Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 (25 page)

“And us? What will become of us?”

“You will revert to your base forms during the transfer. I will decide how you will appear when we reach our new home.”

“Then we are ready, master.”

Phaeon stretched out his hands, palms up and curled inward. He brought them slowly together. When the palms touched there was a blinding flash of light and a noise like a huge space rock hurtling through the atmosphere. When the light faded, Phaeon, the sentient deepdrakes, and the lush appointments were all gone. Only a simple, rough-hewn cave remained.

A starship approaching N’plork at that moment would have seen a ball of pure energy launch from a spot directly over Hellehoell and speed away, disappearing rapidly into the inky blackness of interstellar space. There wasn’t any such ship, in fact, so no one off- planet witnessed Phaeon Timeskin, one of the oldest intelligences in this current multiverse, as he sought out a new world far from the influence of magic to call home.

Tol sat in his fancy-schmancy office in Justice Hall and watched the reports of fierce fighting in Ferroc Norda between the Civil Defense troops and what he recognized as mutated deepdrakes, although the media insisted on calling them ‘dragons.’ He wondered what sort of event could have prompted the mutations. The press seemed to think that the titans were somehow to blame, but Tol couldn’t decide if that was based on a kernel of truth or just a manifestation of latent xenophobia. It was easy to fear the titans, especially with generations of rumors and legends surrounding them. Tol steadfastly refused to allow himself to be led down this toxic path. The titans he’d met had been intelligent, rational, and courteous. He was going to regard all titans that way unless he had good cause to change.

There was another item that caught his eye: a large, intense fireball of some sort was launched from a mountainside not far from the epicenter of the fighting near the entrance to the titan enclave of Hellehoell. It headed up rapidly and apparently was able to make escape velocity. Investigators could find no trace of the launch site, based on a reverse calculation of its trajectory. No burned vegetation, no scorch marks, no disturbed soil. The verdict? Magic. Convenient, all-encompassing, and despite that very probably accurate in this instance.

A high-pitched bell rang three times on the other side of his office: secure message coming in. He rolled over in his fancy high- backed office chair and stared at the communiqué. It made him frown in consternation:

From: Aspet I, King of Tragacanth

To: Sir Tol-u-ol of Sebacea, Special Investigator, Royal EE Branch

Assignment:

Capture or neutralize Esfina Frem. Last known location: Goblinopolis, but intelligence suggests she may have returned to Solemadrina. She is wanted for conspiracy to commit murder of a member of the Royal Family and state espionage. This is an
Alpha Priority/Royal Family-only
matter. You are authorized whatever funds and equipment you deem necessary to carry out the mission. You will report directly to me. A courier pouch will arrive with diplomatic credentials so that you may travel internationally under guise of diplomatic service. Remember that any false steps while deployed may result in an ugly international incident. Stay smart and be safe.

--message ends--

Capture or neutralize
. That was unusual language, coming from Aspet. He guessed the king didn’t want to bring himself to order Tol directly to off someone if need be. They’d known all along that this Frem was involved up to her eye ridges in the plot against Boogla; why the sudden urgency to have her ‘neutralized?’ Though Tol didn’t relish the role of King’s Assassin, he was challenged by the whole cloak and dagger thing. Very different from the overt approach he’d almost always taken as a street cop.

As Tol considered his brother’s full intent, it suddenly hit him that he was automatically thinking of Aspet as his supervisor—and therefore as king—for the first time. It was an odd sort of realization, like finding out that the hat you had been wearing for many years was actually intended as a boot or an apron.

That surreal detour was mercifully brief and soon he was mentally back on mission. Tracking someone within Tragacanthan jurisdiction and outside those boundaries were two decidedly different propositions, it seemed to Tol. He really didn’t know much of anything about international espionage; he was just a simple city beat cop with a fancy title. He decided to drop in on an old partner who had left the force years ago to work for the Tragacanthan squad of the Trans-national Edict Enforcement Cooperative, or TEEC. If anyone knew about this stuff, he should.

