Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 (10 page)

“Look in the upper tunnels, Your Majesty!” one of them shouted.

Aspet paged over to those maps. He followed the trail of tripped alarms to the Royal Residence. He swept went along the hallways until he saw two signatures in one room. One of them was blinking purple. “Found her! She’s in her private study with another person! The windows are machine barricaded but I can override that from the panel outside the master bedroom. Tell the RPC to meet us there.”

“Acknowledged, Your Majesty,” replied the RPC agent.

They tore down one hallway, up another, then up one flight of stairs and continued past the entrance to the master suite to another rooftop exit. This one led to a wraparound balcony that surrounded the master suite on three sides. RPC streamed in from several directions at once and surrounded the suite from both the exterior and along the hallway inside.

Aspet held up his left hand with a finger of his right poised over the shutter override. He was waiting for the RPC to signal him that they were in position inside. When everyone was ready, he counted three by waving his arm and then pressed the last key of the override code.

Windows crashed, wood splintered, and the sounds of RPC agents shouting orders filled the air. Aspet leapt through a shattered window frame behind a couple of burly agents to see Boogla perched on top of a hobgoblin dressed all in black. She had her fist poised in a throat strike. As she looked up, startled in her infirm condition at the sudden inundation of RPC, she saw Ballop’ril and Prond, the Archmage having pulled the coordinates from the FAC, shimmer into solidity to one side and stared at the manifestation for a second, confused.

The hobgoblin took that opportunity to stretch out his arm and toss a small blue vial far into the air. It arced up and over the side of the balcony. Boogla screamed for someone to grab it, but it was over everyone’s head. Prond raised his arm and a stream of silver light from a stasis spell shot out, surrounding the vial and bringing it gently toward him. Aspet raced over and snatched it out of midair. He ran back to Boogla, who had tumbled off of the hobgoblin and was lying on the ground grasping her chest in respiratory distress, and dribbled the liquid carefully between her lips until she had drunk every drop.

The hob was under close guard by the RPC, who had an even dozen weapons leveled at him, but while everyone was scrambling for the vial he had swallowed the capsule secreted in his cheek pouch. His back suddenly stiffened and he arched up in a massive convulsion. When it relaxed he was dead.

Boogla was kept in the Royal Infirmary for three days under observation with a Traumamine drip to keep her tranquil, but the antidote did its job and she was released with no apparent ill effects. Aspet personally issued an International Royal Writ of Arrest for Esfina Frem, but she had gone into hiding after the failed assassination/extortion attempt. He further notified the government of Solemadrina through official channels that their trade shipments were being hijacked to funnel illegal exports to the black market.

Dolmax called an all-hands conference for the RPC and they went over every last detail of the fiasco, looking for places where they had failed and coming up with ways to prevent them happening again. Every agent was required to take forty hours of additional training, during which they practiced responding to intrusions in the Royal Complex over and over again until it was a reflex for them. Dolmax offered his resignation in response to the RPC failure; Aspet rolled his eyes and refused to accept it.

“I have an RPC Director who just participated in the greatest training exercise ever held in Tragacanth. What kind of fool would I be to lose him now? I am safe; Boogla is safe; that’s all that matters. Get back to work, Director Dolmax.”

in which the Royal Couple take a holiday and have pleasant diversions

It was estimated it would take at least a fortnight to repair the damage to the Royal master suite, so Aspet decided to take his recuperating wife and temporarily relocate the seat of government to one of the vacation palaces. He’d been to Hikklew; that was the smaller location where he first met up with Boogla. There was another one, though: a sprawling estate called Saltchitterington on Myndrythyl Bay, about midway between Port Zog and Lumbos. Aspet had stopped there once briefly on a previous visit to Lumbos to confer with the Oria Magineer. He had been quite impressed and now felt strangely drawn to the place.

