Don't Feed the Trolls

by Jacob Peppers

  “A message, you think?” the mage asked.

  Dannen grunted. “Yes. One that’s pretty damned hard to ignore. I just wish I knew who sent it.”

  Fedder nodded slowly, then his eyes widened. “Hey, why don’t we ask the lad?”

  Dannen turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow. “What’s that?”

  “The lad. He can talk to animals, right? Or says he can, anyway. Why don’t we just ask him to talk to one of the beasts, figure out what happened here?”

  “Fedder,” Dannen said slowly, “they’re all dead.”

  “Ah. Right. Probably that’d make it harder.”

  “Yeah,” Dannen sighed, “probably.”

  They remained there in silence for several seconds, each thinking his own thoughts. Finally, Fedder spoke. “It’s a damned waste.”

  Dannen had never had a particular love for animals, certainly nothing like Tesler himself, but staring at the wanton destruction before him, he was forced to agree. Still, he was surprised to find Fedder looking so grim, a man who often times seemed to him to possess hardly any human emotions at all. Except anger, of course. That, the man had in abundance. “Yes,” he said finally. “A waste.”

  Fedder shook his head sadly. “There’s good eating in cows.”

  Dannen sighed, rising to his feet. “And the horses?”

  Fedder snorted, looking at him as if he was insane. “You ever ate horse, Butcher?”

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “Well. You ain’t missin’ much, that’s all I’m saying.”

  Dannen rubbed at his temples where a headache was beginning to form. “You’re all heart, Fedder, you know that?”

  “What?” the mage asked. “Butcher, I’m just sayin’ it’s a wa—”

  “No, I heard you. Come on. Let’s go give the house a look.”

  He glanced over at the others and saw that they were much as they had been, Mariana still dry-heaving, and Tesler’s expression changing from one of concern to one of anger and sadness at turns. Then he started toward the farmhouse, stopping as he noted the bloody scrawl along the home’s outer wall.

  Fedder grunted beside him. “Well. Not exactly subtle, is it?”

  “No,” Dannen said. “Not subtle.”

  And that much, at least, was true, for in case the dozens of dead animals lying butchered in the field were not enough, the perpetrators had apparently decided to write the message along the wall in what could only be blood.

  Turn back now, Dannen Ateran. Turn back or die.

  “Well,” Fedder said after a moment, “at least they spelled your name right.”

  Dannen had received a lot of death threats in his time—most of them deserved—but a death threat written in cow’s blood on a farmhouse…that was a first.

  “Seems there’s some folks here who don’t much care for you,” Fedder said.

  “I’m not too worried about it—there’s folks everywhere who don’t much care for me.”

  Fedder gave a laugh at that. “Plus, maybe we’d love to go back, but wouldn’t you know it, the damn bridge is out.”

  Dannen nodded grimly. “A shame.”

  “A tragedy is what it is.”

  “Come on,” Dannen said, “best we get back to the others—Mariana wasn’t looking so good.”

  “Gonna have to disagree with you there, Butcher.”

  Dannen sighed. “You know what I mean.”

  By the time they got back to the others, Mariana seemed to have gathered herself. She looked pale and was pointedly avoiding looking in the direction of the dead animals, but she was standing and, it seemed, not in immediate danger of getting sick.

  “You two okay?” Dannen asked.

  “Okay isn’t the word I’d use,” Mariana offered, running an arm across her mouth, “but I’ll survive.”

  Dannen nodded. He glanced at Tesler, but the young man was not looking at him, didn’t even seem aware, in fact, that Dannen and the others were there. He—and the squirrel perched on his shoulder—were staring at the field of dead animals.

  “Tesler?” Dannen asked. “You alright, lad?”

  “They were used as a threat, weren’t they?” Tesler asked. “To warn us off.”

  “Yes.”

  The young man shook his head sadly. “So many dead just to send a message.”

