“Hard for Drin to understand, but sound like she keep repeating some kind of magical ward. Something about ‘keep us safe from giants in the mountains.’”
“It’s a prayer,” said Lom, with sudden recognition. “The Prayer for Protection from the Rock Titans. My mother used to have it hanging on the wall when I was a whelp. If I remember aright, it goes like this:
Mighty spirits, hear my prayer,
You who dwell in realms of air:
From the mountains to the sea;
From titans cruel deliver me.
With sinewed arms, with trunk and stone,
They rend the world, tear flesh from bone.
So hear my plea with each new day,
Pray, keep those titans far away.
“Yah,” agreed Drin, “That sound like what she saying.”
“Rock Titans?” asked Selpla, “I thought they were extinct or something.”
“Maybe. I’ve never seen one, at least. My mother’s folks were quite nervous about them, though. I grew up hearing stories of the terrible destruction they were capable of inflicting when they were on a rampage about something. We had to leave them offerings at the equinoxes every year to appease their wrath. Must have worked, ‘cause, as I said, I never saw one.”
“What kind of offerings?” Prond inquired.
“Meat pies, mostly. Big ones. And a couple jugs of leggen nut razzle, although I realized late in childhood that these were more for my uncle Ikorn than the titans,” Lom chuckled. “One spring I caught him up on the hill where we left the offerings, wandering around in his skivvies. He had one of the jugs in his hand; the other one was lying empty on the ground. He made me promise never to tell mother or aunt Follia about it. I did get a new pro kickball out of the deal, though.”
Selpla looked thoughtful, “Do you think rock titans could have been responsible for this mess?”
Lom surveyed the scene. “I doubt it. First of all, no footprints. Second, spark carefully at the air. There’s still a faint magical aura here. Titans are decidedly non-magical creatures. They’re just huge and brutal. Whoever did this used magic, and a lot of it, by the look of things.”
“There can’t be many mages in Tragacanth powerful enough to wreak this kind of havoc,” Selpla replied, crossing her arms, “I seriously doubt the Sutha Magineer threw a temper tantrum here...but if not him, who?”
“Equally puzzling,” added Prond, “Is why?”
They stood there for a further minute. Finally Selpla shrugged and shouldered her bag. “I guess the only way we get any answers is to follow the trail.”
“Just a minute, intrepid newshound,” said Prond, “We’re supposed to be waiting to be rescued by Kurg, remember? If we get so far from the road that he can’t find us, there’ll be smek flying every which way.”
“Oh, come on, Prond, it’s a story. You know Kurg will always forgive anything anyone does, so long as a good story comes out of it.” Selpa turned her lower lip down in a rather unconvincing pout. Prond rolled his eyes and stuck out his tongue in response. She giggled.
“Yeah,” Lom added, “besides, it could be hours before Kurg finally hauls his hindquarters down here to pick us up. We could probably be back before he even shows.”
Selpla knew that these were weak arguments, but her urge to sniff out a scoop lent them considerably more credence then they would have garnered otherwise. “Right you are,” she agreed, throwing prudence to the wind, “So let’s move out.”
Prond still seemed a little reluctant. Selpla turned to him.
“If you’re that worried about it, why don’t you hang here and wait for Kurg? We can manage without you for this trip. We’ll meet you back here in a couple of hours.” She gestured to the others, “Come on troops, let’s march.”
Prond started to protest, but then thought better of it. “Fine,” he said, plopping himself down on a stone mileage marker that looked like it would make a decent stool, “Don’t get yourselves lost.”
Selpla held up his comm. “I still have this,” she said, waving it in the air.
Prond smirked, but made no reply. They were already too far down the trail to hear him if he had. The rain picked up again, so Prond pulled the hood of his overjack over his face as far as it would go and stared at the deluge. Better to be sitting here than stomping around out there in the mud with Selpla the soggy newscaster. He whistled softly, watching a variety of waterlogged wildlife slosh about their daily business.
