Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2

by Robert G. Ferrell

  “Well, you don’t have to go there personally, of course. They do have a comm circuit listed here.” He scribbled the number on the back of a business card and handed it to Ai’go’r. “Here you are, sir. Best of luck!”

  Three days later Ai’go’r received a message from the Arcanium that his contract had been accepted and a Mage First Tier was on the way to investigate and, if needed, remove the curse. He breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps the end of the nightmare was in sight. He wondered idly if the rival whom he suspected of causing the curse to be pronounced had taken similar measures against anyone else.

  “You want me to go to Grosyem? I’ve never been there before, although I’ve read about it in tourist guides. Am I traveling by conventional means or translocation spell?” Prond was discussing his latest assignment over comm with Ballop’ril, who had gone into Tillimil to meet with several other high-level mages.

  “Translocation,” Ballop’ril answered. “The round trip would require in excess of a fortnight if you went by sea: and that’s only if you took direct ship, which would cost more than the contract will be worth. Look in the archives for translocation templates to Grosyem. You want to find one for Barra Tingo, ideally. Make certain it’s recent.”

  “Yes, Archmage. If I find one, shall I leave immediately?”

  “Yes. Don’t forget your ‘go’ bag. And while you’re there, please update the templates and perhaps even add one or two, if you get an opportunity.”

  When Prond was ready to leave, he had the Arcanium clerical staff contact Ai’go’r by comm with the coordinates at which Prond would appear, so he could meet him.

  “Good. That’s only half a kilometer from here. I can be there in a few minutes.”

  Prond checked and re-checked the contents of his ‘go’ bag. It contained not only his personal toiletry items for overnight stays, but also implements and raw materials for a variety of magical spells, talismans, phylacteries, and so on. Following schola policies, he cast a ‘great circle’ translocation spell that would return him to his precise starting point automatically after three days if he did not manually initiate the return sooner. This was for the mage’s own safety; if he were disabled by some mechanism he would teleport home without the need to take any action.

  Translocation was a curious experience. It essentially created a tunnel through The Slice connecting any two points on the material plane as though there was no physical space between them. The mage walked forward only two steps: one took him into the magical tunnel and the next to the destination. While the tunnel was located within The Slice, its walls were opaque from the point of view of the mage, so the optical sensation was a momentary blurring of vision as the scene transitioned from origin to destination. Taking only one step had no effect, because the tunnel itself was a quantum object that allowed the mage to be in superposition: in both places at once. The act of taking that second step caused the superpositioning to break down and transported the mage to the far end. If the second step was never taken, the mage remained at the original location.

  Prond appeared out of thin air, from Ai’go’r’s perspective, on a deserted strip of land about a hundred meters inland from a rock shoreline on the eastern outskirts of the sleepy tropical town of Barra Tingo. He nodded in satisfaction at the destination and made a note to verify this template as still valid.

  “Greetings, great mage. I am Ai’go’r Desnol. I presume you have come to help me with my problem?”

  Prond smiled at him. “Yes, Ai’go’r. My name is Prond, Mage of the First Tier, and I was dispatched by Archmage Ballop’ril, Master of the Schola Arcanium, to fulfill the contract you have entered into with us.”

  “Excellent, excellent,” effused Ai’go’r, rubbing his hands together. “Let us waste no time. I will take you to my warehouse, where I believe the curse to be laid.” They both got into the grocer’s tiny pram and chugged off. On the way Ai’go’r relayed all of the story he could to Prond.

  “So, you believe this rival grocer in Hividz paid someone to cast a curse?” Prond asked. “It is imperative that I find out more about the mage who did this, if indeed it is a curse. Not only is it a violation of the Oath of Ethical Conduct, the more I can discover about the casting mage, the easier it will be to undo the malediction.”

  “I’ll be happy to tell you everything I know about the grocer, although I have no knowledge whatever concerning the mage. His name is Riqpen and he is a gnarlignome; the only one of that race I’ve ever met in person, in fact. We’ve never been friends, per se, but up until recently we’ve at least been on professional terms with one another. I even helped him out once when a shipment of his got delayed by bad weather at sea. A few weeks ago—right out of the blue—he offered to buy me out. The price he named was fair, but I have no interest in selling right now. This is my livelihood and I enjoy it, to boot.”

  “What happened when you turned him down?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s why I think he’s involved. He started yelling at me and swearing by ‘Arfsweener’ that he would get even for this grave insult. I didn’t pay a lot of attention because I hear that kind of language fairly often out here. I think it’s the humidity.”

  “Did you insult him?”

  “Not from my point of view: I just declined to sell. It was pretty polite, actually. I wasn’t mad at him; I thought it was just a business proposition. He apparently didn’t take it that way.”

  As he stepped inside the grocer’s warehouse, Prond immediately detected a strong magical aura. He winced at the twisted, haphazard lines of arcane force sprayed around the room almost at random. Every piece of produce in the warehouse was serving as a self- perpetuating maledictive locus. This was a very sophisticated curse, not just the result of some minor talisman’s spell discharge, as he had expected to find.

