Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 (31 page)

“The reason I brought it up is that Vidda’s editor first contacted us because she’d gone a full day without calling in. That apparently was unheard of, whether she was on assignment or not.”

“And from that you extrapolated that all journalists are constantly in touch?” Selpla challenged smilingly.

“No, I got that from observing
you
.”

Selpla acted affronted. “I beg your pardon,” she sniffed,“I do
not
find it necessary to call in every few minutes.”

Tol reached into his overjack pocket and pulled out a sheaf of paper. He held it out for her to see.

“Your comm records. Over the last three months you called back to the city desk on average twelve times a day. Sometimes even on your days off.” That works out to...once every forty minutes or so.”

“There must be some mistake with those records. I don’t call in that often: I wouldn’t have time to get any work done.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Tol said, taking her in his arms, “That’s not the kind of contact I’m interested in making at the moment.”

Selpla clicked her comm unit onto
Do Not Disturb
. “I’ll put that call through for you immediately, Sir Knight.”

in which two fugitives stir up a hornet’s nest

“Land ho! I told you we would make it!” Hinyak was grinning broadly as he brought the tattered sail around to tack into the southeast wind. They had rowed for the first few hours after escaping the
Grollnash
, but a sudden squall had driven them further out to sea. When one of the oars had been washed overboard by a wave, they’d taken a sail repair kit and sewn their own clothes into a makeshift sheet. It had taken three days to make up the lost kilometers. They were starving, badly dehydrated, and wearing only their underwear. Jovsox was suffering considerably from the blast to his leg as well; it had festered and was oozing copious pus.

A crew of commercial fishers spotted them and brought them aboard the hoy they used to transport catches back to the fishmongers on shore, commenting favorably on their ingenuity at rigging the improvised sail. The ship’s medic drained and dressed the goblin’s wound, wisely avoiding any questions as to its origin. Fishers plying the vast southern N’plorkian oceans are a hardy and uninquisitive lot.

The northernmost of the Paradiddle Islands is a tropical paradise known as Ratamacue, and this is where the outlawed sailors at last washed up, so to speak. Although it is a small island in one of the smallest nations on the planet, Ratamacue has a well- equipped hospital as a result of its popularity among celebrities from across the globe seeking treatment for ‘exhaustion.’Jovsox healed rapidly here and the pair were soon looking for further diversion.

“We need t’ find a crew to sign on with,” said Hinyak one morning, “So’s we can get t’ Balom.”

“Balom?” asked Jovsox incredulously, “Why d’ we want to get back t’ that place? They didn’t like us much there the last time, as I remember it. That one cop said he was going to throw away the key if we ever came back.”

“I ain’t scared o’ him. It don’t matter whether they liked us or not. That stretch of beach just south of the border—the one where we pulled the ‘pirate treasure’ scam—really
does
have a buried treasure: ours. I buried that haul we took on the carriage heist there. That’s why the cops couldn’t pin anything on us.”

“Really?” the goblin seemed truly interested now, “I thought we lost all that dough in the landslide.”

“Naw. I did use that as cover, though. The Galangan cops still think that’s where the money is buried, but it ain’t. It’s on the beach about a kilometer north of that little lighthouse, almost right on the Tragacanth border.”

“So, how are we gonna get there?”

“I figure we take ourselves over to Jessmirto or Xovcastra and sign on with one o’ them coastwise tramp freighters, then just work our way up, one port at a time. Balom does a lot o’ trade that way. Once we get where we’re goin’ we jump ship and collect the dough. We oughta be able t’ live on that for a long time.”

“Why didn’t you think o’ this sooner?” Jovsox suddenly asked.

“I did,” replied Hinyak, shaking his head. “That’s mostly why we signed on with the
Grollnash
. The ship’s log showed several visits t’ Balom in the past; I figured we were due for another one sooner or later. If it hadn’t been for that stupid Tragacanth cop we prolly would have made it, too.”

“That jlok was tough, I will say that,” said Jovsox, rubbing his healing leg gently.

“Yeah. Guess he came by that knight thing for good reason.”

“I’d sure love t’ pop him, though.”

