Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 (28 page)

“What?” replied the captain, taking the glasses from Tol and sweeping the sloops. “Don’t be absurd. Those are either external fuel tanks of some sort or fishing buoys. I appreciate your concern, Sir Tol, but we have the situation well in hand here. There is no danger presented by these small vessels.”

Tol shrugged. “It’s your boat.”

“That,” replied the captain, turning back to his duties, “It is.”

Tol wandered to the stern and stationed himself at one of the long-distance observation scopes mounted along the railing. He had a strange feeling about the stalkers, and his intuition wasn’t often wrong about such things. Nothing he could really do about them but watch and wait; if they made a move he would, well, figure something out.

They took no action for the next few days, though: just kept their distance. Occasionally he would see someone out on deck— not fishing or sunning themselves as holiday-makers would be, but not doing anything threatening, either: just watching the
Avvolli
. Still, Tol couldn’t shake the impression they were up to no good.

At dawn on the seventh morning, about a day away from docking at Lumbos, Tol went on deck and discovered that the shadowing sloops had disappeared. This fitted with the Captain’s prediction, so Tol reluctantly let go of his suspicions. He was relieved but still vaguely troubled, at the same time. He couldn’t say precisely why he was troubled, but something just didn’t smell right. He was willing to admit that it could be himself generating the off odor: even after a half-dozen baths the scent of the Erolossma sewage system lingered faintly. Whatever the source, it left him uneasy for no readily apparent reason.

Two hours later Tol was eating a late breakfast on the forward veranda when he felt the ship’s engines slow and then cut out altogether. He strolled over to the port rail and saw one of the sloops drawn up alongside. He walked over to the starboard and there sat the other one. Every alarm bell in his body started clanging. He made his way to the bridge as quickly as possible, waving his EE creds in the face of anyone who tried to intervene along the way.

“What’s the scoop, Captain?” Tol asked breathlessly as he slid to a stop near the command chair.

“I’m very busy, now, Sir Tol.”

“I’d guessed that. I’d also guessed that being so busy is somehow related to those sloops bracketing the ship right now.”

The Captain sighed. “You would be correct, Sir Knight. They say they are armed and will sink or heavily damage the ship unless we lower your prisoner down to them.”

Tol rolled his eyes. “Stall them, any way you can.” He turned and ran out the door.

The Captain blinked; shrugged. “We will comply with your demand,” he said into the radio, “As soon as we work out a technical issue with the winch. It was apparently...uh...not lubricated per the manufacturer’s maintenance schedule.”

Tol ran down to the lowest deck with balconies and headed for the aft-most access point. He slung a rope he’d picked up outside the bridge over the railing and rappelled down to the ocean’s surface, out of the sight of either sloop. On the way down he heard a voice from his overjack pocket.

“What, if I may be so bold, are you hoping to accomplish by this little episode of derring-do?”

“I’m going to stop these jloks from springing my prisoner. Did you think I’d just decided to go for a leisurely swim?”

“May I remind you that you are not a strong swimmer, especially in two-meter swells?”

“I know. But I can float like nobody’s business, and paddle while I do it. That’s almost as good as swimming, right?”

“Again: in calm water, perhaps. But this water is
not
calm. You will experience considerable difficulty floating on it without ingesting salt water.”

“I’ll manage. And I have an ace up my sleeve.”

There was a pause while Petey analyzed and cross-referenced the colloquialism. “What could that possibly be? Are you carrying a hidden collapsible dinghy?”

“You’ll see. I’ll give you a hint: check the ship’s blueprints.”

At that Tol released the rope and plummeted heavily into the briny drink, feet first. He went under for a longish while before bobbing to the surface like a cork on the trailing edge of a swell. He coughed and sputtered, flailing rather unproductively for a moment before finding his rhythm. He made for the
Avvolli
’s port hull and felt along it with one hand until he came into contact with something jutting out from the plating. He chuckled triumphantly as he firmed his grasp on the scraper’s bracket, a C-shaped piece of steel welded every three meters along the length of the hull on both sides to which netting was suspended. It supported scrapers who removed the accumulated marine life and rust from the hull in dry dock prior to periodic repainting.