Anbat Yemmilla, or Yemmy, was ancient, and even more grizzled than Tol. He glanced up when Tol walked into his office and grunted. “Heya, youngster. Heard you went and got yourself knighted. Good work, I guess.”

Tol shrugged. “Hi, Yemmy. It is what it is. I need some advice.”

“Pull up a chair. What’s going down?”

Tol related a condensed version of events leading up to this visit, carefully circumnavigating the nature of his orders regarding the perpetrator. “So,” he finished up, “I need some tutoring on how to conduct, um, ‘EE operations’ OTRAG.”

Yemmy leaned back, put his feet up on his desk, and regarded his former partner for a moment before replying.

“Do it quietly, in a private place, then leave the body in a position where detection of the event will be put off as long as possible. Alternatively, use a delayed-effect method like toxins.”

Tol was momentarily taken aback by the old goblin’s candor and the ease with which he deduced Tol’s true mission, but then grinned. “So, you got any? Toxins, I mean.”

“Smek, no. Those substances are illegal to possess by international treaty. I do have some small vials of liquid intended for an entirely different purpose that could, in a pinch, be repurposed by a clever and enterprising special investigator on an official mission, though.” He handed a small leather pouch with six glass bottles in it to Tol. “Inside is a short description of each and its most effective route of application. Be careful: as with all other weapons, these can’t tell the difference between the good guys and the bad.”

Tol was thanking him when he suddenly stopped at looked at Yemmy suspiciously. “How is it you come to have these…
substances
all packed up and ready to go?”

“TEEC trains with them fairly regularly. We conducted a live exercise less than a fortnight ago and this kit is leftover from that. I honestly don’t know if any of these has ever been put to use in the field by an authorized EE agent, however. Not many have been so authorized. I do know that all of these substances have been used to kill multiple people over the years. They exhibit proven lethality for all races.”

“Comes with an instruction manual, eh? How handy.”

“Of sorts, yes. Nothing in depth, but enough to get the job done.”

Tol looked at the thin booklet for a moment before sliding it back into the pouch.

“Alrighty, then. I guess I have my weapon of choice. Now I just have to work out how to justify from a moral standpoint knocking off an unarmed, unresisting person.”

“Authority to eliminate a civilian enemy of Tragacanth can come only from the king himself. He must have told you why this person warranted such action.”

“Yeah, I suppose he did. I don’t think I’m going to get comfortable with this sort of stuff any time soon,” Tol sighed.

“Which is exactly why he chose you for the mission. Those who become comfortable with killing are no longer trustworthy to kill only when ordered. Killing a sentient being should be repugnant and difficult, no matter their crimes.”

Tol left Yemmy’s office with lethal weapons and words of wisdom. Now if he could just get over his misgivings concerning the mission itself. He had seen firsthand the aftermath of the attempt on Boogla’s life and he understood why Aspet wanted the mastermind eliminated, but there was more to this than simple justice: Aspet really wanted vengeance. As king, however, he was by the rules of their society within his rights to seek it. Tol had one of those dumbstruck moments when it sank in that his little brother, his ‘Pet,’ could legally order a foreign national assassinated. He scratched his neck beneath the left ear the way he always did when the world was hard to understand and grunted at the wonder of it all.

After verifying that Frem had not been seen in Goblinopolis since the attack on the Royal Palace, Tol set sail once more for Solemadrina.This time, however, he booked a first-class cabin aboard a sleek, comfortable passenger vessel, the
Avvolli
. He’d always wanted to travel in style—and posing as a wealthy entrepreneur was a decent cover. He’d decided, rather than a diplomat, to play the role of an agricultural supplies broker. He was no expert at either, but his years of experience in the feed store as a youngster at least taught him the required lingo for the latter.

They left from the other side of Tragacanth this time, as the Arctal Current was flowing the correct way to whisk them from Lumbos to Aspolia in only six days, rather than the typical eight to ten. Not that transit time was any issue for Tol. He suspected the passenger line increased their profits a bit by not having to provide meals and services for those extra days, as the ticket cost the same no matter how long it ended up taking to get there.

