Gareth and th Lost Island (6 page)

Henry snarled, showing his sharp teeth. He reached
behind himself, and raised the back of his kilt a bit. Gareth ran
over, and put a hand on his friend’s arm to stop him. “Not now,
Henry!” Gareth hissed. “You can fling poo at the Dean and
Nut-less
when we return with proof we found the Lost island
of Mascal, I promise,” he assured his friend before herding him
towards the exit.

Without looking back, the three of them walked out of
the Conclave Hall with their heads held high. Right before they
were out of earshot, they heard Nutleiss tell the Dean, “Thank you
for getting rid of Mintel, and that creepy little pervert.” Careful
not to let his friends know what he was doing, Henry held up a hand
with one finger extended behind his back in a universal gesture of
contempt.

Tralnis and Henry followed Gareth to his small office
in the basement of the School of Languages. They were the only ones
there at that hour, so Gareth let his shoulders slump as depression
set in. “I’m sorry for dragging you two into this. It’s not fair
that you get banished with me,” he apologized.

“When I signed the guardianship papers for you at the
orphanage, I promised that I would look after you. You’re my son,
Gareth, and Dwarves take care of their own, no matter what,”
Tralnis replied.

Henry hooted and snorted to tell Gareth that he felt
the same way.

“Thank you,” Gareth whispered, letting go of some of
his guilt.

Tralnis gave Gareth a crooked smile. “Look at it this
way. We weren’t sacked, just put on indefinite sabbatical. Soon
we’ll be off on a grand adventure, or a Frentguin as we Dwarves
call them,” he said optimistically.

Gareth snorted, and shook his head in amusement.
Henry cocked his head to the side to ask what that word meant. “The
Dwarves have a unique way of looking at things. Frentguin means a
chance to visit faraway places, meet new people, and then have sex
with them,” he explained. Henry rolled his brown eyes and shook his
furry head. This caused Gareth to chuckle slightly. Tralnis was
glad he could distract Gareth from the downward spiral of guilt he
had been headed towards.

The Dean had only given them two hours to clean out
their offices, and Gareth had a tendency to be something of a
packrat. Luckily for Tralnis, he never used the office that had
been assigned to him at the School of Medicine. He preferred to use
the office at his private practice instead. As such, Tralnis was
free to help Gareth pack up what they could in the short time
allotted.

When they reached Gareth’s office, the young scholar
held the door open for the other two, and then rotated a disk next
to the door frame. Rotating the disk realigned the rune array that
sent magic to charge the trapped Aetherium gas in the clear glass
tubes that ran the length of the ceiling. Once the gas was charged,
it gave off a strong, slightly blue tinted light that was perfect
for reading and staring at tiny details for hours on end. Once
inside the office, Henry let out a long, low whistle as he looked
around.

Tralnis looked over at Henry, and nodded his head.
“While I don’t speak Chimmish, I’m pretty sure I know what you mean
and I have to say I agree completely,” he stated. Tralnis turned to
look up at Gareth, and waved his arm around the room. “Gods of rock
and ore, Gareth, how do you manage to find anything in this mess?”
he asked.

Gareth looked around the room, trying to see it
through his family’s eyes. Except for the space left out for the
door, the walls were completely obscured by floor to ceiling
bookcases. The bookcases were jammed so full, that some of the
books had to be stacked on top of others to get them to fit. Stacks
of boxes littered the room with contents ranging from ancient books
and scrolls to small statues covered in runes. A plain wooden desk
sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded by stacks of books that
reached four feet high in some places. On the desk itself were
several journals open to the last page Gareth had written in them.
Pencils and fountain pens lay strewn among the journals. A set of
goggles with interchangeable magnify lens hung on a hook set in the
side of the desk.

“My filing system may not look like much to you, but
I know where everything is,” Gareth replied.

Tralnis rolled his eyes skeptically. “All right,
prove it. What’s in the second box from the top in the stack over
there?” he challenged as he pointed to a stack to the right of the
desk.

Gareth looked at where Tralnis was pointing. “That
box contains a collection of Issian works that were halfway between
a book and newspaper. Unlike the newspapers we have today, those
were only published once a month instead of daily,” he stated.