  Dannen realized, then, that the young man wasn’t scared of who had done this, not as he’d first thought. Instead, he was angry—angry, specifically because someone had killed the cows for no other reason than to send them a message. “Come on, lad,” he said, clapping the young man on the back, “it’s been a long day with more ahead. Best we go get some rest.” He nodded his chin at the farmhouse a short distance away.

  “You…you mean to stay?” Tesler asked in disbelief. “Here?”

  Dannen looked up at the sky. “I don’t see as we have much choice. Night’s coming on, and with all that’s happening in the north, I don’t love the idea of traveling in darkness when we can’t see what’s coming at us. In my experience, villains are rarely kind enough to send a letter of announcement ahead of themselves.”

  “You’re right, of course,” Tesler said, but Dannen could hear something in the lad’s voice.

  “What is it?”

  The young man shook his head. “Nothing it just…it’s like staying in a graveyard.”

  “Graveyards don’t have beds,” Fedder offered.

  Dannen shook his head. “That’s not what he means,” he said. At first, he wanted to dismiss the young man’s concern, but then he considered that while to him and the others they were just cows, they were more than that to Tesler. After all, the man could talk with animals, had been able to talk with them—if he wasn’t just an insane madman, that was—since he was a child. Dannen supposed that such a thing might change a man’s perspective on a few things. Takes some of the joy out of eating steak when you know the steak’s name, after all. “I know, lad, and I’m sorry, really. Only, it doesn’t seem as if we’re exactly spoiled for choice.”

  Tesler nodded grimly. “As you say.”

  Dannen watched him for another moment. “You gonna be okay?”

  The young man let out a heavy, shaky sigh. “I have to be.”

  And since that was nothing short of the truth, Dannen nodded. “Come on. We’ll all feel better after a good night’s rest.” Which, of course, likely wasn’t true, but there was nothing else to say, so he started down the path toward the farmhouse, the others following.

  Dannen’s thoughts were troubled, wondering at who would have left the message and why, not loving at all the fact that someone seemed to know exactly where they were, and so he did not consider the crimson writing on the wall of the house—and Mariana’s aversion to blood—until the woman let out a gasp behind him, stumbling into the field and beginning to vomit out the contents of her stomach into the grass.

  He winced, his own stomach roiling unpleasantly. “We’ll uh…we’ll be inside.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dannen didn’t so much wake as he did decide to give up trying to sleep and after a brief meal of crusted bread for all of them—save Fedder who was the only one among them to partake of the dried meat, the others not having the stomach for it—they were on the road again.

  It would have been nice to have borrowed some horses, but whoever had visited the farmhouse had made sure there were none left alive and so that wasn’t an option. So they walked down the path, largely in silence, all of them likely bothered, as Dannen was himself, by the fact that every move they made seemed to be known in advance, known even before they knew it themselves. Even Fedder seemed troubled, at least in so much as that his whistling had stopped, one of the few things about their current situation that Dannen was grateful about.

  As they traveled they passed more farmhouses, passed fields that had obviously been cultivated. Yet, they saw no one, and Dannen grew more and more troubled. The farmhouses were abandoned, the fields left to be swallowed by weeds and grass,
the fruits of the absent farmers’ labor rotting. It gave Dannen a strange, almost supernatural feeling, as if some great calamity had befallen the world, and he and his companions were the only ones left. Not something that would have bothered him all too much in normal times—the gods knew people, for him, most always spelled trouble. But when a man planned to face down an undead army, Dannen figured it never hurt to try to make some friends.

  They spoke little as they walked and when they did no more than necessary, for in that great emptiness, speaking seemed somehow perverse, profane. The path became an endless procession of abandoned farmhouses and abandoned fields, with, from time to time, an abandoned cart or wagon left on the road for variety’s sake. They would stop to examine these, as they did the farmhouses, searching for some sign of what had happened, of what dangers might be lurking ahead of them, but they found nothing, and so with nothing else to do, they walked.