After about half a kilometer Selpla called her little party to a halt. She pointed to the ground in front of them. “What are those holes all about?”
The path ahead was riddled with pits maybe half a meter in diameter, all, naturally, filled with water. They were superimposed over the debris trail left by the retreating mountain, so presumably had been formed since its passage.
“Looks like a print from the world’s largest cleated shoe,” Lom observed.
“Someone or something had to be expending a lot of energy to get all these dug since the mountain passed through. Wonder what for?”
As they stood there puzzling, Drin suddenly spoke.
“Holes getting bigger.”
Selpla was momentarily startled. She had forgotten the little guy was there again.
The holes were, in fact, growing. Each had widened by about ten percent of its diameter in the minute or so since Selpla and her crew first spotted them. They seemed to be getting deeper, too; water busily swirled down into the cavities with an audible sucking sound.
Selpla suddenly yelped as her right foot slid forward and down a few centimeters.
“They’re not only getting bigger, they’re increasing in number,” said Lom.
“Yeah, I noticed that,” replied Selpla, shaking the mud out of her shoe.
“I’d venture to guess that they’re sinkholes,” Lom added after a moment’s reflection, “Flooding and the vibrations from the mountain’s passage must have dissolved the interstitial carbonates in the bedrock.”
Selpla looked at him and frowned. “Do you have any idea what you just said?”
He bit his lip. “No, not really. I think I must have read that somewhere.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want to think you’d suddenly gone all smartsy on me.”
Drin abruptly backed up and started on a wide circling path to the right. Selpla and Lom watched him for a couple of seconds, until they realized the wisdom of what he was doing and followed suit. He was skirting the geologically unstable area altogether rather than trying to traverse it, as had been their original intention. They’d gone no more than ten or fifteen meters beyond it when they heard a sudden roar of water and the crunching of a large volume of collapsing rock. Water rushed past their feet on its way into the gaping maw where they’d been standing only moments before. The return path to Prond and the highway now ran smack through a lake.
Lom chuckled, “Looks like a new swimmin’ hole coming in.”
“This whole place is a swimming hole,” Selpla snorted, “C’mon, let’s keep moving.”
They sloshed in silence for a few moments.
“Given any thought to how we get back to Prond now?” asked Lom, making his way past what looked like a tree stump with gently waving tentacles.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“If it hasn’t been washed out.”
Drin, who had been taking point about twenty meters in advance of the other two, came back and gave his report.
“There is bridge up ahead.”
Selpla looked smug. “See, what did I tell you?”
Lom put his hands on his hips and frowned. “A bridge? Over what?”
“Water,” replied Drin, simply.
“Well, duh. I mean what was there before the flood?”
“Water. Else, why build bridge?”
“Who knows why people build bridges? There could be a ravine, or an endangered orchid, or even a pork barrel contract between a local administrator and his bridge-building
brother-in-law,” expounded Lom, pausing to shake his head to dislodge an accumulation of precipitation. He managed to nail Selpla with the effluvia. She slapped him on the occipital ridge.
“Watch where you sling that stuff, smekking surfdiver.”
“Oh, like it really matters in this smekking deluge.”
“It matters to me.” She shot him a warning look.
“Sorry, Your Highness,” Lom replied, genuflecting broadly. “I’ll endeavor in the future to keep my personal runoff from impacting the Royal Person.”
“See that you do, bloody peasant.”
Their fabulously clever repartee was interrupted by the decidedly odd sight of Drin hopping about wildly, as though the ground beneath him had suddenly grown red hot. Of course, if it had, the half-meter of water covering it would be steaming, so that obviously wasn’t the case. They watched him leap and gyrate for a few moments, torn between compassion and entertainment. Selpla looked down into the turbulent water near Drin’s legs and noticed dark shapes darting here and there.
“What are those things?” she asked, pointing.
Drin’s trajectory took him near them at this juncture. “Needlefish,” he explained, hopping away again.