Tralnis walked over to the stack, and took down the
first two boxes. He opened up the box in question, and pulled out a
stack of papers that were twice as wide as a normal book and joined
in the middle by copper staples. Tralnis didn’t need to read Issian
to get the general gist of what the pamphlet was about. Most of it
was devoted to very realistic illustrations of various specious in
the nude. He was extra impressed by the fold out section in the
middle. After staring at the fold out with a grin on his face for a
few moments, Tralnis folded the extra-long page back into the
pamphlet, and then tucked the whole thing into his jacket. “I’m
just going to borrow this to… uh… study later,” he muttered.

Gareth chuckled to himself as he made his way to his
desk. He placed the clay tablet the Dean had given him on one of
the taller stack of books near the desk. After sitting in his
chair, Gareth opened the bottom drawer. He pulled out a leather
satchel that was only large enough to take a few essentials from
the desk. With a sigh, he put the magnifying goggles, three blank
journals, and a handful of pens and pencils into the satchel.

Henry walked behind Gareth to get to the box Tralnis
was still digging through. On his way past, Henry glanced at the
tablet which was eye level to him, and froze in place. He put his
hand on Gareth’s shoulder, shaking it slightly while hooting
excitedly.

Gareth frowned, and spun in his chair to face Henry.
He held up two fingers on his right hand. “Two questions for you
Henry. The first is what are you talking about saying the tablet
has a rune that looks just like the one I have tattooed on my butt?
The tablet is just covered in nonsense scribbles. The second
question is how did you know I have tattoo on my butt in the first
place? I’ve never shown it to you,” he asked sharply.

Tralnis stepped next to Gareth and leaned his elbow
on the desktop. “Lad, pretty much the whole campus knows you have a
tattoo on your butt,” he told him.

“What?! How… why?!” Gareth sputtered.

Tralnis gave him another lopsided grin. “What do you
remember from the party we threw when you got your Language
Mastership?” he asked.

Gareth frowned as he tried to recall that night. “I
remember there were quite a few of my students, lots of drinking,
and… that’s about it actually,” he admitted.

Tralnis nodded, since that was the answer he
expected. “Once you were well into your cups, you somehow got it
into your head that it would be great idea to streak nude across
the campus. Henry and I chased you from building to building, while
you quoted obscure poetry in several different languages,” he
explained.

Henry’s nod confirmed Tralnis’ story. Gareth blushed
a bit before he picked up the clay tablet, and looked at it again.
All he could see was scribbles that made no sense, definitely not
the stylized rune for the word “language” that had been tattooed on
his rear end sometime when he was a toddler. Gareth had no memories
whatsoever of his life before being found on the white sandy
beaches of the Island Republic of Draconia 16 years ago. He had
already received the tattoo before he was found. It was even more
improbable that the clay tablet had the same rune, since his rune
tattoo was in a language that only Gareth could read.

Henry shook his head, and snatched the tablet out of
Gareth’s hands. He lifted the tablet to the level of Gareth’s eyes
and tilted it so Gareth would be looking across it, rather than
directly at it. Gareth slowly lifted his hands, and took over
control of the tablet again as he muttered, “Will you look at
that?” He tilted the tablet to look straight at it again, and the
image of the rune disappeared. Titling it back so it was parallel
with his eyes brought the rune back into view. Gareth turned the
clay slab over in his hands so he was looking across the opposite
side of the tablet. He was forced to read the new inscription three
times before he believed that he was reading it correctly.

“What does it say?” Tralnis asked in a hushed
tone.

Without warning, Gareth slammed the clay tablet onto
his desk hard enough to break it. The sudden act of vandalism
caused Henry and Tralnis to both flinch in startled surprise.
Gareth looked at his friends sheepishly before pointing at the
tablet. “Sorry, the runes on the back side were instructions that
said ‘Break to Open’,” he told them. Henry reached over the table
with one of his orange furred hands, and brushed a piece of the
broken clay tablet aside. Underneath the clay was a shiny, silver
colored tablet covered in more runes.

