Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 (19 page)

“Harsh,” Tol replied.

“It’s standard language,” said the captain, “What it really means is that if an outlaw presents a clear and present danger to you or your crew, you can deal with him in whatever manner is suitable for the situation, up to and including the use of deadly force. It’s really the same authority you have as an edict enforcement officer, except that yours is a blanket authorization; this one covers only the individuals named. We don’t have cops on the high seas, so captains have to assume the duty to keep the peace.”

“I can see where that’s necessary,” Tol answered, “I guess I never really thought much about it before.”

“That’s one of the reasons all certificated captains have to go through a course that covers those issues of authority and international relations. You can instigate a great deal of bother as a ship’s captain if you cause an international situation. All captains must be both cops and ambassadors, as well as competent sailors, administrators, supervisors, and counselors.”

Tol grinned. “You learn something new every day if you keep your eyes open. I have a lot more understanding of and respect for ship’s captains than I had ten minutes ago.”

“I’m glad to be a part of your education, Sir Tol-u-ol. You, in turn, have shown me precisely why His Majesty felt compelled to create an order of Knighthood just for you. You are a remarkable goblin.”

Tol shook his head. “Thanks, but I’m really just an average jlok who keeps gettin’ mixed up in things beyond his control.”

“We all find ourselves there from time to time. It’s how you handle yourself in those situations that sets you apart.”

“Can we please change the subject?”

“Of course. Come, let me show you how the
Grollnash
is steered and navigated.”

“Thanks.
That’s
something I would very much enjoy.”

Fevins walked up just then with two items in his hand.

“I believe these belong to you, Sir Tol-u-ol.”

He handed Tol’s disruptor and comm unit back to him.

“I found these in the Second Mate’s sea chest,” he explained.

Tol took them from him and switched the comm unit on. He chuckled.

“I signed these out from the EE Quartermaster and he’d chew off a good square of my hide if I came back without them.”

“Of course, Sir Tol. I apologize again for them having been taken away from you. I will keep a much closer eye on the conduct of my crew from this point forward,” said the captain.

“It’s not the crew you have to watch,” Tol replied, “It’s the bilge wrats.”

in which Tol encounters a rather odd but inarguably dangerous summoned creature

Tol called Selpla on his comm as soon as they were within range of a repeater and told her enough of the story to cover the major events. While he missed her more than he would have guessed, he nevertheless disembarked only reluctantly back in Cladimil. The captain had sent word ahead that Tol was safe and aboard the
Grollnash
. An EE pram met him at the docks. “The Commissioner, not to mention His Majesty, would very much like to know how you ended up at sea and what you were doing out there,” the EE sergeant who was acting as his driver said

“So would I, to tell the truth,” replied Tol. “It wasn’t exactly my idea.”

“Well, I hope you’re prepared to write a full report, as soon as possible.”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from a lifetime in EE, it’s how to write a report.”

“I can’t wait to read it. I expect it will be a best-seller.”

“Yeah, ya know, maybe I will write my memoirs one day. They’d probably sell, at that.”

“They might even make a cinematic of your life story.”

“
A Hard Day’s Knight
,” said a mechanical voice from his overjack pocket.

“Smek me, Petey. I forgot you were in there. Did you get banged up any?”

“There were a few moments in which I expected to be flooded by salt water, but on the whole I’m still relatively intact.”

Sergeant Yunbah nodded knowingly in the direction of the voice. “I, um, accidentally ‘misplaced’ mine.”

“It’s in the rear of your upper-right desk drawer, stuffed in a sealed manila envelope with the words “Do Not Open: Biohazard” written on it in red permanent ink,” replied Petey, scornfully.

The sergeant sighed. “Thanks. I’ll… um…look there as soon as I get back to the office.”

Yunbah dropped Tol off at the carriage station. “You can take the regular cross-country back to Goblinopolis or request a Crimson express: your choice.”

“This isn’t an emergency situation; I’d rather not abuse the Crimson privilege. Those expresses are really expensive for both the carriage line and the taxpayers. Besides, the cross-country will give me more time to write the report.”

