Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 (15 page)

“Better than nothing. This looks like a sentient-built passage of some sort; at any rate it’s the best shot we’ve got. Follow me!”

Tol scrambled down a slight slope with rock fall detritus scattered around on it and headed off into the absolute darkness of the tunnel, the light from his tiny torch bobbing here and there. The titans, despite their much larger stride, struggled to keep up. Tol was now pure detective on the trail; he was totally focused on the quarry and could move with surprising alacrity when so engaged.

The tunnel seemed to have more than its fair share of side passages as they pressed forward, but Tol barely hesitated at each one before continuing. Finally he stopped at one, looked at the ground for a moment, and indicated they were turning off to the left. “Why do you think we should go that way?” Tartag asked.

Tol shone his light down on the floor. “Because whoever got here before us did. I thought we could ask him if he knows the way out.”

Tartag looked carefully at the spot Tol indicated and was astonished to see that there were very subtle indentations in the thin layer of dust. Anyone else would have missed them, even were they looking specifically for that type of manifestation.

“How did you even
see
that?”

“A lifetime of tracking down guys who thought they were too clever to be caught. It sort of hones your skills.”

“I’ll say it does.”

They followed the narrower passage somewhat more cautiously, as it was liberally strewn with rock debris and the footing was treacherous. Every now and then Tol would point out some ridiculously obscure sign that a person or persons had recently gone before them. Tartag just shook his head in wonder. After at least fortyfive minutes of steady travel Tol halted abruptly and cocked his head to one side. He made a silencing gesture to the titans behind him. “Did everyone bring some sort of weapon?” In response, the titans all drew their
yankiri
, or long-bladed glaves. The sound of sharpened metal moving against leather scabbard was strangely comforting to Tol as he stood there with his new rapid-fire disruptor, a far more powerful version of his trusty old service weapon (which he still carried in a holster under the other shoulder, as backup).

“There’s something coming, and it’s got more than two legs,” Tol announced quietly. “Be ready to fight.” Everyone stiffened and waited. There was no sound for a few moments, then without warning a swarm of huge reptilian things with very large talons and foul, toxic-smelling breath were upon them.

“Deepdrakes!” Tartag cried, as he swung his yankiri wildly. Tol fired once on the stun setting and the lizard shook it off, so he raised the power level to
perforate
and shot again.

“Apparently,” he said to no one in particular as he dove behind a rock jutting from the wall, “Perforating a deepdrake just irritates it. A lot.”

“They don’t seem to take well to being sliced open, either,” replied Eltiar, his weapon dripping with grayish-pink deepdrake gore.

“The heads do come off nice and clean,” added Apoj, holding up a particularly fearsome-looking specimen by lacerated neck muscle tissue. Just then another one leapt at Apoj’s own throat and was surprised to find an entire deepdrake head stuffed far down its gaping maw. As it struggled to dislodge the breathing obstacle Tartag brought his glave down with incredible force on the creature’s back, severing the spinal column and very nearly bisecting the entire animal.

“Yecch. It’s gettin’ slippery in here,” observed Tol as he slid his way into position to take a shot at the next deepdrake coming down the corridor at them. He got it right between the eyes with a full-power bolt that drove a meter-long fountain of brain tissue and blood out the back of the huge, misshapen skull. The beast kept coming at them as a result of its considerable momentum; Eltiar sliced off one its front legs for good measure as it slid by.

When the battle was over there were seven demised deepdrakes. Their opponents had suffered a few lacerations and one relatively minor fracture. They were covered in a thick layer of the same gore that enveloped their immediate environs, though. They scraped as much of it from themselves and each other as practical and headed off down the corridor, alert to the very real possibility that the first encounter might only have been with a scouting party.

They made their way among skeletons and other, less identifiable clumps of what they could only presume were deepdrake prey. The stench was nearly unbearable, even for Tol, who had a lot experience dealing with stinky places, having lived his life in Sebacea. It was becoming more and more apparent that this corridor was some sort of deepdrake larder, where choice gobbets of flesh were stashed to age for a while before being consumed. The titans looked at one another nervously: the odds were very high that they would encounter more deepdrakes—possibly more than they could handle, even collectively. Only Tol seemed unconcerned. He regarded deepdrakes as, despite their large size, inferior fighters to the vicious sewer wrats of Sebacea, and he’d taken on entire nests of those bleeders by himself before.