  “You have a serious issue here,” Prond told the grocer, “This spell is very complex and took a long time to cast. It will be quite tedious to undo. If the mage casting it was paid at SagMag scale, it would have cost more to commission than this place is probably worth. I don’t understand the motivation here. Something’s going on beyond just the retaliation of a spurned business owner.”

  “You...you aren’t going to charge me that much to undo the curse, are you?” Ai’go’r was shaking a little as he asked.

  “No. We have a contracted price, and we will honor that contract, no matter how much work it takes on my part.”

  “That is noble of you and reflects well upon your schola,” Ai’go’r answered, wiping his brow in relief.

  Prond spent the rest of that day trying to map out the arcane force patterns in the affected area. It was hard work, because any movement of the produce changed everything around. Late that evening he sat in his room at the nearby inn, wondering if this task was not too much for him to handle. Ordinarily even a Third-Tier mage could remove a simple curse, but this one was anything but simple. It was a tangled mess, in fact. He fell asleep wondering why anyone would take this bizarre approach to casting a malediction.

  About the middle of the following day Ai’go’r came back from lunch with a copy of the local news journal. “Look at this!” he said to Prond, waving the folded papers under the mage’s nose. Prond read the story he pointed to, which detailed the sudden, grotesque destruction of a grocery in Rebrugge, Hividz by what the local EE were calling a ‘magical meltdown.’

  “That was Riqpen’s shop!” Ai’go’r exclaimed. “That was the gnarlignome who wanted to buy my business!”

  Prond sat down heavily, paper still in hand. This changed everything and nothing at all. If the curse were tied to that physical location, it would have been altered significantly by whatever happened in Rebrugge. Since nothing here seemed to have changed, the curse was free-range now: no longer anchored. That would make it much more difficult to remove, as there was no central feed point from The Slice. Prond was seriously beginning to wonder if he possessed the skill necessary to carry out this contract. He imagined how disappointe
d Ballop’ril would be if he came back after having failed, however, so he racked his brain for a plan.

  He decided that he needed to understand what had happened at Riqpen’s place first, as that might give him insight into the source and arcane mechanism for Ai’go’r’s curse. As he didn’t have a lot of time left, Prond contacted a mage local to Rebrugge and asked her to head over to the spot and set up for remote viewing so he could investigate without having a physical presence.

  The scene in Rebrugge was shocking. There was nothing left of Riqpen’s building: the very ground seemed to be disrupted. Riqpen himself had not been seen since the incident. A team of forensic mages was on the way from Coestra to investigate the cause of the disaster on behalf of EE. CoME had dispatched its own team of investigators, as well. Apparently whatever had taken place there generated harmonics on multiple arcane planes, even in The Slice itself; ripples had been detected all over the planet.

  There was not much in the way of usable evidence left, however, after what was already becoming known as the ‘Rebrugge Event.’Although the remote viewing connection was quite good, even the mage who set it up for Prond said that there was so much destruction and chaos all along the magical spectrum that it was impossible to make any sense of it. Prond did his best to sort through what little he did gather before thanking the Hividz mage profusely and closing the connection. He had just over a full day left to defuse the curse.

  Since he had no central energy sink from which to disconnect the magical flow that maintained the curse, the only thing Prond could think of to do was disentangle the individual streams one by one. He started at the front of the warehouse and worked his way back. As the layout was sorted by produce type and variety, he effectively ‘uncursed’ one vegetable at a time.

  As he was preparing to head back to the inn to sleep just after midnight, Prond made a disheartening discovery. Some, although not all, of the produce he had uncursed was reconnecting to the curse-generative magical energy streams. He enfolded them in a quick arcano-static field, but he knew it would not last forever. Something exceptionally odd was going on here. He could really use Ballop’ril’s advice right about now. He toyed with an Amulet of Summoning the archmage had given him for emergencies. This problem was vexing, but it was not an emergency, he decided at length. He sighed and headed off to bed.

  Prond slept for only four hours and was back dissolving the curse before daybreak. He had only six hours left before the translocation fail-safe activated and returned him to the Arcanium.

  The stasis spells were still holding; he hoped that once all of the primary energy streams had been disrupted those fields would no longer be necessary. He finished up dissociating the individual energy feeds a scant half-hour before his mandatory return kicked in.

  “The curse is lifted...for now,” he explained to Ai’go’r as he packed up his go bag. “I don’t fully understand the mechanism by which it was cast, so I can’t guarantee that it has been dispelled forever. I am quite certain that the master of the schola, Archmage Ballop’ril, will be keenly interested in your curse, which is in some way I do not comprehend connected with the strange goings-on over in Rebrugge. He and possibly I will most likely return soon.”

  “Thank you for your help, Mage. I hope I can get back to business now.”

  “I see no evidence of a curse in place at the moment. It is possible that something as simple as rearranging the shelves and bins will hinder its reinstatement. Again, without knowing the precise mechanism of casting I can’t be sure of that. Farewell.”

  With that Prond took a step forward and disappeared.

  Chapter the Twenty-Fourth

  in which Prond receives more education than he can bear

  As Prond had suspected, Ballop’ril was very interested in the Rebrugge Event and its relationship to Ai’go’r’s curse. He quizzed his apprentice about it for hours, drilling him for every conceivable detail. He seemed particularly intrigued by the persistence of the ‘feral’ energy streams.

