Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2

by Robert G. Ferrell

  Once Prond had gathered all the useful information he could about the outer shell, he took a deep breath and pushed his way gently into the wavering barrier. The euphoria hit him full force, but he closed his eyes and willed it not to affect his detachment. After a long minute he acclimated and the euphoria moderated into a gentle buzzing.

  As he wormed his way further in, stopping every meter or so to take notes and reaffirm his bearings, Prond noticed that he could no longer see the surrounding structures of Rebrugge, although the swirling envelope had seemed translucent from the exterior. The entirety of here and now was defined by and encompassed within a sphere that seemed to travel with him, yet evolve as he moved nearer to what he reckoned to be the center of the swirling, pulsing energy sink.

  Prond was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain any sense of direction or even basic plumb/level proprioception. It was as though gravity, momentum, and inertia had taken on random values that changed with no logical pattern. He could not tell where he stood with respect to the ground; he could walk around a full circle in a plane perpendicular to where he estimated gravity should be. It was so disturbing that he wondered if he were going insane. He began to panic: he wanted out desperately but had no idea which way out was. Logic told him that any direction he went should take him out of the hemisphere—it had only seemed to be around ten meters in diameter—yet he walked in as straight a line as he could manage for a full five minutes and made no visible progress whatever.

  He stopped and collected his wits. Take the facts for what they are and draw conclusions based on what you empirically know to be true, Ballop’ril had warned him. Fine. What he empirically knew to be true was that he no longer occupied the same general coordinates in spacetime as his starting point. He also knew that wherever he was now, either the laws of motion and gravity were different here or his ability to perceive the order in them had been smashed against the rocks.

  Speaking of rocks, something very much like a boulder loomed up from the swirling fabric of situational reality on his right and Prond sat upon it to take some notes. At least his data journal seemed to be functioning normally. He tried to describe his surroundings, but irritatingly any one particular aspect he looked at cycled through multiple physical characteristics so quickly that he couldn’t find words to pin any of it down. He was trying to describe a rainbow to a creature born without eyes. Worse, the rainbow kept changing colors, many of them completely new to him.

  If this was indeed The Slice, he could not comprehend why any archmage would choose to transcend and live here forever. It was all far too confusing. Suddenly, as he stared off into the impossible convolutions of space and time that constantly enveloped him and had done so since before his personal eternity began, Prond became aware of a shape that was static. This seemed so wrong that he couldn’t wrap his brain around it at first.

  The shape was in no hurry to define itself, but finally it moved in a manner that brought it closer to him (he hesitated to say ‘it moved forward’ because that was far too determinative) and resolved into a strange smooth-skinned biped that looked oddly familiar. As this was the first geometric manifestation Prond had encountered in a while that he could come up with terms to describe, he scribbled furiously; it stood there patiently, waiting for him to finish.

  “I’m surprised you are still able to think clearly in this mess,” the figure said to him, finally. While Prond heard the words and could define each of them, they were not conveying any meaning. He puzzled over this new concept: that an obviously grammatically correct statement in a language he spoke employing words he knew well from a voice he recognized as such could create no cognitive impression. They just sat there, lumps in his cerebral cortex, and refused to form any recognizable mental pictures. He shook his head at the apparition helplessly.

  The unknown figure, or person, or whatever it was, took pity on Prond and led him gently away. The scenery was unchanged for a moment, but then, miraculously, collapsed back down to three recognizable spatial dimensions with at least nominally consistent physical laws governing them. Prond stood there blinking, trying to get to grips with objective normality, which now seemed grossly foreign and incomprehensible.

  As manageable cognition seeped back in, Prond looked around and noticed that, while height, width, and depth seemed to have returned to their accustomed duties, the surroundings to which they applied were no longer at all sane. Soaring spires, floating bags with tendrils trailing from them;seemingly solid physical structures that flowed and bent with an otherwise undetectable wind...his day was just getting odder and odder. The figure, which had finished resolving itself, was quite definitely related to that transcendent mage who had helped them out in Pyfox’s cavern and the Kopyrewt. At least, he had the same creepy smooth skin and slender build, although he seemed more substantial. Prond looked at him questioningly.