The passageway was taking a definite downward slant now; at times quite dramatic. The air temperature was increasing as they ventured deeper and deeper. There were multiple openings in the wall, with black, unfathomable depths behind them, but Tol seemed quite adamant that the trail they were following led straight along the main hallway. The caches of flesh and piles of bone were becoming less frequent, concurrent with a welcome decline in the odor of decay and dried bodily fluids with which they’d been forced to contend for some time.

As the incident debris diminished, the roughly-hewn walls and floor of the passage smoothed and after a while even began seemingly to glisten. They passed through an arch—an obvious artifice—beyond which the surroundings improved dramatically. The walls and ceiling moved outward and were now composed of polished marble, albeit of a different form than they’d seen in Hellehoell itself. The crude steps had morphed into an elegantly- constructed formal staircase, still leading down precipitously. The increasing warmth was ameliorated by a constant flow of cool air, although by what mechanism and even via what ventilation system was impossible to say.

A hundred meters or so further along Tol took a step that almost caused him to lose his balance. The step itself was the culprit, as the pressure from his foot caused an ancient mechanism to activate and the stairs began to descend on their own. They moved hesitantly at first, sticking and releasing noisily as though they had not been used in millennia—but then some form of lubrication apparently kicked in and the jolting died down into a quiet, fluid motion.

Tol waited until it seemed safe to do so and then stepped back on. The moving stairway carried him smoothly down, at a surprisingly rapid clip. He turned around and grinned as he watched the titans try to figure out how to address this new challenge; it was obvious none of them had ever before encountered such a mechanism. Finally Tartag took the plunge; he stepped gingerly on and was very nearly sent reeling backwards for his trouble. But, he righted himself and after a few seconds called back to the others.

“It’s quite enjoyable and not at all difficult once you’re here. Come on!”

The other two titans looked at each other and shrugged. First one then the other leapt on and joggled back and forth for a moment before they got the hang of it. Soon all four of them were gliding gracefully down, down, toward some unguessable destination. At least the ride was pleasant and, for the titans anyway, mildly exhilarating.

“What do you call this contraption?” Tartag yelled down to Tol.

“It’s a moving stairway. Some people call it a ‘stairveyor.’ It’s a bunch of steps mounted on a conveyor belt. They’re popular in cities for moving people from one floor to the next.”

“Quite a marvelous conveyance.”

“Yeah, I had a lot of fun riding them as a kid.”

“How do you get back up, once you’ve gone down?”

“They go both ways. They’ll usually put two of them side- by-side. One goes up, the other down. If they break down or lose power, they’re still perfectly good stairs.”

“Where do you think these are taking us?”

“I haven’t got any idea. We’re still on the track, though.”

“How could you possibly track someone on this stair-whatever?”

“There are faint footprints on the step two below mine. They’re too big and the wrong shape for deepdrakes, but just the right size to be titan. The stairveyor must have cycled all the way around once before we got here, and as you can see, it’s pretty dusty.”

“You are quite a tribute to your profession, Sir Tol-u-ol. Your tracking skills are most impressive.”

“Thanks. Comes with the territory. Often you have to get them before they get you.”

“Yes, well, I hope no one will be trying to ‘get you’ today. Other than the deepdrakes, I mean.”

“They’re just walking turds, really. Nasty teeth and that, but predictable and easy to out-maneuver.”

The longest moving stairway on, or rather, in, Tragacanth was finally coming to a terminus. They could see the end scant meters ahead.

“I don’t think that’s a very charitable characterization, in all fairness,” an odd voice chimed from the darkness below.

Tol and the titans went on their guard, although Tol did not draw his disruptor. He was the first to come face to face with the voice, which turned out to be emanating from a deepdrake’s body. Vocal abilities aside, it was no ordinary deepdrake: it was about a quarter again larger, with more agile front legs and paws, and deeply-set eyes that shone with intelligence. Tol regarded it curiously for a moment.