  “I have seen references to this kind of behavior in ancient texts, but never any modern evidence of it. This is quite fascinating,” the archmage said.

  “What do you suppose is the underlying mechanism?” asked Prond.

  “I cannot be certain at this point, but from your account and that of the Rebrugge mage it may well have been tied to a forking in the Dark Energetic Continuum. While such events are probably fairly common in The Slice as a whole, it is so unfathomably enormous that the odds of such a thing occurring in any given location must be beyond astronomically remote. Once in a lifetime doesn’t even begin to describe it: more like once in the lifetime of a civilization.”

  “A forking of The Slice?”

  “Yes. It grew a new appendage, essentially. Doing so subtly redistributes both mass and energy throughout the unimaginable expanse of The Slice itself.”

  “Just how large is The Slice?”

  “No one really knows. Those who have transcended report that it traverses the very physical universe itself. If that is the case, there are no meaningful units with which to express its size. It may as well be infinite, for all it matters to our limited ability to comprehend such scales.”

  “How can an infinite object add to itself?” Prond surprised even himself with this query.

  Ballop’ril beamed at him. “Excellent question. I don’t know that forking actually adds to the volume of The Slice; it may well simply be a conformational adjustment, like a river changing course. What I do know is that it requires incredible energy to accomplish and the event has a profound effect on anything attached to The Slice at that location. We are actually fortunate that N’plork and the surrounding temperospatial fabric were not destroyed in toto as a byproduct.”

  Prond sat there in stunned silence for a moment, trying unsuccessfully not to think about this. Narrowly dodging planetary catastrophe always affected him that way. Ballop’ril seemed deep in thought; suddenly he brightened.

  “This is the perfect topic for your disquisition!”

  Prond stared at him, puzzled. “What ‘disquisition’ are you talking about, Master?”

  “Yours, my apprentice. You aren’t just training to be a magus. I would also like for you to attain the degree of Doctor of Apotropaic Arts. That will qualify you to teach at any universitas, in addition to opening your own schola. Finally, having a doctoral degree will greatly assist you when at last you come eligible for candidacy as an archmage.

  Prond didn’t know quite how to react to this. “Um, what else do I need to do for this doctoral degree?”

  “There is also a rather substantial academic component, but you are fulfilling most of that as you advance up the mage hierarchy. There are DAA’s who are not themselves mages and only do research into the magical arts, but I want to see you as a leader in both theory and practice. Remember the book that ‘called to you’ in my library? That text was written by one of the greatest of all scholar-mages. At that point I knew you were destined for that path.”

  Prond looked into space for a few moments, considering.

  “All right, Master. If that is the path I am to follow, then I will tread it gladly, though I know not the way.” He switched to the formal language of arcane discourse because he found it easier to express himself in that manner sometimes.

  “The way will be illumined even as you traverse it,” answered Ballop’ril, “For you are one of the rare ones who carry with them their own light—the flame of wisdom—and a hunger for learning I have not seen for many years. The first step in your path will be to study the Rebrugge Event in depth, until you become the world’s leading expert on it. It will be your life for a while.”

  Prond shrugged. “As you command. To do so I will need to spend some time in Rebrugge itself.”

  “Agreed. Pack for an extended voyage. I authorize you to use an open-ended translocation spell for this. Please report back no less often than every two days. Take copious notes and think hard on every tidbit you uncover.
Make no assumptions; take every finding for what it is. In this way you will see only what is really there to be seen.”

  “I will follow your teachings, Master.”

  “Above all else, do not pre-judge. There are motives and mechanisms at work in The Slice that we as mortal creatures cannot begin to comprehend. Take the facts for what they are and draw conclusions based on what you empirically know to be true, nothing else.” Ballop’ril fished around in the pocket of his robe. “Here, you’ll need this,” he said, handing him a small metal object on a fine silver chain. Prond was too preoccupied with preparations to ask him what it was for, exactly.

  Prond paused at the perimeter EE and CoME had established around the former grocer’s warehouse, now a shimmering, wavering hemisphere of surreality. Ballop’ril had arranged for Prond to have complete access to the site; the only person granted that freedom. Everyone else was to keep a healthy distance, which was not a restriction that would need active enforcement, as the very air here was disorienting and disturbed all the senses at once. It took Prond over an hour of meditation to discipline his mental resources sufficiently to venture into that whirling maw of unreason.

  He began his study at the outside, intending to peel the layers back one by one. His first encounter was with the interface between the phenomenon and the ‘normal’ universe: a wavering, multicolored barrier that resembled the skin of a sapon bubble. Prond reached out and touched it, ever so gently. It offered no resistance, but his finger and hand seemed to siphon off some of the radiance and he felt euphoria at the contact. He withdrew his hand but the radiance came with it, clinging to him like fine gossamer.

  He took detailed observations and recorded them all in the palm-sized weatherproof data journal magically linked to his mind so that it would record his thoughts when he phrased them properly to trigger the transfer. This saved time and ensured that the maximum data could be gathered even when hands were busy with other tasks.