  “Mage of the First Tier?” the figure said in response, “I would have expected someone a little more advanced to be investigating this, to be honest. Still, it is good experience for you. A question, then: do you know where you are?”

  Prond turned in a complete circle, seeing nothing whatever during that circuit that he had ever seen before. He gave the only answer that made any sense to him. “The Slice?”

  Oloi, for it was he, smiled approvingly. “Yes, indeed. Well done. Someone on the material plane punched a hole in The Slice. Not a wise thing to do; such ruptures usually end up taking a parsec or so of local spacetime with them. Why, exactly, are you here?”

  Prond still wasn’t feeling very polysyllabic. “Sent to take notes.” He held up his data journal, “For DAA,” he added by way of explication.

  “Ah, academic degree. Very salutary. I will presume Ballop’ril is the master of your schola. Virtually no one else would send an MFT to investigate an n-dimensional rift.”

  Prond nodded in the affirmative.

  “So,” Oloi continued, “How are you meant to get back to N’plork?”

  Prond gave him the most completely blank look in his repertoire.

  “Oh, dear. Did Ballop’ril not give you an interdimensional translocation enchantment?”

  Prond thought about this and suddenly remembered the necklace the archmage had handed him. He extracted it from his pocket.

  “Ah, there it is,” said Oloi, beaming, “Capital. You don’t have to use it immediately, but I would not wait more than a half-day. The longer you are here, the more your body will adjust to The Slice. If you wait too long, you will not be able to return to Primus.

  You have not yet the skill to transcend, so you will in effect starve to death, as there is nothing here to eat but manna, which you cannot digest in biological form.”

  Prond turned a little lighter shade of blue-green. “Thank you. Can you help me with ‘why’?”

  “I will do what I can for you. I first noticed what we call a ‘deep ripple’—a disturbance in the dark energy fabric, with resonances, originating outside this plane—about what from your perspective would have been two hours or so before the ‘puncture’ took place. I was in this area quite by happenstance or I wouldn’t have known about the rift until it was fully formed, at which point every sentient creature within this sector knew due to the dramatic effect it had on local geometry. The ripple was persistent and steadily increasing in amplitude; I knew that was going to lead to a traumatic event so I dampened it as well as I could, but the energy behind the disturbance was too great and it overcame my efforts after a while. When the rift occurred I was wise enough not to be here; it took quite a bit of the landscape down, including a couple of pinnacles I found rather attractive. Pity. Still, The Slice is over twelve billion light years long, not to mention self-healing, so it doesn’t really make any difference in the grander scheme.”

  “So,” Prond replied, having finally rediscovered the compound speech centers in his brain, “What exactly happened here? I mean, I understand that someone created a rift and that said rift required enormous energy, bu
t who could do that and where did the energy come from?”

  “Excellent questions, both. The energy apparently came from another part of The Slice itself, although the opposite or positive energetic component would have been necessary to effect a rip from Primus to here, rather than vice-versa. As to who, that one has me stumped. Even Ballop’ril would not be able to create a rift of this magnitude without having devoted the last ten or fifteen years exclusively to the project. I am forced to consider the possibility, however remote, that this may be a spontaneous conformational correction initiated by The Slice, itself.”

  “Ballop’ril called it a ‘forking.’”

  Oloi looked surprised. “Really? A forking? I suppose that’s possible. That in itself is a form of adjustment, but generally forkings are associated with a pool of manna so dense that it collapses in on itself and The Slice has to provide an outlet for the resulting energy burst. For a manna pool of that density to form spontaneously is almost unheard of.”