  The one comfort for Dannen was that, while the entire world seemed eerily quiet, eerily empty, there were, at least, no signs of anymore bloody messages scrawled on farmhouse doors or of those who had left it. A comfort, but a small one, for Dannen doubted that someone who would slaughter a dozen cows and horses for his and the others’ benefit would decide to leave them alone, maybe find a hobby instead. At least one that didn’t involve death threats and farm animal genocide.

  They had been traveling so for two days, their supplies of rations rapidly dwindling, when they caught sight of a village in the distance. A small village, likely home to a few hundred people, if that. What caught them all by surprise, though, was not the village itself but that, even at this range, smoke was visible drifting from several chimneys. Staring at those lazy pillars of smoke drifting into the air, the first signs of life they’d seen in days, Dannen couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief. It seemed that he wasn’t condemned to spending the rest of eternity trying to dislodge rocks from the inside of his boot during the day and listening to Fedder’s snores—which would do any lion proud—at night.

  But as he stared at them, his relief slowly faded, and he was left to wonder.

  Fedder grunted as they paused on the path, staring out at the distant village. “Seems not everyone fled after all.”

  Dannen nodded slowly. “Looks like it.”

  “We should go around.”

  They all turned to look at Mariana, the woman studying the distant village with a distrusting frown on her face. “Why’s that, lass?” Fedder asked.

  She looked at him as if he were a fool. “Isn’t it obvious? Something—likely an undead army or two—has sent everyone else running. So why hasn’t it sent these people?”

  Fedder shrugged. “Maybe they’re just not the runnin’ type.”

  She rolled her eyes. “When an undead army is coming at you, anyone with any sense is the ‘running type.’”

  Dannen didn’t much care to think about what that made them, the only fools who seemed to be traveling toward danger instead of away from it, but he didn’t bother saying so.

  “Might be they have ale,” Fedder said, the man practically licking his lips in anticipation.

  “Might be they have undead soldiers,” Mariana snapped back.

  Dannen glanced at Tesler who shook his head slowly. “I think Mariana’s right. We can’t trust it…can we?”

  Dannen frowned at the village, at those distant pillars of smoke. After days spent walking alone without seeing so much as a squirrel—at least, that was, besides the one Tesler carried—to show that life still existed outside their group, he had felt relieved to finally see proof of it, of civilization. Not much, perhaps, a small village that looked like it housed no more than a few hundred people, not exactly the height of civilization, a grand city to be sung about by bards and written about by the poets. Still, for Dannen—who’d spent the better part of the week past sleeping on the hard ground and listening to Fedder’s roaring snores without even so much as a thin inn wall to dampen their effect—the thought of spending the night on a real bed, with a real door that he could really lock, sounded as close to paradise as a guy like him was ever likely to get.

  Still, he hesitated, for while his first instinct was to go sprinting for the village and leave his companions to figure it out for themselves, he knew that Mariana had raised valid concerns. After all, a bed sounded pretty amazing, but less so if he died in it, skewered on some undead skeleton’s sword while trying to get the first peaceful sleep he’d had in…well, who could keep track?

  Which was a silly thought, of course, for if there were undead in the village, it wasn’t likely they’d let him lie down for a rest in the first place. After all, undead soldiers risen from the dead and driven by a necromancer’s magic to butchery were, perhaps unsurprisingly, not known for their subtlety.

  He told himself that it was unlikely undead. For one thing, he had some experience with the undead, ghouls and ghosts and all the rest, and they didn’t really go in for making fires. Just men and women then, though that begged another question, one that worried him. What type of men and women would remain in their homes when so many others had fled?

  “Mariana’s right,” he said slowly, “we’d have no idea what we’d be walking into.”

  Fedder snorted, opening his mouth to say something, but the woman beat him to it. “Thank you. Why take the cha—”

  “But it doesn’t matter,” Dannen went on. “Dangerous or not, we have to go to the village.”

