Nat arrived at Eathon’s tree and somehow, against all laws of slapstick, managed to clamber up it and slip beside the object of her affection.
“What’s going on?” asked Eathon, roused him from his slumber.
“I think I heard a noise,” Nat drawled.
“What kind of noise?” the elf asked, his hand going for the hilt of his sword.
Nat paused for a moment to think. “Um, I think it’s one of those monster things. You know, the ones that roam the forest floor looking to eat people?”
“A deathwatcher?”
“Yeah, that’s the kiddie,” said Nat, trying to snap her fingers and failing.
Eathon slid his sword back into its scabbard. “There’s no such thing,” he sighed, the tension leaving his muscles.
“What do you mean? You were the one who told me about them.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I only made that up to get you in my hammock.”
Nat chuckled. “Well, well, Mister Redsky. Aren’t we a dark horse?”
She placed a hand on his bare chest and spilled forward to lean in for a kiss, but Eathon turned his head at the last moment.
“What’s wrong?” said Nat. She pulled back. “It’s my breath, isn’t it? Jesus, I must smell like a festival toilet.”
“You smell fine.”
Nat’s hand went to her upper lip. “Is it my face? Is my moustache coming in?”
“You look fine.”
“I look like I’m transitioning.”
“It’s not you, Nat, it’s me.”
“Ugh, that old chestnut,” said Nat, rolling her eyes back so far she almost caught sight of her brain.
“No, I didn’t mean it like that…”
“Then how did you mean it? Oh God, don’t tell me it’s all different down there,” she said, pointing to his crotch, “like you have a set of mandibles in your pants?”
“No!” Eathon cried, then remembered his sister was sleeping a couple of trees over and lowered his voice. “It’s just that I’m not prepared to interfere with another man’s girl. Terry may be gone but he still has feelings for you. Plus we’re both inebriated.”
“No one who’s actually drunk can pronounce the word “ineberated.” She tried again. “Enerbiated.” She gave up. “Damn it!”
She threw up her hands, and in doing so, went toppling from the hammock. Eathon just about caught her, snatching her by the wrist and sending her rolling on top of him. Their eyes met, inches apart.
Nat breathed him in.
TERRY EMERGED THROUGH Elderwood’s portal. He was back in The Broken Lands.
As the gateway closed behind him he glanced about at his surroundings. He was in the middle of some woods. These woods were different to before though, not the same as the ones he’d landed in during his first trip. The foliage was different—less jungle, more coniferous—and a wet fog clung to the ground like a vast grey sea. Less Garden of Eden, more Forest of Doom.
“Where am I?” he asked Elderwood, whose face looked back at him from the bark of a nearby tree.
“Here,” said Elderwood, and dropped a weird-looking fruit into Terry’s hand.
“What’s this for?”
“Take a bite and all will become clear.”
“I dunno,” replied Terry, who recalled something shady from Sunday school about eating forbidden fruits.
A branch slapped him lightly about the arse.
“Just eat the bloody fruit, will you?” said Elderwood, who’d had quite enough nonsense for one day.
Terry did as the tree insisted and chowed down on his peculiar offering.
BOOSH.
Instant, head-mashing drug trip.
Terry’s pupils turned into saucers and his mouth hung open like a guppy’s. He’d taken some mushrooms at Glasto one time, but this knocked that experience into a cocked hat. In an instant, he was transported from his body, moving through time and space and merging with the cosmos to become one with the infinite. In terms of profundity, it definitely had the edge on seeing Lionel Richie go a bit rainbow-coloured.
As Terry drifted, he heard Elderwood’s rich, gravelly voice speaking to him like the guy who used to do the movie trailers. The tree’s voice told him, with moving pictures, how evil had returned to The Broken Lands. How Clive had become a force to be reckoned with, and was sowing destruction far and wide. It told Terry that the fate of the world was at stake and that he was required to play an important part in its survival. It also told him that his girlfriend had gotten wasted and bunked up with Eathon. Of all the things the tree told him, this was the one that really stuck.
Then all at once Terry was gone, vanished like the browser window of a startled masturbator. In a split second he was shunted back to the physical realm and reunited with the meat of his body.
“What the hell?” he gasped, staggering backwards as if he’d been involved in a low-speed collision.
Elderwood came into focus. “I have showed you all you need to know. Now, will you rejoin the cause and help defeat the evil that stalks these lands?”
“Of course I will,” said Terry, “just tell me what I need to do.”
Elderwood smiled. “You must go forth and enter the cavern.”
He rearranged the spread of his canopy to open it up to the firmament. Rays of sunlight broke through and lasered off the morning fog, vapourising the grey sea and revealing the maw of an ancient cave.
“Where does that go?” asked Terry.
“To your salvation, or to your death,” explained Elderwood.
Terry sighed. “Okey dokey.”
He was walking to the cave mouth when Elderwood stopped him.
“You’ll need something to light your way.”
“What? It’s not like I bought a Maglite with me.”
“No need. Snap off one of my branches, and when you need a light, simply say the magic word, “Luma.” Understood?”
“You sure? It’s not going to hurt you, is it?”
“Of course not.”
“Okay then…”
Terry reached for the nearest branch, wrapped his hand around it, and snapped off a length.
Elderwood wailed in agony. “Arrrrggghh! The pain!”
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, you told me it wouldn’t hurt!”
Elderwood stopped screaming and smiled. “You humans. Always so serious.”
NAT WOKE TO a birdsong that rasped across her wounded brain like a fiddler’s bow. Her mouth tasted evil, her stomach a bucket of rusty nails.
