Don't Feed the Trolls

by Jacob Peppers

  As if called into being by her thoughts, a crossbow bolt struck the edge of the battlements less than six inches from her face, and she winced, raising a hand as small shards of stone were sent flying.

  She had meant to explain to the men that she meant them no harm, that, in fact, she was here to help them, but hadn’t actually managed to say any of that before they had decided—admittedly, with some sense to it—that anyone climbing up out of the bowels of the undead army must belong to that army. And proceeded to try to kill her. With alacrity.

  Mariana was frustrated, not just by the fact that the guards were shouting behind her, drawing the attention of others along the wall, so that her pursuers were constantly increasing in number. She was mostly frustrated—and scared—because each moment she spent fleeing from these men was a moment she couldn’t spend convincing King Ufrith to send out his army, a moment when Tesler and the others might die.

  One guard up ahead, hearing the shouts of his companions behind her, spun, swinging his blade at Mariana as she approached, and she was forced to leap onto the crenellations, sprinting and hopping over the gaps made for archers, narrowly avoiding the guardsman’s blade.

  She glanced to her right side at the fields below and, though she had never been particularly afraid of heights, a tingle ran up her spine. Should she place one foot wrong, she would have a long drop ahead of her and if, by some unfortunate misfortune, the fall didn’t kill her, then there were plenty of the undead down below who would be more than happy to finish the job.

  Still, she did her best to put it from her mind, sprinting faster. She could not slow, could not allow herself to slow. If the mob of angry guardsmen behind her wasn’t enough incentive to keep up her pace then the thought that, should she fail, the others would die certainly was. And so, the wind whipping her hair out behind her, Mariana ran on, leaping along the outer edge of the city walls, praying that she would find the king.

  Praying, even more, that she would find him in time.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  They were all around him and the others, pressing in from all sides, and Dannen gritted his teeth as he forced his way forward, swinging his sword over and over again. There was no elegance to it, no skill. He wielded his blade two-handed, using it like a woodcutter at his craft, raising and swinging and raising and swinging. But for every undead opponent he cut down, there were a dozen to take its place.

  Their progress toward the middle of the enemy army was not stopped, not quite, but it was growing increasingly slower as more and more of the undead army clustered in front of them. As for Dannen, he was growing tired. His arms and shoulders ached, his legs too. His back and chest smarted from several minor cuts he’d received while fending off the blades of the undead horde. But his weariness and his aches and pains were far from the worst.

  Since they had begun their wild, rampaging charge into the enemy army, five more trolls had fallen, bringing their numbers from twenty-six—including Bumblebelly and Fiddleguts—to twenty-one. Still enough trolls to give a man nightmares—one did that well enough—but it was a sign of what was coming. Also, there was a certain number—what it was Dannen had no idea—where they would lose the necessary fighting power to continue forward and would find themselves stalled by the undead horde. And when that happened, it was only a matter of time, likely a very short amount, before they were all cut down.

  He wondered if Mariana was alright, wondered if she had found the king, but he did not get to wonder long, for the latest undead to charge him—one with flaps of flesh still hanging from a face—brandished an axe. Dannen parried its unskilled blow, lopping off its head with his back stroke, but the creature fell toward him, nearly dragging him down to the ground—a death sentence with so many of its fellows pressing in around him. In fact, Dannen stumbled and would have fallen had Fedder not reached out and grabbed him by the shoulder.

  “I got you, Butcher,” the mage panted, sounding as exhausted as Dannen felt, an exhaustion so thick he could not even summon the energy to respond with anything more than a nod before the next creature was on him. He kicked it back, opening up a brief amount of space and charging into it, forcing his way forward with one brutal swing after another.

  Suddenly, he caught sight of something in the distance—or more accurately, two somethings. Tents. One off to his left, the other his right. Only two tents in an army of thousands, and he did not have to wonder long to whom they might belong. After all, the undead needed no creature comforts—considering the fact that they weren’t, strictly-speaking, creatures—and so the tents could only be the lodgings of the necromancer and his swordsman brother.

  Turned out he did have enough energy to speak after all. “Fedder!” he said, having to yell to be heard over the tumult of the battle.

  The mage finished his latest opponent by the expedient of lifting the skeleton off the ground and literally ripping it in half before tossing the remnants away with an unmistakable expression of disgust. Then he turned to regard Dannen, following his wild gesticulating with his gaze to the two tents.

  “Which is the necromancer’s?” Fedder yelled back.

  “How should I know?” Dannen snapped. “It isn’t exactly as if we were invited!”

  Fedder grabbed two onrushing skeletons by their heads, slamming them into each other with bone-shattering—quite literally—force and letting the headless bodies drop at his feet before turning back. “Your call, Butcher! What do we do?”

  Dannen looked around him and everywhere he looked, the situation was grim as man and troll fought desperately to hold back the onrushing, never-ending tide of undead. They didn’t have time to make it to both tents, that much he knew. With the way they were all showing their exhaustion, they likely didn’t even have time to make it to one. Which left him with only one option—a bad one.