As soon as he announced his intentions, he sent into operation a long chain of events. First, the RPC headed for Saltchitterington, code-named ‘Natra,’ to prepare for Royal residence. As Natra was a Royal estate to begin with there was a small contingent of RPC agents assigned there full time—one of the cushiest, if least exciting, billets in the Corps—but a far larger presence was required when the King and Consort were on location. With this latest unpleasantness, the embarrassed RPC were taking no chances: the place was searched and locked down one square meter at a time, inside and out.

By the time Aspet and Boogla rolled up in the Royal limousine from the carriage station, Saltchitterington was as secure as the RPC could make it. Part of the challenge of VIP security was transparency: it was important to keep as much of the security apparatus as possible invisible or at least low-profile to those being guarded.

The estate was modeled along the lines of those popular with videoz and music celebrities: large main house with several wings, pool with waterfalls, elaborate pool house, several guest houses, and riding stables. On the rear margin of the property, overlooking the bay, stood the ruins of one of the first goblin keeps built in nascent Tragacanth, nearly four thousand years ago. It was estimated that it had been continuously occupied for at least a millennium afterwards, perhaps longer. That still left nearly three thousand years since the last inhabitants moved out, which of course led to a plethora of ghost stories also attached to it.

Aspet was fascinated by the carvings and close-fitting dressed stone accomplished with only primitive tools. Even a few of the original roof and floor timbers were still extant and in place. He liked to sit in the ruins and try to imagine life in this spot thirty-five centums ago, during the heyday of its habitation. Upon consulting with the RSCA and finding that little was really known about the everyday life of people in that era, His Majesty Tragacanth had an idea.

Aspet knew from his ‘freelance’ hacking days that there were a number of underground groups whose membership overlapped somewhat with the hacking community. These ranged from people who collected comic journals to those who were involved in live action role-playing games. One of these groups hosted a series of historically-themed parties annually; Aspet had attended a couple some years ago.

He contacted the head of the group, the ‘seneschal,’ by computer mail (voice was usually awkward, as the other end had to adjust to the fact they were talking to the King of Tragacanth) and made him a proposition: if the group would agree to use it and keep it maintained, he would fund the restoration of the site as historically accurately as possible and give the group a long-term lease for its use, provided that at least two weeks of the year in the summer they would open it to the public as a ‘living history village.’ The King wanted people to be able to walk through and see first-hand how their ancestors had actually lived and worked.

He knew the members of the group did their best to wear period clothing and eat and drink from period utensils, play period games, and use appropriate language to the extent practical. While the site was some distance from Goblinopolis, where they were headquartered, there was frequent inexpensive carriage service available.

Thus was the Society for Historical Re-creation propelled from an obscure urban social clique to a Royally-sponsored organization with funding and instant prestige. The seneschal was actually a gaming buddy of Aspet’s named Hekka, although His Majesty had forgotten that until he was reminded. In the SHR everyone adopted names that historically could have existed, so in fact Hekka went by ‘Abfabra Foe-Thumper.’He had gone by that name for so long now that even people outside the SHR called him ‘Abfabra’ or ‘Abfab’ these days.

The first step was to get a reputable history scholar out here and draw up a realistic plan for the keep and settlement. Once that was done they could choose and locate the correct materials and begin restoration work. It was during this work that the strange events began.

At first they were innocuous and easy to mistake for coincidence or just practical jokes: tools moved a meter or two from where they had been left; opened doors were now closed and vice-versa; architectural drawings were taken from drafting tables and replaced upside down or backwards; lunchbox contents were mysteriously exchanged. The workers grew accustomed to this activity and even found it somewhat amusing.

After several weeks, however, events took a darker turn. One of the workers was injured when a wall suddenly collapsed on him. The wall in question had been certified structurally sound by an engineer only the day before. Then nails began to shoot across rooms randomly, at velocities sufficient to pierce goblin hide, although no one had yet been punctured. This was the point at which all involved had to face the fact that someone or something atypical was behind these occurrences. Nails can’t simply propel themselves through the air like that.