“Just be patient. All things come to those who wait.” Hinyak stretched out on his bed in the hostel where they were staying. “Our paths might well cross again.”

Hinyak was not only a competent sailor, he also possessed the rudimentary charisma prerequisite for all who engage in the fraudster’s trade successfully, despite his half-ogre origins. Within two days he had talked their way onto the crew of a tour vessel called the
SeaSpotter
that took eco-tourists up and down the western coast of Esmia, from Loppren in Asmagon all the way to Yohkla Inlet in northern Tragacanth, stopping at every sizeable port along the route. In an impressive manifestation of what might be termed Hinyak’s particular genius, it was exactly what they needed to get them to Balom.

Though Hinyak and Jovsox were of different races, the paths they had separately taken to their present destination were remarkably similar. Both were orphaned at a young age and fled the orphanage after only a year or two, to make their own ways on the streets of opposite coasts in the island nation of Frespiola. Both had been in trouble on and off their entire lives, rationalizing it, as many of their ilk did, as an inevitable consequence of the position life had put them in, rather than their own questionable moral underpinning.

Both joined the Frespiolan Marines as soon as they were old enough. Hinyak was a quick study and rose through the enlisted ranks to Sergeant of the Sextant. Jovsox was not exactly dim, but his intrinsic resistance to authority interfered with promotion; when they met he was a Greaser’s Mate and unlikely to progress much further.

They immediately formed a friendship. Jovsox, despite his lackluster intellect, recognized a kindred spirit in Hinyak and admired his ability to solve problems. For his own part, Hinyak saw the undiluted simplistic loyalty Jovsox was capable of exhibiting and it engendered in him a kind of familial attachment. He thought of himself as the goblin’s ‘big brother,’ a relationship that Jovsox himself found both fitting and agreeable, and so they formed a duet that had so far endured all stresses and strains placed upon it.

Hinyak had been recommended for officer training, which meant that he would be transferred out of his unit and spend the next year at the Marine Academy in Melaman. Jovsox was clearly distraught at this prospect.

“I ain’t liking that idea at all,” he complained. “I might not see you again for a long time.”

“Yeah, that’s true. We do have an out, though.”

The goblin brightened. “We do? What is it, you screw up and stay here?”

“That may or may not work,” Hinyak explained, “If they get mad they might send me on one of those shakedown deployments or even boot me.”

“I got another year and a half in my hitch,” Jovsox said, sadly.

“I guess there’s nothin’ we can do about it.”

“Sure there is,” Hinyak said, brightly, “We can desert.”

“Desert? Run away? Won’t that make us...criminals?”

“And? It’s not like we both ain’t criminals, anyway. How many times have you snatched stuff in your life?”

“Plenty, but I was mostly just tryin’ to survive.”

“Me, too. EE don’t care what your reasons are: if they catch you at it the jig is up, no matter why you did it. Prison is not my idea of livin’.”

“But you’re a good Marine; not like me.
You
got a good career goin.’ Why would you just give that up?”

“Eh, I ain’t really cut out for military life. Too regimented for me. I don’t much like workin’ for somebody else. I’d get tired of being an officer after a year or two, anyway. Might as well skip that part and take off now.”

“I’m game. Being a Marine ain’t exactly my idea of fun, neither.”

“Tomorrow night, after mess. Meet me at that shelter near the slop station. I know a way out that ain’t being watched by the guards for about ten minutes during changeover. Discovered it during a ‘gap-close’ exercise but kept it to myself just in case I ever needed it.”

“I wisht I was smart like you,” Jovsox muttered, shaking his head.

“Stick with me and you won’t need to be.”

So it was that Sergeant of the Sextant Hinyak of Terimpu and Greaser’s Mate Third Class Jovsox of Correq were listed AWOL and then finally as deserters from the Frespiolan Self-Defense Marine Force. It was the first in what was to prove a long string of governmental denunciations that nonetheless failed to end their lives on the lam.

