Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 by Robert G. Ferrell Page A

N’plork. One of those mages is over 900 years old. He might have at least heard of the place.”
    “Sounds reasonable. How are you going to get hold of him?”
    He held up his comm.
    “You can call The Slice on that thing? Talk about long distance charges.”
    Aspet chuckled. “No, I can’t call The Slice directly, but I can call Tol. He knows how to get in touch with the transcendents. He has an amulet or something.”
    “Handy thing to have.”
    “I suppose so.”
    Two days later the high-quality facsimiles were delivered to Saltchitterington and an hour or so after that Plåk suddenly materialized. The RPC went for their weapons out of reflex but Plåk ignored them.
    “Greetings, Aspet. Imagine meeting you again.”
    Aspet looked hard at him. “ Have we met?”
    “Oh yes, though I doubt you’ll remember it. You had a dream injected into your mind prior to the throne challenge and I helped you navigate through the difficult parts toward the end. My name is Plåk. I’m the archmage who’s over nine centums old.”
    Boogla giggled. “I’d like to say you’re looking well for someone that age, but I don’t know what your species is supposed to look like when it’s old.”
    “I am quite well-preserved, thank you.”
    “Well met, Archmage Plåk,” Aspet said,“I called Tol to have him ask you to come here. I want to show you some manuscript copies and see if you recognize them. They’re probably close to four thousand years old.”
    “I’m excited about any artifact that makes me feel young by comparison. Lead on.”
    Aspet slid the facsimiles from their sheath and laid them out on a table. Plåk studied them with ever-increasing concentration, moving back and forth among several repeatedly. At length he sat on a stool at the end of the table and looked up.
    “I need more time with these, but I can’t stay here much longer. Can you leave them out like this? I’ll come back just as soon as I can recharge in The Slice.”
    Aspet nodded. “They’ll be just as you left them. Hurry back.”
    “That, I most assuredly shall. Farewell for now.”
    He faded away in a fine shower of sparkles.
    “I wonder what he thinks we have here?” asked Boogla.
    “I don’t know, but whatever it is sure seems to have captured his attention.”
    “What did he mean by that dream reference?”
    Aspet exhaled audibly. “CoME injects the neuroelectrical field of throne challengers with a specially-designed entangled stream of signals while they sleep that is interpreted by the candidate’s brain as a dream. They monitor the response to the puzzles presented in that dream to determine various aspects of the candidate’s personality and intellect. They can weed out psychopaths and utter lunatics quite effectively this way, even if they are adept at disguising those traits in personal interactions. There is a disentanglement trigger provided to each challenger afterwards to allow them to shed the dream from their short- and long-term memory. Otherwise it takes up so much space in the brain that it runs the risk of driving the person mad.”
    “So, you can’t remember any of it at all?”
    “I have occasional flashes of recollection; they told me that would probably happen the rest of my life. But for the most part, no.”
    “Meaning you don’t know if Plåk is telling the truth or not?”
    “Not absolutely. But I have an intuitive impression that he
    is. Something just... rings true about his claim. At any rate, he helped Tol out quite a bit during the Pyfox business so he’s not intrinsically evil or anything, no matter what might have happened in Morianella. Hey, let’s go grab some lunch by the waterfall.”
    “Marvelous idea, my love.”
    “Of course it’s a marvelous idea,” Aspet replied, grinning widely.
    After a cold lunch fit for a King and his Consort, Aspet and Boogla were walking hand-in-hand along a charming gravel path that led from the fruit orchard up to the waterfall when the air in front of