His companions’ eyes got wide. “Needlefish!” they both exclaimed in unison, and joined Drin in hopping madly about. “I thought,” Selpla gasped as she jumped frantically, “That needlefish only lived in the (ouch) Molkpot river.”
“Drin,” Lom asked, matter-of-factly, “You said there was a (ow) bridge up ahead. Did it have a sign on it?”
“Ya. Two.”
“What (ow) did they (ouch) say?”
“One say, Molkpot River, No Swimming. Other one say, Danger! River Over Banks! Keep Away!”
“Aaggh!” replied Selpla, “Why the smek didn’t you tell us?”
Drin looked at her and shrugged. “Didn’t ask.”
Selpla, Lom, and Drin eventually managed to thrash and kick their way to a small sandbar in the middle of the flooded river, but not without quite a collection of lacerations from the fish and bruises from submerged stones. They sat on a fallen tree breathing hard and rubbing their mangled feet. Lom was scanning the middle distance looking for some way back up to the road (he’d privately decided it was time to abandon the moving mountain story before it killed them) when something strange floating in the water caught his eye. It was a large, thin, vaguely circular mat or raft of rust-red, heading slowly but deliberately in their direction.
He stared at it for some time, trying to figure out if it was vegetation, or some sort of oil slick, or just what it was. Eventually the floating mat touched the small island where they sat and began to disintegrate. More accurately, the tiny creatures of which it had been composed started swarming over the sand and up the bark of the tree towards them. Suddenly it hit him what he was witnessing: the landing of a raft of voracious pincer ants, driven from their colossal nest by the rains.
Lom yelped and splashed back into the water, where he was immediately set upon by the circling needlefish. The others were momentarily confused by his apparent loss of sanity, but soon realized the reason for it and followed suit as the powerful ants descended on them by the thousands.
Caught between needles and pincers, their only option was to flee to high ground, the nearest example of which was about fifty meters to the southwest. They leapt, kicked, and stumbled their way across the expanse of water, avoiding a couple more rafts of ants along the way. Finally they flopped weakly on the far shore, too exhausted from their ordeal to care that they were now mired up to their elbows in dark blue muck.
Chapter Twelve:
Chosen
Tol concluded that he must be dreaming. It was the only explanation, unless he was deceased, but he didn’t feel deceased. What did being deceased feel like, anyway? He’d always assumed it didn’t feel like much of anything. He definitely felt something, so he must not be deceased. He wasn’t in a place that seemed to be adhering to the natural laws he’d come to know and respect, however, so he had to be dreaming. Odd. He didn’t remember ever having realized he was dreaming before while he was doing it. You’re never too old for a new experience, he decided. Or did he dream that, too?
He was in a sort of stadium or arena, surrounded by sloping white walls and a large number of floating opalescent orbs of different diameters. Whoa. What had he been drinking or smoking? Whatever it was, he hoped there was some more of it. He hadn’t had a dream like this since he was a rowdy teenager smoking or swallowing just about anything passed to him.
He rested there on some species of rather comfortable fluffy cushion pad and stared at the orbs. They were moving lazily about, occasionally sending bluish streamers to one or more companions. He felt no urge to stir, not even to go to the bathroom. That tore it: he never woke up without having to go to the bathroom. This was, unequivocally and without any doubt, a dream.
After a while, as Tol slipped in and out of what he could only assume was some kind of meta-doze, one of the orbs touched down next to him and morphed into a vertical haze. Tol gawked at it dazedly and watched it resolve into a short, thin, blue-skinned creature. Obviously another product of his drug-enhanced imagination...but it did look a little familiar. It reached out a four-fingered hand and touched Tol on the forehead. He jerked involuntarily—it felt like he’d been suddenly encased in warm gelatin. Actually, it was a pretty pleasant sensation, once he got used to it. If he weren’t already asleep, it just might lull him into taking a little nap...