  It seemed foolhardy to split an already outnumbered force, but he knew that, in truth, he had no choice. If they didn’t find the necromancer and kill him, they were all dead anyway. He turned back to Fedder. “Take Tesler and half the trolls to that one,” he yelled, gesturing at the tent on the left. “I’ll take the rest and go to the other!”

  Dannen expected the mage to argue, almost wished he would, but he did not. Instead, he only nodded. “Good luck, Butcher.”

  “And to you,” Dannen said, meaning it. Fedder was a difficult man to know, a man who had made him contemplate murder—or, more likely, suicide-by-pissed-off-mage—uncountable times, but he was also his oldest friend. He wished he could tell the man the truth of that, could tell him, also, that he was sorry for dragging him into this, but there was no time. Instead, he turned, shouting at Bumblebelly and Fiddleguts, and in moments, he—and his considerably diminished force—were heading for the tent on the right while Fedder and the others moved in the other direction.

  For a moment, he thought it likely he would never see any of them again, but then he decided that wasn’t right. After all, all paths, in the end, lead to death.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  By the time Mariana’s wild running had brought her to the part of wall above the city gates, she had amassed quite a crowd, the defenders apparently deciding it was preferable to chase this lone stranger than contemplate the unstoppable army flooding the fields below them.

  She was sprinting past, feeling the minutes slip away while she searched vainly for the king when she caught sight of a group of what appeared to be around fifty soldiers gathered in the city road before the gate.

  She hesitated for a moment—any more than that and the mob behind her would make a bad day worse—her gaze traveling from the group gathered at the gate to ahead of her along the battlements. Unfortunately, the northern king didn’t decide to show himself, and there was no way to know where he might be. Mariana frowned, thinking. Dannen had said the king was a great warrior in his own right. If that were true, she doubted he would be content to sit on the walls and stare helplessly down at the army gathered in front of his city. No, he would want to g
ather at the gate, to make sure he was ready to greet the army when they finally broke their way in—an occurrence which, judging by the poor shape of the gate, wasn’t far away.

  Yes, he would have to be at the gate. Or at least that was what she told herself as she sprinted for the nearest set of stairs leading down, taking them three at a time. She reached the bottom of a few seconds later, and by the time she did she could hear the sounds of her pursuers starting down after her.

  Mariana stared at the group near the gate, some thirty paces away from her, trying to see if she could catch sight of Ufrith, though unless the man was wearing a big sign that said “I’m the King” on it, she had no idea how she’d recognize him. In the end, it was not a sign that she caught sight of but what she thought might have been a crown. It was visible only for a moment, then gone again before she could decide for sure if she had seen what she thought she had or if the golden glimmer had been something else instead.

  No way to be certain, and considering the thundering approach of her pursuers, Mariana didn’t have time to consider it. She charged toward the group.

  “King Ufrith!” she shouted.

  A moment later, she received an answer from the group, though not the one she had been hoping for. As one, those on the outside turned, pointing their already-drawn blades in her direction. Mariana shot a glance behind her and saw that her pursuers had reached the base of the steps, not that she planned on retreating now anyway. She was committed, one way or the other.

  She continued forward, slowing her pace a bit so as not to impale herself on the blades facing her. “King Ufrith, I need to speak with you!”

  She paused, only feet away from the soldiers, and in moments, her pursuers came up behind her.

  “Come here, you—” one man growled, gasping hard for breath as he moved forward, his blade drawn.

  Mariana hesitated, wanting to draw her weapons but knowing that to do so would only encourage a fight, one she didn’t want. The man was almost upon her when a voice rose from the middle of the crowd at the gate.

  “Hold!”

  The soldiers froze, and Mariana turned back to the cluster of soldiers to see them spreading apart. The man that emerged was, indeed, wearing a golden crown, a great two-headed battle axe clutched in his hands. He was a big man, not as tall as Fedder but as wide, if not wider, at the shoulders than the mage, and Mariana thought that even had he not been wearing the crown, there would have been no question that the man who stood before her was a king. It was something in his bearing, the way he carried himself, confident and inspiring even with dried blood crusting his armor and a bandage wrapped around his arm to show that he had taken part in the fighting already along with his men.

  “What is happening here?” the king asked.

  “T-this woman, Majesty,” the guard who’d been moving toward her panted, “she came over the walls.”

  The king blinked. “Over the walls?”

  “Y-yes, Majesty. From the enemy army.”

  “Majesty,” another man said, stepping forward to stand beside the king, his uniform marking him as a general. “We don’t have time for this distraction—the gate is weakening, and the enemy army will be through any moment. Let us take her to the dungeon and—”

  “Tell me,” the king said, ignoring the man as if he hadn’t spoken as he eyed Mariana, “how did you make it over the walls?”

  “Well, I didn’t fly,” Mariana said, knowing it was probably the least-wise thing in the world to be snappy with a king but she was tired and scared, mostly for Tesler and the rest, and had little patience.

  Instead of growing angry, the king smiled widely, giving a laugh. “I see. And what is it, young lady, that you would like to speak to me about?”