Tol propelled himself from one bracket to the next until he reached one of the sloops. The pirate had made a tactical error from Tol’s perspective by staying so close to the hull of the cruise ship. It hid Tol’s approach and boarding quite well. He crept up the stern ladder and held Petey up to check for witnesses.

“I see no one on the deck. There appear to be several persons on board: two on the bridge and two belowdecks. So far as I can ascertain it is clear for you to come aboard if you do not tarry.”

Tol grunted in satisfaction and clambered up onto the wooden planks of the aft deck. He flattened himself against the exterior wall of the pilothouse adjacent to the entry hatch. He took a deep breath and then exploded onto the bridge. He had destroyed the radio even before the surprised occupants could react. The first one that came at him he tossed through the thick glass of the pilothouse, from which he fell to the deck and then rolled off into the pitching waves. The second drew a weapon, but Tol wrenched a navigational instrument from its moorings and hurled it at him, knocking the pistol from his hand and severely injuring his arm. Tol dragged the screaming kobold through the hatchway and heaved him overboard with his companion.

Tol looked around until he found the armory. Inside, to his grim delight, were a dozen fragmentation globes. He carried the crate over to an open access hatch for below decks, set the timer to fifteen seconds, pulled the pin, dropped it in, and then sealed the hatch. He ran back and dove over the stern just as one of the remaining crew came up from below via the other hatch and yelled at him.

The crewmember’s protestations were cut short by a rapid-fire series of dull thumps from deep within the sloop, thumps punctuated by the stern and bow being violently separated from one another. Tol grinned as the bisected ship rapidly took on water and sank, leaving only floating debris to mark the spot where a few moments earlier there had been an intact sloop. He turned and made his way as quickly as possible along the hull around the stern, thanking his lucky stars that the engines were at full stop as he walked across the housing for the huge screws, and forward to the other vessel.

“I see nothing but floating wreckage, sir,” reported the first mate, scanning the port side. He trotted over to starboard and focused his glasses on the other sloop. “The starboard ship seems intact...no, wait! There is heavy smoke pouring out of it!”

The Captain trained his own glasses on the remaining sloop. It was indeed belching thick, black smoke from the engine room area. The crew tossed an inflatable life raft over the side and leapt into it one by one as the sloop was consumed rapidly by the ravenous flames.

“Person overboard drill,” he commanded. The first mate passed the order along as the captain continued to watch the burning sloop and its erstwhile crew. The life raft suddenly began to droop on the sides and then the sea rushed in. Within seconds it was entirely submerged and the occupants treading water. There was no sign of Tol.

After the survivors had been hauled aboard and sequestered in the now-crowded brig, the captain considered how he was going to word the communiqué that a Knight of the Crimson had been lost at sea. He had certainly gone down in glory—saving the
Avvolli
from high-seas pirates—but that didn’t make the situation any less sticky. The Tragacanthans were very protective of their Knights and would insist on a full investigation. That might keep the
Avvolli
in port for days or even weeks, which would greatly displease her owners and possibly even endanger the captain’s job.

He was sitting at the desk in his quarters, pen in hand, when there came a knock on the door. He ignored it. The knocking came again, this time more insistent. The Captain scowled and slammed down the pen. He had left strict orders not to be disturbed: someone was asking for six weeks of grease trap duty. He yanked open the door and was poised to rip into whoever was on the other side, but stopped in mid-rip.

Tol was standing there, drenched and grinning. “Sorry it took me so long to get back on board,” he said, “Rope broke.” He held up a frayed piece of nautical cordage with obvious wrat tooth marks. “You probably ought to do some about the wrat problem in your storage lockers.”

The Captain looked at him with a mixture of incredulity and relief, mouth still hanging open. “Oh, and you were right about the torpedo-looking things being fuel tanks,” Tol added, “Went up nice and hot.”

Once in dock Tol escorted his prisoners to the nearest EE station and contacted Aspet on an encrypted comm channel.

“Frem is dealt with,” he said, without formalities.

“How do you know for sure?”

“She had the back of her head and chest cavity eaten away by some smekking powerful acid. I examined her myself. Quite thoroughly deceased. I didn’t have to use any of the...tools I took with me.”

“Where did it happen?” Aspet asked, munching on a slice of candied greatfruit in his office.

