, waving his EE creds in the face of anyone who tried to intervene along the way.

  “What’s the scoop, Captain?” Tol asked breathlessly as he slid to a stop near the command chair.

  “I’m very busy, now, Sir Tol.”

  “I’d guessed that. I’d also guessed that being so busy is somehow related to those sloops bracketing the ship right now.”

  The Captain sighed. “You would be correct, Sir Knight. They say they are armed and will sink or heavily damage the ship unless we lower your prisoner down to them.”

  Tol rolled his eyes. “Stall them, any way you can.” He turned and ran out the door.