  “What?” Mariana asked. “Why? What are we on some sort of scavenger hunt to see the number of ways we can almost die? We’ve got troll and undead dragon in the bag, so now you want to knock village of the damned off the list?”

  “What I want,” Dannen said slowly, “is to get some supplies. We’re pretty well out, in case you hadn’t noticed. I don’t know about you, but I don’t much care for the idea of chewing on our boots because we were too frightened to stop. Besides that, we can’t just keep walking blindly. We need to find a map—a guide would be better—and maybe some means of transportation, assuming, of course, that we want to get to the capital while there’s still a capital to get to.” Which, of course, was one point that he wasn’t at all sure on, but he had given Perandius his word. Usually such a thing didn’t mean shit, for he had given his word—and broken it—countless times, but this time, for reasons he did not fully understand, it did.

  Perhaps it was because he believed that what was happening to the north was wrong and he had suddenly been overcome by a streak of morality that had rarely troubled him in the past. More likely though, he thought it was simply because he was pissed off. He’d been attacked by an undead horde, an undead dragon, and a Tribune-turned-ghoul, had lost count of the times he’d nearly died in the last few weeks. Probably he was going to die soon enough, but if he could, he would make the bastards behind all of this pay before he did.

  Fedder grunted, obviously pleased. “You see, girl?” he asked. “Heroing isn’t about being scared of your own shadow.”

  “Unless, of course,” Dannen said, “you run into a shade.”

  “A shade?” Tesler asked. “What’s that?”

  Fedder frowned, as if hurt that Dannen hadn’t agreed, but the man would just have to get over it. After all, so far as Dannen was concerned, being in a state of constant terror was pretty much all heroing was. “Nasty buggers,” the mage said, “they pose as a man’s shadow and then try to kill him.”

  “But how—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Dannen said. “What does is that, while we have to stop, Mariana’s right. We have no idea what we’re walking into, so everyone be ready.”

  Mariana and Fedder were both frowning now, neither of them liking it, but that was alright. After all, Dannen figured that’s what compromise was—both parties walking away feeling cheated. And if you were “heroing” and you weren’t miserable, then he didn’t think you were doing it right.

  He looked back at the village and while he knew that what he’d told them was true—that th
ey had to stop, unless they wanted to starve to death on the way to the capital—that didn’t keep him from feeling rooted to the spot, and it took some effort to get himself moving. People might mean beds and ale, a place to stay where he didn’t wake up with damp clothes from where the dew had collected on him during the night, not to mention the various aches and pains that were a little unwelcome surprise each morning. But he’d also lived long enough to know that people had a tendency to take it in mind to kill a man for hardly any reason at all, had the scars to prove it.

  But finally, he started moving down the path toward the village, hoping that he hadn’t just consigned himself and his companions to a terrible death.

  ***

  Despite Dannen’s fears—fears which had grown with each step they took—they reached the village in short order and no slavering horde with killing on its mind appeared. Which just as well as, just then, Dannen didn’t think he’d put up much of a fight, might even welcome it. Not the best cure for an aching back, maybe, but a guaranteed one at any rate.

  Dannen paused at the entrance to the small town—no grand gate or guards stationed here, not in so small a place—and looked around. A small village—town was probably too grand a word for a few dozen houses and shops—but he noted, with a mixture of anxiety and relief, that people moved about the street. A man and woman walked down the lane—well, “stumbled” might have been more accurate. They moved with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders, not so much a gesture of affection, it seemed, as a necessity if they wanted to remain standing. Farther down the street a shopkeeper stood at his stall haggling with an angry customer.

  He was surprised by the amount of relief he felt at seeing actual living, breathing people, particularly when none of them showed any signs of wanting to kill him. He turned to glance at the others. Fedder was currently standing with his hands on his hips, grinning an “I told you so” grin while Mariana scowled at the buildings around them, looking for that undead horde, maybe.