Now, over five years later, they served together on the
SeaSpotter
. They used assumed names, as Hinyak had rightly guessed that their hijinks aboard the
Grollnash
would have earned them outlaw designation. Hinyak, or ‘Halla,’ as he called himself after a childhood nickname, was assigned as the Pilot’s Mate, with responsibility for ensuring that the proper charts for avoiding navigational hazards were always in place on the navigator’s chart board. Jovsox, who now went rather unimaginatively by ‘Juvvy,’ was made Rigger’s Mate, in charge of keeping the ropes and cables on board cleaned and stowed properly. It was an employment that suited him well, and he was competent at it.

It took them nearly three months of sailing in and out of ports large and small, through all kinds of weather and seas ranging from glass to gale, before finally they gazed out the tiny porthole in the crew berths and saw framed by it the northern Galangan port of Balom, their destination. Halla seemed genuinely excited for the first time in a long while.

“I have shore leave arranged for tomorrow for both of us,” he told Juvvy that evening at supper. “It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to find the money.”

“Unless somebody else found it first,” Juvvy said, between bites of chowder and soda bread.

“Don’t be such a pessimist. I hid it very well. You can’t just dig and get to it.”

“I thought you said you buried it on the beach.”

“I did.”

“Then why can’t anyone that digs in the right place find it?”

“I’ll show you when we get there.”

“I thought this was supposed to be a deserted beach.”

“It was when I buried the money. I don’t remember any of that stuff being here.”

“The sign says ‘Balom Orc Enclave.’ I thought all the Orcs were dead or something.”

“Nah. Well, mostly. But they have a few little reservations where they’re allowed to live under close supervision so they don’t get all militant again. I guess this is one of those, but I swear it wasn’t here when I buried the money.”

“Looks like it was established last year
at the request of the Grand Orcish Council, with the full cooperation of the government of Galanga
,” Juvvy read slowly from a placard bolted to the fence next to the heavily reinforced and barbed wire-encrusted gate. “But this Enclave thing isn’t going to mess up our digging for the money, right?”

Halla frowned. He picked up a bucket he’d brought with them and walked over to a large tree whose ancient branches hung out over the pink beach. He paced off from it and dragged a line in the sand, and then did the same from a sign warning about rip currents, but was stopped short by the fence around the enclave.

“Smek me. The smekking money is just inside the fence. I guess we’ll have to get in there somehow,” Halla said, irritation evident in his voice.

“Couldn’t we just dig under the fence?”

“I read that orcs are good sappers, so the fences around these things go down like ten meters,” replied Halla, “We’re just smekkin’ lucky they missed it when they were excavating for that.”

“So, whatta we do?”

“Let’s just ring the bell and ask if we can come in.”

“Is that safe?”

“Do you want the money? Every potentially profitable action carries risk.” Halla was already walking toward the gate.

A sullen-looking orc guard peered through a slot at them.

“What?” he asked, simply.

Halla had a story prepared, but for some reason he could not readily elucidate he decided for once to tell the truth. “We buried some property here before the enclave was built and we would like permission to retrieve it. It’s only a meter or so inside the fence.”

The guard appraised them both. “
You
can come in. The goblin stays out there.”

Halla and Juvvy looked at one another. “He is my half- brother,” Halla lied, “We are family.”

“You are
not
related,” The orc stated it as pure fact, which it was.“The goblin stays out.”

Juvvy shrugged. “It’s okay. I’ll just hang out here.”

“I won’t be long,” Halla replied. “Go stand at the exact spot where I hit the fence.”

Inside the compound, which was sparse and institutional at least at the perimeter, Halla wasted no time in making his way to a place immediately across the fence line from Juvvy. He started clawing at the sand with his nails, which were quite long and sharp. When he had dug down about a meter, he stopped deepening the hole and spoke to Juvvy through the fence.

“Fill that bucket with sea water and bring it back.”

“Whatta ya want that for?” Juvvy asked, puzzled.

“I told you the money couldn’t be accessed just by digging down. Seawater has to come in and complete an electrical circuit or the lid can’t be opened. It just feels like a very solid layer of sandstone when you hit it. Anyone digging here would stop at this point and go dig somewhere else.”

Juvvy returned with the bucket. While he was gone Halla scooped out a little canal from the excavation to the edge of the fence. “Pour the water through the fence into this ditch,” he instructed Juvvy. The seawater trickled down and pooled on the lid.