  “There was a correlating event on N’plork,” Prond said, “Whether it was connected or not, I don’t know, but I was fulfilling a contract with our Arcanium to remove a curse. Rather than a curse on a particular person or place, every individual object—a grocer’s produce, in this case—in the affected warehouse had its own unique and seemingly separate energy flow. No sooner would I shut off one than it regenerated along a slightly offset path. I finally had to lock each individual stream down with a separate stasis field, Took hours.”

  “Odd. Not a very traditional way to cast a curse. Why do you think it might be connected to the forking?”

  “Because the owner of the warehouse that was destroyed on N’plork when the rift took place was the prime suspect for the curse’s origin. He was upset about a failed business deal. Once the rift took place my stasis fields suddenly became stable and the maledictive energy streams dissipated.”

  “Was the suspect a mage?”

  “Not as far as I know. He was just another grocer. A gnarlignome, my client said.”

  Oloi was about to reply but paused in mid-breath. “A gnarlignome?”

  “Yes. He wanted to buy our client’s business and did not take ‘no’ very well. Swore revenge for the ‘insult.’”

  “Did he, by any chance, mention Arfsweener?”

  “Yes! That was the name I was told he swore by, in fact. Who, or what, is that?”

  Oloi sighed.“Something of an involved story. I’ll give you the extremely condensed version; please don’t interrupt as you do not have much time left here.” Prond nodded.

  “The planet on which I was born is not embedded in The Slice. Consequently, magic does not exist there. I was once an interstellar explorer: I served aboard a starship that traveled between star systems using a wormhole generator to warp the fabric of spacetime so that such voyages could be made in reasonable time frames from crew perspective. A computing device on board kept track of how much time would have passed for people outside the wormhole envelope and we went ‘back in time,’ as it were, at the end of each voyage to render that perceived interval reasonable.

  We didn’t know about the dark energy continuum—The Slice—at first. It wasn’t until we visited a planet embedded in it that had sentient life who were magic-literate that we discovered it for ourselves. Most of the crew were afraid of mages, as magic seemed to contradict the laws of physics as we knew them. I was fascinated by it: so fascinated, in fact, that I remained behind when the starship left that planet and studied under one of their archmages.

  On that same planet was an archmage named Avzwenr who had, I must say, more talent for magic than anyone else I have met. He was as far advanced above the usual archmage as archmage is above mage-in-training. Unfortunately, his ego was equally well- developed; he began to think of himself as some form of divinity. I personally believe that his repeated voyages into The Slice damaged his brain, leading to a form of insanity. Whatever the cause, he began to conduct more and more bizarre experiments, eventually leading to the modification of his own life-form starting with an intelligent but sub-sentient primate found in the tropical jungles of that planet. He called the creature a szpli-hzk, which would translate into Goblish roughly as short servant. He made another one, a female, and managed to get them to breed. Eventually he had a whole colony of the things going. Worse, he had managed to instill them with enough intelligence to regard him as their creator, or deity.

  I was an archmage myself by this point; the other archmages and I decided that Avzwenr had gone too far and was now a danger to both society and himself. We banded together and prepared a containment spell over a period of about a year, working around the clock in shifts. In secret we surrounded Avzwenr’s compound and released the enchantment. It locked Avzwenr and his buildings in a temporal stasis that slowed time relative to the external environment, to the point that he would be effectively trapped inside for as long as the planet existed.

  We did not understand just how far advanced in the magical arts Avzwenr had truly become, unfortunately. While he could not override our combined stasis field, he fed its energy back in upon itself in a closed loop until the enchantment become energetically unstable and tore a hole in The Slice similar to the rift you experienced. That rift dispersed the contents of the stasis field in random directions along the path of The Slice. At least one of the szpli-hzk ended up on N’plork, where it interbred with gnomes or possibly dwarves and was apparently able to produce fertile offspring. That population experienced reproductive isolation, probably because other gnomes regarded them as ugly and rather primitive, so eventually an entirely new inbred race developed who became known as gnarlignomes by one of several putative mechanisms. They had what you might term a ‘genetic memory’ of Avzwenr, which got corrupted to Arfsweener, now the chief god in the gnarlignome pantheon.”

