Gathering of the Titans: The Tol Chronicles Book 2 Read Online Free PDF

the other races far behind. Other than that they were ridiculously tall and, legend had it, capable of quite a lot of destruction when riled, no one knew much about these giants. That was all about to change.
    Tol had never seen a titan before, so he didn’t really know the proper way to greet one. He wasn’t very good at formal, so he decided to go casual but polite. It’s difficult to be casual when you are accustomed to being thought of as a big, intimidating person and suddenly you’re shaking hands with something that could probably crumple you up and dribble you like a bouncerball. The polite part, though, comes quite naturally.
    By the time Tol and the others rolled up, there were two dozen titans and twice as many government workers milling about. He stared in mute amazement at the sheer size and physique of the giants. He definitely did not want to make any of them mad. He only hoped they were sufficiently intelligent that they could be reasoned with. The legends made them sound like mindless brutes. He gathered his wits and approached with what he hoped was not too obvious trepidation. He held out his hands in friendship.
    “I Tol-u-ol. I friend.”
    One of the titans looked at him and shook his head. He turned to another one and said, “I don’t see how they expect us to negotiate when they keep sending over morons. This one doesn’t even understand basic verb conjugation.”
    Tol dropped his hands. “I was trying to communicate at some minimal level in case you didn’t speak much Goblish. I can see now that won’t be necessary.”
    The first titan sighed. “Thank the gods. We were beginning to wonder if the rest of Tragacanth was inhabited by idiots.”
    “Well now that you’ve taken a whizz on my diplomatic approach, I’ll just drop it. I’m not much of a diplomat, anyway. Getting down to brass tacks, what are your demands?”
    “We haven’t demanded anything. We are petitioning for the right to occupy this underground urban complex, built by our ancestors but lost in our surviving historical records, under the terms of the Ancestral Graveyard Edict.”
    Tol’s detective sensibilities kicked in.
    “If the city was lost, how did you know we’d found it?”
    “You tripped the burglar alarm.”
    “I don’t hear any alarm. Besides, titans are still arriving: that means some of them were days away when the entrance was violated. How could you hear anything from that far off?”
    “Ultra-low frequency pulses,” the titan replied, “They can travel for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers. Since we have lived for millennia in small, isolated colonies, we developed the ability to hear and communicate with ULF pulses.”
    “How do you generate them?”
    “Most often by Tympanum Majorum. That’s a huge two- headed drum where the tension on one head is adjustable with a foot pedal. As the drummer hits the Tympanum with large, soft-headed mallets, he changes the timbre, pitch, rhythm, and tempo according to a code we developed millennia ago. The recipients, once alerted, wear odd-looking ear coverings that filter out everything else to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the pulse. To a goblin it would sound something like a faint distant throom .”
    “How did you come up with the idea for that?”
    “Sea Behemoths taught us. They have built-in Tympana and use them to communicate clear around the world underwater with ULF pulses.”
    “Sea Behemoths...” Tol replied thoughtfully. He wasn’t sure he was buying that explanation, but he would give them the benefit of the doubt for now. The titan, whose name was Tartag, took Tol over and showed him the large Tympana colored to look like stones and mounted in natural-esque stone towers taller than the surrounding landscape. They were set to vibrating by strong puffs of air directed up through tubes from a pressurized chamber somewhere, presumably as a result of the intrusion by the lost child or his rescuers.
    “That’s very clever,”