They set up conventional cameras to record the perpetrators, but got nothing. Then they tried infrared cameras and for the first time garnered some evidence in the form of cold spots, vaguely bipedal in shape, moving across the field of view. They left the cameras running for a full week and when they reviewed the video got the shock of their lives.

Aspet stared at the communiqué in disbelief, as though it had just grown lips in front of him and asked for a breath mint. “They’ve discovered
what
?” he asked no one in particular, who happened to be standing nearby. He continued reading. “An
exorcist
? They actually want to hire an
exorcist
?” He rolled his eyes. “Sweetheart, I’m going to take a ride to the ruins and find out what in the smek is going on down there. Wanna come along?”

Boogla thought about it. “Sure; why not? Might be interesting, given that they apparently believe them to be some manner of haunted.” Aspet told the RPC where he was going and they escorted him and Boogla down to the all-terrain prams used on the estate. The RPC were a little nervous about the expedition.

“We’re not sure if we can adequately guard you from this threat,” the captain of Aspet’s personal guards told him.

“Surely you don’t believe the ruins have actual ghosts in them, do you?”

“We don’t know what to believe. If they do exist, however, it is our sworn duty to prevent them from harming you. Somehow.”

“Captain, if I am harmed in any way by a ghost, I will hold you and your team blameless in the matter.”

“We appreciate that, Your Majesty, but it would constitute a violation of our oaths nonetheless.”

“Well, I strongly suspect you won’t need to violate anything today. If there are any ghosts I will sic Her Highness on them. She could probably face down the entire population of the underworld: one at a time, or
en masse
.”

“Are you creating work for me?” Boogla asked, giggling.

“I doubt it would be much like work for you. More like recreation, which is, after all, why we’re here.”

Despite the putative supernatural activity, the reconstruction team had made impressive progress. They framed out a half-dozen buildings using hand-cut timbers, laid floor mosaics, cut a huge pile of slate roof tiles, and began manufacturing tools and utensils common to everyday life back then, at least according to the history scholar in residence. Aspet started asking around concerning the supernatural occurrences, but most of the workers were too embarrassed to admit to the Monarch that they had experienced anything of the sort.

Fortunately, the site foreman was something of an amateur ghost hunter and had kept a detailed log of the events, times, and locations. Aspet and Boogla backtracked over them, one at a time, looking for commonalities. As they studied the records, Boogla suddenly spoke up.

“Even though the events themselves were occurring pretty much all over the site, notice that they all seem to coincide with significant work being done in one area: that building in the corner.” She pointed at it.

Aspet looked at her notes and nodded. “Do we have any idea what that structure was used for?”

“Let’s ask the scholar.”

Doctor Reoksa was Northeastern Regional Director of the Tragacanth Historical League and the scholar charged with interpretation of the site. She was not very tolerant of this ghost nonsense, but since it was the King asking, she cooperated.

“Your Majesty, my best guess based on the layout, artifacts recovered, and contemporary accounts is that this structure was a teaching facility or possibly some sort of laboratory.”

“Laboratory, eh? Maybe there was a tragic accident that killed some people who are still hanging around.”

“Your Majesty, may I speak freely?”

“Of course, Doctor Reoksa. Go right ahead.”

“I know of no empirical evidence, much less a theory or even plausible hypothesis, which could account for a spirit somehow living on after the death of its host organism. The energy requirements and intelligence source necessary simply do not add up. It is possible that ghosts exist as something completely outside our realm of experience or scholarship, but the odds against that are rather steep.”

“Agreed, Doctor, although I saw something I could not personally explain that was identified to me as representing ‘spirits’ in the Kopyrewt Forest. Be that as it may, we’re mostly just being entertained here. Taking some time off from reality, as it were.”

“Very good. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the occasional flight of fancy.”

“Thank you for your time and expertise, Doctor. We’re going to explore on our own now. We promise not to disturb any artifacts.”