As this was a rather expensive cruise, the line management felt it appropriate to provide entertainment beyond the usual musical shows, hammer-string lyre bars, and water sports. The third day out that entertainment centered around a demonstration on the Solare deck by the eccentric gnome inventor of a crazy new flying contraption.

People had taken cracks at practical flying machines for years, but none of them made much progress. There was the kobold over in Hividz who constructed this ten meter-wide framework covered in light fabric that could soar reasonably well when launched from a cliff, but on the third such attempt a microburst slammed him and it into the ground so hard that both were thoroughly dismembered.

There had been many experiments with hot-air envelopes over the centums as well, with varying degrees of success. A small group of dedicated enthusiasts held demonstrations every year and flew their ‘airspheres’ for excited crowds, but the concept never really bled over into either freight or commercial passenger-hauling: too many issues no one was willing to fund working out.

The gnome showing off his invention to the passengers of the
Avvolli
had hit upon something quite different, however. He lived in the rugged mountainous area of southern Tantatku where he’d spent most of his life as an independent miner, finding and exploiting small veins of various valuable minerals. One day he’d chanced upon a reddish streak that looked like nothing he’d ever seen before. Extracting a sample and heating it repeatedly in his athanor, he eventually worked out that he’d discovered a previously unknown substance that when heated generated a gas with the potentially useful property of linear thermal buoyancy: the hotter it became, the more buoyant.

The gnome, whose name was Dagyo, soon realized he had the basis for an entirely new form of transport in his hands, if he could only work out the niggling details. He spent the next three years doing just that. He used his miner’s knowledge of metallurgy to create an alloy that was both light and extremely strong. From his new metal he crafted a structure that looked like a squashed ice cream cone in cross section: a semicircle sitting atop an acute triangle. It was ten meters long and six wide, covered with a stiff doped fabric. Underneath was slung a streamlined control compartment big enough to house four gnomes.

Along the keel of the craft ran a u-channel with fan-shaped burners situated every meter such that the heating would be relatively uniform across the entire length. The interior of the giant bag was coated with a thin but tough metallic foil sandwiched between two sheets of rubberized fabric. As the solid mineral Dagyo had christened ‘aerite’ sublimed under the influence of the battery- powered burners, it expanded into the sealed envelope. When it cooled to liquid state, the aerite ran down the sides and fed back into the trough to be re-heated. The hotter Dagyo made the fires, the lighter his craft would get.

He added horizontal and vertical planes for navigation and two curious internal fan-driven engines for propulsion, controlling all of that via pulleys and wires from a console at the front of the little passenger car. Dagyo referred to his craft as a
Zifjagga
, which translates from gnomish as ‘flying jellyfish.’ After two months of almost constant practice and refinement, he took his show on the road to drum up funds for further enhancements.

He landed the
Avvolli
gig after one of the line’s executives brought his children to an amusement park where Dagyo had been contracted to do demonstrations to distract those in near-infinite queues for the most popular rides. The executive immediately saw the potential for entertainment, if not transport, and booked Dagyo to bring his contraption aboard the
Avvolli.

The premise of Dagyo’s Zifjagga show was pretty simple: the ship’s owners had installed a large swiveling mooring point on top of a ten-meter mast on the Solare deck. Not only did the Zifjagga moor there, it was attached by a one hundred meter extra-strong tether to a ring welded below the mooring point so that Dagyo could take the AeroPram (as he named it) out and fly it around in circles without worrying about engine failure or jammed controls causing him to become separated from the
Avvolli
in the deep ocean.

The spectacle of a bag full of gas with someone suspended underneath it was quite diverting; the shows always had people lining the decks: some to marvel at the engineering, some to gaze in naked envy at the gnome who was no longer bound to the surface, and a few who secretly or not so secretly just hoped to witness a disaster. One of the latter category was a kobold named Lizgug, who happened to be distantly related to the glider creator in Hividz. He hoped the bag would explode, or maybe break apart. Kobolds are not as a race particularly empathic or charitable, but Lizgug exceeded those already low standards by a considerable margin: he was actively—sometimes even aggressively—unpleasant.