  “Intriguing,” said Prond after a few moments’ contemplation. “But how is Arfsweener connected to the Rebrugge rift?”

  “This is only a theory, but the initial rift Avzwenr caused when he set up the feedback loop seems to have spawned a very large number of sympathetic oscillations along the central energy conduit of The Slice, and those oscillations are somehow tied inextricably to Avzwenr. I strongly suspect that he intentionally used his own name as the invocation trigger, which would be entirely in keeping with his inflated sense of self-importance. Whenever anyone located on a planet embedded in The Slice uses that name, or a close approximation, in an invocative manner, there is a small but measureable chance that it will induce one of these oscillations. I believe that is what transpired here.”

  Prond shook his head. “I would never have figured that out, even if I worked on this problem for a thousand years. How do I write this up as a disquisition paper? Can I relate your theory— giving you credit for it, of course?”

  “Yes. If you need more detail, I wrote a monograph on the subject that you can probably find in Ballop’ril’s library. It’s titled Sympathetic Oscillations in Feedback-Induced Rifting. I’m almost certain I gave Ballop’ril a copy. If not, he knows how to contact me. You need to be on your way. I can see subtle signs of acclimatization in your aura. Goodbye, and best of luck in your studies.”

  Prond smiled and waved farewell as he activated the translocation talisman. “Thank you, archmage!” he yelled as The Slice faded into the common room of the Arcanium.

  Ballop’ril was there waiting for him. He examined Prond’s aura and smiled warmly.

  “You’ve been in The Slice! I’m guessing Oloi was involved. Did you learn anything?”

  Prond sat down heavily in one of the overstuffed chairs. “More than my brain can comfortably hold.”

  Chapter the Twenty-Fifth

  in which a titan nation is born, with attendant labor pains

  The Elder Council meeting was set to begin in ten minutes. Tartag, as Odinial, was the officiator, but he relied on two Keepers of Order, known as the Hu and Mu, to help him run the meetings smoothly. This promised to be a pivotal assembly,
because the principal item on the docket was whether to authorize issuance of the formal Petition for Sovereign Status. This would require a vote among the current residents of Hellehoell, the results of which must be eighty percent in favor of independence or greater for the Petition to be granted by the Tragacanthan Royal Government per His Majesty Tragacanth’s directive.

  While Tartag was confident the titans were fully capable of self-rule, he was worried that the more militant contingent, known as the Xarkas, would vote against the Petition merely because they wanted to gain independence by military means. He saw this as absurd, since the Tragacanthans were willing to grant them sovereign status within the framework of their own laws: peacefully and with no strings attached. No one would have to die, and there would be an immediate policy infrastructure in place for trade relations, not only with Tragacanth but its allies worldwide. He could not allow the Xarkas to hold sway, for the good of all titans.

  The chief instigator of the Xarkas was a bitter old rock titan named Luglassa, whom everyone simply called “Lug.” Lug had come to Hellehoell after a difficult and strife-filled life in a mountain village on the border of Lardonica and Ovinis. He trusted no one: even fellow titans were frequently under suspicion. His only means of interaction with other races had been violence; for that reason he was a walking mass of scars and deformations. He was in all likelihood also single-handedly responsible for at least some of the negative reputation of titans in folk legend. He had a score of old grudges to settle and he wanted to settle them by winning a decisive victory over the goblins of Tragacanth. Tartag and others had tried to convince him that they could never prevail in such a battle, but they made little progress against his closed mind.

  Tartag called the meeting to order and scanned the council chambers. It was standing room only, with titans visible down the hallway as far as the eye could see and many, many more watching via closed-circuit viewscreens. This was an historic moment for all titans. Since the first call had gone out, over one hundred thousand titans had flocked to the massive underground complex, more than fifty percent of which was now restored and in use. Titan society had not been so cohesive and unified in two millennia. Well, unified except for the Xarkas.