“Well, begging your pardon, but the ones we’ve encountered so far did not see fit to communicate, unless you call trying to rip us limb from limb communicating.”

The deepdrake chuckled. “The harvesters are rather exuberant in their quest for meat, ‘tis true. However, they are not representative of deepdrakes as a species: merely a primitive derivative thereof, bred specifically for their function.”

“I presume that you claim to be such a representative, then?” asked Tartag; by now the titans had all reached the bottom of the stairway.

“I am indeed,” the deepdrake replied, “I am Fontaric the Voluble, Harvestlord of Dzilidonia.

“I am Tartag, Hellehoell Ambassador to Tragacanth, and these are my companions Apoj and Eltiar,” he said, waving his arm toward the other titans. “And this,” he added, turning to Tol, “Is Sir Tol-u-ol of Sebacea, Knight of the Crimson, Special Investigator and brother to the King of Tragacanth.”

“Welcome to you all. You have reached the outer limits of the Realm of Dzilidonia, home to Phaeon Timeskin.”

“Thank you for the welcome, Fontaric. I’m afraid we were a little hard on your harvesters back there. We didn’t feel we had a lot of choice.”

Fontaric laughed merrily. “No harm done. They will regenerate in due course. We are an immortal species, created to be companions of an immortal. There are exactly six hundred and sixty-six deepdrakes in existence. Once every six hundred and sixtysix years we come together for a great celebration of our species with banquets and drink in abundance. For this reason we refer to 666 as the ‘number of the feast.’”

Fontaric’s curious story seemed to be over, so Tol spoke up. “Who is this ‘Phaeon Timeskin’?”

“Phaeon,” Fontaric replied, “Is an eternal entity created by the same event and of the same raw ingredients as the spacetime fabric itself. He was one of many cast out in dark energy bubbles, spreading across the universe at thousands of times the speed of light, at least initially.”

“How did such a singular entity come to be embedded in N’plork?” asked Eltiar.

“He floated free in deep space while the first generation of stars formed and then blew themselves apart. Finally his bubble struck this nascent planet and became embedded in the molten mass. He chose to remain here while N’plork cooled and solidified around him. He has watched the rise of life on this world from the first protocell. In many ways, then, he
is
N’plork.”

“Such an entity must be awe-inspiring to behold,” said Tartag, “Might we be allowed to meet and communicate with him?”

“I believe,” came a mellifluous yet intense, almost hypnotically lyrical sound, which they realized after a moment was also a voice, from somewhere in the middle of the room, “That can be arranged. I am Phaeon Timeskin, at your service.”

They turned to face the apparent source of the voice, but there was no one there to be seen. “Where...where
are
you?” Tol finally asked.

“I am right here. I take it you all have had limited experience with brane visualization.”

“I’m visualizing my brain downright confused right now,” answered Tol.

“B-r-a-n-e, derived from mem
brane
. Sections of the fabric of spacetime can be peeled off, if you will, and used to create physical objects. The brane has no intrinsic color or texture, however, so you have to train your particular optical perception mechanism in order to visualize it.” He knelt down and drew a circle on the floor. “Start at the circle and work up. I’m roughly the same height as the goblin. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that the packet of ‘thin air’ just above the circle doesn’t seem quite right. Now, concentrate on that area, move your head back and forth, and let your line of vision travel with it. At the edges on both sides you should eventually begin to build up an outline which, when filled in, will be me.”

They stood there shaking their heads as though in collective denial as Phaeon continued.

“You will have to assign clothing, skin color, and even features from your own minds; I have none of my own. As a result, I appear differently to each person.”

“So, you’re some kind of personal hallucination, then?” asked Tol, who was feeling rather foolish shaking his head back and forth.

“I’m quite real; quite tangible. I’m just made from the same pattern as the wallpaper, if you want to phrase it in that manner.”

“Wait, I’m starting to get something!” yelled Tartag. “You look like a very short titan to me. You’re wearing an outfit similar to the ones we wore in schola. That takes me back...”