Tol had about four hours to kill before the West-Tragacanth Limited pulled into Cladimil Central Station, so he decided to take in some of the local sights. He could only remember ever having been in the city once prior, when he was a young cop taking an EE workshop held here. He didn’t have much time (or billmes) for sightseeing on that occasion, the per diem provided by the Precinct being barely enough to cover room and meals. He wasn’t blessed with a lot of time now, either, but at least finances weren’t an issue.

Cladimil is not nearly far enough south to be in the actual tropics—that region starts in southern Galanga, in fact—but it likes to pretend that it is. Vegetation, buildings, and even lifestyles are finely calculated to give off a tropical aura; even street vendors operate under a strict code of visual and gastronomic ‘tropicality.’

Tol had never been to a tropical region, so he was quite happily taken in by the ruse. He bought some souvenirs for Selpla, ate some good seafood at a dockside restaurant, watched random young people frolicking in the surf, and was in a generally jovial mood (and slightly sleepy) when he finally boarded the Limited for Goblinopolis.

There were only two routes around the Masrons: northerly through Krubber Pass or the desert route to the south through Asga Teslu. Since the northerly route ran through Fenurian and Dresmak, Tol chose the shorter, faster desert run, although it was less scenic. He wasn’t interested in scenery so much. Besides, he intended to sleep most of the way.

Once the Limited made the Zongat crossing and swung around the southern edge of the Masrons, the landscape turned harsh but strangely beautiful. There were soaring spires of sandstone, deep canyons striped in red, yellow, and orange, and vast tabletop mesas. Giant succulents that store hundreds of liters of water and guard that treasure with motile fire thorns dotted heat-distorted horizons in every direction. During daylight hours the air was hushed except for carrion-bugs and blowing sand, but at night a cascade of activity and sounds flowed into the desert world, bringing it to life.

Most of this was lost on Tol, however, who crawled into a bunk in the sleeper coach and was snoring before the Limited was ten kilometers outbound. The arid wastelands whizzed by him completely unheeded until a curious thing happened. Without warning the brakes locked and the carriage ground to a prolonged, screeching halt. The noise finally woke Tol, who sat up in his bunk in annoyance was promptly catapulted to the floor by the final braking action.

He got up, slipped boots on, and wandered down the stairs of the double-decked sleeper to investigate. He stuck his head out between the sleeper and lounge and saw several carriageway employees walking around with torches. He jumped down and walked over to them.

“What’s going on? Did we lose a wheel or something?”

One of the officials came over to meet him.

“Sorry, sir, this is a carriageway matter. Please return to the carriage.”

Tol pulled out his badge and held it under the goblin’s face. The official’s eyebrow ridges shot up. “Sorry, investigator; I didn’t know you were on board. We got a report from two different passengers that someone had jumped off the carriage.”

“While we were movin’? Probably not a lot left of them, then.”

“That’s what we’re afraid of.”

“If you’ve got an extra torch I’ll help you look.”

Tol joined in the search. They had done some math and come up with the area indicated. The passenger had jumped from near the front of the kilometer-long carriage. He or she could be anywhere from this point to a half-kilometer back, assuming no rolling under the carriage itself. They formed a line and started walking slowly towards the rear. As they trudged along Tol found himself next to the official he’d first encountered.

“Did the witnesses say anything about
why
the subject jumped off a carriage moving at 100 kilometers an hour?”

“Only that the subject—apparently an elf—was very pale and suddenly screamed something about ‘the curse has followed me,’ just before he jumped.”

“Yeah, I’d call the urge to jump off a fast-moving object a curse, all right. Not a long-term problem, though.”

Just then one of the others yelled “Sir! There’s something over here!”

“
Something
? By that do you mean
something we’re looking for
?” the conductor yelled back.

“I...I’m not sure.”

Tol and Wijuvva (‘Wijjy’), the conductor, hurried over to where the other search team members were gathered. There was an elf there, on the ground. He was obviously deceased: so far, no surprises. Tol bent down and examined the body. It was completely intact: not a bruise, abrasion, or laceration to be seen. There was neither blood nor tissue in evidence. The elf looked perfectly healthy, with only one minor exception. He wasn’t breathing.