  Mariana took a deep breath and quickly recounted Dannen’s plan. The king listened quietly, nodding as she did. When she was finished, the general gave a scoff. “Please, Majesty,” he said, “tell me you don’t believe this—this stranger. I mean, for all we know everything she’s told us is a lie. Why, how do we know she doesn’t work for this necromancer?”

  “Well,” Mariana snapped, “the fact that I’m breathing ought to be some small bit of proof, shouldn’t it?” She winced inwardly as soon as the words were out of her mouth, figuring that the way she was going, her breathing would be a problem that got solved soon enough.

  The general let out an angry growl, starting forward, but stopped as the king spoke.

  “Enough, General Karlax,” he said.

  The man turned, looking at him with surprise. “B-but, King Ufrith, she is clearly lying and—”

  “To what end, Karlax?” the king asked, his tone genuinely curious. “You said yourself, the gate will come down soon enough and though I do not doubt that you and these brave soldiers here will fight well, in the end, even the great might of the north cannot stand against such a force.”

  “B-but, Majesty,” the general pressed, “we might still retreat back to the inner keep. There we can—”

  “Can what, Karlax?” the king asked, his voice not unkind but also not yielding. “Die like rats hiding in our burrows? No,” he said, shaking his head, “I would not choose such a fate.” He frowned, considering, then glanced to one of his soldiers. “Bring me my horse.”

  The soldier hurried off to comply, and Mariana finally allowed herself to breathe as it appeared that she wouldn’t be dying in the next few seconds after all. The next few minutes, though…well, that seemed all too likely. “You’ll…you mean you’ll come?” she asked.

  The king smiled. “It was bravely done, your coming here,” he said, “you and your friends, and I thank you.” He turned back to Karlax. “We will need mounts, General, for all of our men. And for this one here, too. That is…” He paused, glancing at Mariana. “If you wish to come?”

  “I do,” Mariana said immediately, her thoughts on Tesler and the others.

  The king gave her an approving nod. “I thought you might.”

  “But…but Majesty,” the general said, “what…what is it that you aim to do?”

  “What do I aim to do, Karlax?” he said, turning to eye the man, his voice hard, resolute. “Our fate has come upon us. Even now, it knocks at the gate. I aim, then, to ride out and meet it.”

  ***

  Tesler was exhausted. He was afraid. Mostly, though, Tesler was ashamed. The others, mortal and troll alike, fought bravely and with incredible skill, keeping back the undead hordes. Tesler himself, though, knew little of fighting, had never trained as these others had and though he held a sword—one appropriated early on by one of the skeletons the others had destroyed—he knew nothing of its use, and it was all he could do to keep from stabbing himself as he charged behind Fedder and the rest of their group toward the tent Dannen had indicated.

  The only reason he had survived this long was thanks to the others. He felt useless, thought that perhaps those villagers, his father among them, had been right, though they had fallen short of the mark. A freak, yes, but not just that—a useless freak, one who could do nothing to help the others who fought so bravely to save the northern kingdom.

  What is wrong, Tesler?

  Tesler glanced at his shoulder where the goddess clung to him. Now, like always since he’d met her, she seemed to see directly into his thoughts. “I…I can’t fight,” he said quietly as he followed behind Fedder and the trolls, “I can’t do anything.”

  You wish that you were like them.

  “Yes.”

  But you are not like them.

  He sighed. “I know that, Maela. Don’t you think I know that?”

  You are better.

  He gave a snort at that. “Better, sure. I can’t do anything.”

  You are better, the squirrel goddess repeated, you just don’t know it yet.

  Tesler opened his mouth to answer, but suddenly a blade flashed out of the ranks of undead, piercing the neck of the troll beside Fedder and ahead of Tesler, the troll which had been protecting the mage’s flank.<
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  The mage was too busy fending off several of the undead at his front to notice, and so he did not see the skeleton brandishing its sword, lurching at him from behind.

  “No!” Tesler shouted. He charged forward, raising his sword, the blade awkward and ungainly in his hands. His sword, more by luck than design, ended up in front of the skeleton’s own, barely keeping it from striking the mage’s back. The skeleton’s skull turned to regard him, and Tesler struck out more out of fear than any actual intention and was shocked when the blade struck it in its neck, severing its head from its body.

  The body crumpled, landing at his feet, unmoving, and Tesler found himself grinning widely. “Fedder,” he shouted, turning, “I did it, I got—” But the mage was already plowing forward, unaware of what had transpired. The trolls, at least what was left of them, followed behind him. Tesler felt a surge of panic at that as he saw his companions—and his admittedly slim hopes of making it out of this alive—departing. He turned, meaning to start forward, his mind filled with an urgency bordering on panic.

  But he only managed a single step when something struck him in the lower back, hard, knocking the wind out of him. The strength left his legs, and he was sure that he would fall. When he did not, he looked down, confused, trying to figure out what had happened, and it was then that he noticed the length of steel protruding from his stomach. He stared at the bloody metal for several seconds, uncomprehending, before he realized something. It wasn’t just any blood staining the blade—it was his blood.