“The sewers beneath Erolossma. Some huge smekker of a beast. Looked like a giant wooleater worm with multiple eyes, tentacles, and acid for spit. Not even a smidgen cuddly. Downright vicious, in fact.”

“Did you kill it?”

“Possibly; I shot out everything that appeared to be an eye, anyway. The beastie didn’t take kindly to that, but it probably saved my life.” He sniffed his forearm. “Still can’t quite get all of that stench out, though.”

Aspet shook his head and smiled warmly.

“Tol, you’ve done a great service for your country and your family. We have considerable intelligence to indicate that Frem was hired to kill Boogla and quite possibly even me. She has a long history as a paid assassin.”

“I believe it. She was tough and smart. I found a book with stuff about you underlined in Frem’s hideout. She definitely was coming back for another shot.”

“I’m very glad you took care of her,” said Aspet.

“It more luck than skill, to be honest,” Tol replied, “She was just in the wrong place when the monster decided to hack a loogie.”

“Luck in this sort of endeavor, good or bad, is not a matter of chance. It’s ultimately a natural result of pre-existing conditions established by the actions of one or more persons.”

“Whatever you say, Your Majesty.”

“When will you be home, brother?”

“I’m in Lumbos now. Sometime tomorrow, I expect.”

“Come see me as soon as you can, please.”

“I am yours to command, brother.”

in which an intrepid reporter uncovers a story she did not anticipate

Selpla glanced at her calendar again, just to make sure. It said her appointment to interview the newly-elected leader of the restored underground titan city of Hellehoell was the following day at ten in the morning. She looked at the name—Tartag—and realized it was the same titan she’d met the last time she was there. Tol was still on some secret mission; he didn’t expect to be back for at least two more days, which is why she’d scheduled this appointment now.

The rail carriage view from Goblinopolis to Dresmak was serenely beautiful, alternating between wild grasslands and copses of a variety of large-leaved northern hardwoods. There was wildlife in abundance here, with few settlements. The only one of any size, in fact, was the village of Upupa, and it was a good fifty kilometers east of the rail line, which more or less paralleled the T-1. Some of the flocks of avians were so extensive that they blotted out the sun for minutes at a time as they passed over. This was one of the few entirely natural places left in Tragacanth; Selpla enjoyed getting a glimpse of the way her country had appeared before civilization encroached four millennia previous. Not that she wanted to give up the convenience and cultural advantages of life in the big city, of course.

After Dresmak the landscape changed dramatically. Barely ten minutes west of the city limits the ground began to rise into the foothills of the mighty Masron range. As the rails climbed, the forests fell away; in their place were majestic, plunging crags and deeply gouged rifts that scarred the mountainsides like cuts from colossal blades. Grays, browns, blues, and intense violets dominated the color spectrum here, with only the occasional smear of dullish purple from isolated patches of montane scrub.

When the carriage chugged into Fenurian that evening, Selpla was asleep. She’d nodded off after the last gorge-spanning bridge on the west side of the Masrons and rubbed her eyes drowsily as the carriage eased to a halt at the Fenurian South Station. She pulled her overnight bag down and shuffled to a waiting shuttle from her customary inn, where she crawled into a soft bed no more than five minutes after she’d signed the guest register.

The next morning she woke early and took breakfast on her balcony overlooking the seaside cliffs of Amnil Bay. The Noorprid Sea was unpredictable here: tranquil and deep green one moment, angry and electric blue the next. Whirling saltchitters and waveskimmers formed aerial vortices at regular intervals along the shallow sublittoral waters. Sailing vessels were common from here around Neaux Point into Yohkla Inlet with Dresmak at its mouth. The protected waters of the Inlet were ideally suited for those learning to handle sailboats.

At nine o’clock she left the hotel in a rented pram, heading for Hellehoell. The titans had already accomplished an impressive amount of excavation and reconstruction: the approach and entrance—they called it
Daludobris
—were now lined with marble bas reliefs and fluted demi-columns. The roadway itself was paved with shiny variegated pink and orange shellstone mined from ancient sea beds now located in wide strata deep beneath the northern Masrons. The combined effect was quite stunning. She found herself glancing unwittingly at the sky from time to time, looking for the swooping phantasmagoric beasts she’d witnessed on her first visit. Selpla had not brought any support crew with her on this occasion, so she took a number of still photographs on her own to accompany the story.