The rail employees brought the body back to an unoccupied car under Tol’s supervision. A company doctor declared the elf officially deceased. That just left three questions: why did the elf leap from the carriage in the first place; why wasn’t he all bunged up from the high-speed impact; and since he wasn’t bunged up, what killed him?

The put the deceased on ice for the remainder of the trip, as Tol had ordered him taken to the National Forensic Lab in Goblinopolis for post-mortem examination. The remainder of the trip gave Tol an opportunity to reconstruct the event. The conductor moved all passengers back and sealed off the first car as a potential crime scene. Tol interviewed the witnesses in depth. What they told him did not make sense.

The elf got on at the farming village of Upupa, the only stop between Goblinopolis and Dresmak. (The Limited made a loop, starting and ending up at Goblinopolis. One carriage looped clockwise, the other in the opposite direction.) He kept to himself up until the last half-hour, at which point he began changing seats every couple of minutes, growing increasingly agitated. He asked people if they saw someone or something following him, but no one did. Toward the end he was holding a very strained conversation with an invisible ‘ghost’ companion and pacing back and forth. People moved away from him and who/whatever he was talking to; he did not seem to notice.

Finally, the elf broke into a sudden run for the door, yelling something garbled about a curse. One of the witnesses said it sound like he said “ancestral curse,” but none of the others could make out any details of what the elf was babbling hysterically as he ran. “Crazy as a night-screamer,” Tol muttered, as he read through his notes. He was on the verge of simply calling the case closed due to ‘mental aberration of the subject’ when a shadow passed over, or rather through, him and it suddenly got very cold.

Tol looked around instinctively for an open window, but then remembered they were in the Asga Teslu where in the daytime it got hot enough to coagulate a red-throated rock crawler’s blood. The carriages were cooled, yes, but not by any process powerful enough to create that level of temperature differential. Tol smiled as he realized once again how potent was the power of suggestion. Of course he felt cold: that was the traditional means by which ‘ghosts’ made themselves known. Ghosts and curses and phantoms were all manifestations of an active imagination, but that didn’t make them any less real to those who truly believed.

Tol wasn’t one of them. He had long since concluded that people were the only things that go bump in the night. He went to take a sip of the nice hot tea he’d been drinking while writing out his preliminary report and was shocked into temporary immobility by what he discovered. It was frozen solid.

“Wait, if it really was some ancestral curse, why would the spirit or whatever still be on board the carriage after the victim offed himself?” Tol was talking to Doctor Millmoss, the paranormal psychologist the EE Bureau used as a consultant on cases like this, on his comm.

“Residual energy? Are you on the level? I thought energy made things hotter, not colder. Negative energy? Is there really such a thing? No offense, doc, but I just can’t buy into this malarkey. Thanks, anyway. Bye.”

Tol sat and stared at the ceiling of the carriage in thought. He wasn’t focused on anything up there, just fixated on one spot while his mind went over recent events analytically. Suddenly an impossibly black shadow moved across his field of vision. It took a second or two for it to register; when it did Tol leapt to his feet reflexively. He spun completely around, taking in the lighting and calculating the necessary position of an object in order to cast that shadow.

There was no object, and no strong source of light in the direction necessary to cast the shadow even if there had been. It must be some form of optical illusion.

Tol decided to conduct a simple experiment. He had been sitting in the same seat the witnesses said was occupied by the elf for most of the trip. He relocated to the other end of the now-empty carriage and waited. After a full hour there had been no shadows, no temperature fluctuations: nothing. He returned to the original seat. This time he hadn’t been sitting there for more than a couple of minutes when it felt as though two strong hands grabbed his throat and were trying to choke him. Tol jumped to his feet and spun to dislodge the attacker. The choking sensation immediately ceased. He suddenly had an idea.

“Hey Petey,” he said, taking the pen from his overjack pocket, “Got any clue what’s going on here?”