This time the walls were dirty gray. They went straight up to meet a decidedly undecorative ceiling whose little acoustic-dampening bumps were detaching here and there, giving it a scabrous appearance. The sheets smelled like disinfectant with just the merest soupçon of mildew. A real comedown after his hoity-toity dream, but at least he knew where he was. The Edict Enforcement Infirmary in Sebacea was a drab little building that all district EE cops grew to know intimately over the course of their careers.
An infirmary tech walked into the room just then. “Welcome back to land of the conscious, officer Tol-u-ol. Hope you had a pleasant outing.”
Tol grunted, “Any chance of getting something to eat in this dive?”
“Well. You seem to be recovering nicely from your ordeal. Let me see if I can rustle up some victuals for you.”
“Wait,” Tol called, shading his still-dilated pupils from the harsh infirmary lights, “How long have I been...out?”
“Let’s see,” replied the tech, looking at a clipboard, “says here you were brought in from a GRUC tunnel on the 13th. That would be three days ago. We thought you were a goner for a while—you’d lost a lot of blood. Last night, though, you took a sudden turn for the better and now here you are, rosy-cheeked and ready to party. Congratulations, officer. You’re one tough so-and-so.”
Tol grunted again, and the tech left the room. He could still see the image of the alfar in his mind’s eye as clearly as he did in the dream...or, whatever it was. He was grateful to whoever facilitated his rapid recovery, regardless of whether or not they were real. Reality wasn’t anything to drop your pants and celebrate most of the time, anyway.
He took a little survey of his parts. Everything seemed to be working. A bit of soreness here and there, but nothing he hadn’t experienced after a moderately successful night at the pub. He took a deep breath and sat up. Felt pretty good. He rolled his legs over the side of the bed. Some slight dizziness, but he could handle it. Now for the big one. He slid his butt ever so gently off the bed and stood up.
Admittedly, if the bed hadn’t been there to lean on, things might have gotten ugly, but as it was he managed to stand on his own until the surprised tech came back with his soup and crackers. It did feel really good to lie back down, though.
They kept Tol in the infirmary for another 48 hours, just to be safe. Everyone agreed his recovery from such a beating was nothing short of miraculous. “One might even be tempted to say magical,” said the surgeon who released him.<
br />
“OK, ya found me out fair and square, sawbones: I’m an archmage in disguise. For my next trick, I’m going to walk down the street and turn into a pub.”
The surgeon smiled. “Lay off the razzle for a while, Tol. No point in pressing your luck.”
“What good is luck,” Tol replied, walking away and waving, “If you can’t press it now and then?”
Truth be told, he didn’t feel nearly as fit ‘n’ chipper as he wanted the infirmary staff to believe. Things were sore; muscles and tendons throbbed here and there. He had a little difficulty walking straight, too, which he took enormous pains to hide from onlookers. The staff weren’t fooled in the least, of course. They saw cops come and go every day, and this was more or less the way all of them acted. The tough guy image was very important to EE officers, because it gave them an edge on the streets and in interactions with the criminal element. Plus, they just liked to think they were made of sterner stuff than the average jlok.
Once out of sight of the infirmary, Tol leaned against the side of a building. He was sweating from the strain of trying to look healthy. He closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath, and hobbled onward. The delicate aroma of deep-fried wrat fritters assailed his nostrils and reminded him that he was hungry. He sniffed around for the source of the odor and was pleasantly surprised to discover that it came from a pub—one he’d never seen before, to boot. He could have sworn there was a vacant lot here just last week. No matter. He loved exploring new pubs. Things were definitely looking up.
The pub’s decor was, um, different. The ceiling was hard to make out, but what little Tol could resolve seemed to suggest swirling multicolored gas with stars mixed in here and there for good measure. The barmaids were of some weird smooth-skinned race he didn’t recognize. Must be foreigners. As long as they had wrats and razzle, he didn’t really care if they came from another galaxy. Immigration wasn’t his beat.
Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 Page 14