Gareth helped pick away the rest of the clay to
completely uncover a metal tablet that was hidden inside. He sighed
slightly in relief when the runes on the new tablet were printed
normally, and easy to read. Focusing on the tablet, Gareth pulled
out one of the blank journals from his satchel and a fountain
pen.

“Don’t keep us in suspense, Gareth, what does it
say?” Tralnis pleaded.

Gareth looked quickly from the tablet to his journal
as he translated the runes. “It doesn’t actually say anything, or
at least not in a way I understand. The runes are just groups of
numbers with the occasional letter thrown in,” he explained. After
he had transposed all the number groups, he stared at the journal.
He was sure he had seen something similar to the third set of
numbers before. Closing his eyes, he retreated into his memories to
locate when, and where, he had seen the similar numbers before. He
eventually came across the right memory, and snapped his eyes open.
“Henry, I need you to climb on to the top of that bookcase over
there in the corner, and grab whatever maps you find,” he ordered
while he pointed at a bookcase on the far wall. “Tralnis, I need
you to help me get to the bottom box of this stack,” he said as he
gestured to the nearest stack of boxes.

Tralnis smirked, and pushed the carefully balanced
stack of boxes over. The only box remaining upright was the one
Gareth said they needed. “Done,” he said smugly. He noticed
Gareth’s look of shock and dismay so he added, “Come on, it’s not
like you’re the one who will have to clean the mess up!”

“Good point,” Gareth conceded and tore the top off
the box they needed. “We’re looking for a book bound in light brown
leather, with a Kraunish star and circle on the front,” he informed
Tralnis as he searched through the box.

After a moment, Tralnis pulled out an ancient book,
and showed it to Gareth. “This one?” he asked.

“That’s the one!” Gareth said excitedly. He took the
offered book, and went back to his desk. With his free hand, Gareth
swept everything that was left on the desktop off onto the floor.
Henry returned, and put four ancient looking maps, along with one
recent one, on the desk. “We need these two,” Gareth declared as he
picked up one of the ancient maps and the most recent one. Both
maps were atlases of Hadronus, just 13,000 years apart. Gareth
carefully unrolled the ancient map, and held down one edge with the
book Tralnis had found and the other edge with his journal.

Gareth opened up the Kraunish book, and flipped to
the page he was looking for. He ran his finger down a table of
numbers and matched them up with points on the map. When he was
sure he understood the way the ancient Krauns wrote map
coordinates, he used the set of numbers from the tablet and located
a small town on the coast of the Northern Continent. Gareth flipped
through the book again, and found a table that showed how to
translate Issian coordinates to Kraunish ones. The numbers used by
the Issians matched the second group of numbers on the metal
tablet. Gareth double checked the numbers, and found the Issian
coordinates pinpointed the same town. “There!” Gareth shouted as he
put his finger on the town.

Henry and Tralnis shared excited looks. This was the
first time since they had been given this seemingly impossible
quest that they thought they might actually have a chance of
pulling it off. Their happy looks slipped however when Gareth
added, “… and that’s going to make things difficult.”

“Why? All we need to do is charter an airship and
we’ll be there in a week, maybe two,” Tralnis said
optimistically.

Gareth pointed to the ancient map, “This map was made
before the Second Great Apocalypse. During the cataclysm, one of
the ancient races released weapons that caused tremendous
earthquakes,” he said before rolling out the newer map. “This is
what the coastline looks like now and here…” he put his finger down
in an expanse of blue next to the coastline, “is where that town is
now. It’s at least 50 miles off of the coast.”

Tralnis stepped back from the desk, and ran his
fingers through his long beard in a sign of nervousness. “A great
big bloody ocean… why did the town have to be in the middle of tons
and tons of liquid death,” he moaned.

“What’s wrong?” Gareth asked, concerned since he had
never seen this side of his father before.

Tralnis closed his eyes, and took in a few deep
breaths to calm himself. “One of the things Dwarves are most scared
of is drowning when a cave suddenly fills up with water. Large
bodies of water scare us silly,” he admitted.