She sat up slowly and peeled back her eyelids to find herself twenty feet in the air and still wearing her Ugg boots. She was lying in a hammock. Her own hammock. She had no clue how she got there, then, with a clammy sense of horror, recalled the events of the previous evening.
Sneaking by Galanthre’s tree.
Climbing up Eathon’s.
Hitting him up with a medieval booty call.
Her guts turned over and she tasted bile in her throat. This was going to be a rough day.
With the utmost care, Nat managed to climb down from her tree and set down on the dew-damp soil. She sheepishly went in search of her companions and found them stood around the ashes of last night’s fire shivering in the morning chill. Nobody was talking. Apparently, Nat was not alone in her hangover. This was a party comedown in every sense of the word “party.”
“Morning,” croaked Galanthre, her bloodshot eyes speaking the steep cost of the night before.
Nat returned the greeting and looked to Eathon, but instead of engaging her, he went about cramming his belongings into a pack before tying it off with a length of twine.
“We’d best eat before we get going,” he said, still dodging her gaze.
The party gathered around the spent campfire and took a silent breakfast of trail rations. Having filled their bellies with almonds, stone bread and dried beef, they were beginning to feel a lot more human (or elven, or dwarven, depending on their persuasion).
Nat begge
d her companions to let her snatch a nap before they set off in pursuit of Clive, but they insisted on picking up the trail right away.
Soon the gang were back on their feet and following the giant’s craterous footsteps once more. They yomped through woods, they yomped through swamps, they yomped past the ruins of another ravaged settlement. After a few more hours the sun rose high into the sky and shone bright and hot. Nat began to lag. The weather was no good at all for someone with her fair complexion. What she wouldn’t have done for a bottle of SPF 30.
The party were trekking across a patch of rocky lowlands when the wind changed and they encountered a terrible smell: a suffocating, putrid stench that burned hot in their sinuses. It stank like an abattoir in the height of summer.
Following the terrible aroma, the party rounded a large, rocky outcrop, only to look up as one and discover an horrific sight. Sat behind it, legs crossed in silent meditation, was a giant made of trolls.
Nat’s hand went to her mouth and her mind flashed back to a trip she’d taken to Australia as a kid. She and her mum and dad—back when they were a family unit—were visiting her aunt who lived on a farm outside of Sydney, and they’d all gone into the wild looking for kangaroos. She was so excited to see one, but no matter how carefully she crept, the creatures would keep so far in the distance that she could barely make them out through binoculars. Her aunt would point to little dots the size of ants and Nat would run at them with the binoculars pressed to her face, hoping to bring them close enough to see the animals life-size. Then, BAM! Nat went sprawling to the dirt, tripped by something lurking unseen beneath her eye-line. She looked to see what it was and found a large, hairy monster lying on the ground. It was a kangaroo. A kangaroo! As she lay there, mere feet from the animal, the swell of the animal’s chest went from a hypersonic flutter to a slow, laboured throb, then stopped completely. Nat had gotten her wish. She’d seen a kangaroo. She bawled her eyes out for the rest of the day.
Nat staggered back from the cross-legged giant, awestruck. While she was no student of the Monster Manual, she could tell you this much: this was no bloody smurf. The giant was a thing of nightmares, like something from an Aphex Twin video, only blown up to the size of a block of flats. At the crest of the monster sat Clive, nestled inside the creature’s forehead and apparently asleep.
“What d’ we do naw?” whispered Tidbit.
Nat took a gulp. “We’ve come this far,” she replied. “We have to face him.” She cupped a hand to her mouth and called up to the giant’s pilot. “You and me need to talk.”
The giant twitched awake, stood up and angled its head towards them. “You?” Clive cried.
On his instruction, the monster reached down, snatched Nat up in one of its hulking paws and carried her up to its master.
Eathon drew his blade and went to swipe out the giant’s Achilles heel, but his sister stopped him. “Futile,” she told him. “Let them talk.”
The giant held onto Nat like a squirrel clutching a nut. Cleaver, who Nat had managed to half-draw as the monstrous hand came swooping down at her, squirmed in his scabbard.
“Let go of us, you toe rag!” he protested. “I’ll cut ya!”
Nat regarded the horror before her. A swarm of flies circled around the giant’s head like a buzzing black halo, and in the centre of it all sat Clive, looking absolutely vile. He’d never been much of a looker, but now he resembled a body dragged from a lake. One of his eyes was shot with blood, the other gone; plucked from his skull. Revolting boils leaked turbid, yellow seepage over his clammy skin. This wasn’t a man anymore. This was a monster.
“Do you have something to you want to say to me?” he gurgled in a voice like a rotten plum being sawed on by a cheese grater.
A black static fizzed about him as though the very air he touched was corrupted.
Nat looked on, eyes wide. “How are you doing this?”
“Oh, you mean this thing?” he replied, making his corpse golem shrug. “It’s nothing special really. It only looks like magic if you're not the magician.”
Nat strangled a sigh. Even with all his newfound tricks, Clive was still an unctuous little tosspot. “You have to stop this,” she told him.
“Or what?”
“Or you’ll get a smack in the chops,” explained Cleaver, not all that helpfully.
Nat shoved the sword back in his scabbard before he could elaborate any further.
“Where are the rest of you?” asked Clive, seeing only three figures at his feet.
“Nev and Ash are looking after the citadel,” she replied, “Terry went home.”
Clive laughed. “So, you finally trimmed the crust off your shit sandwich, eh? Good for you. Terry wasn’t cut out for this place.”
“And you are?”
“Of course. I can be whatever I want to be here.”
“And what do you want to be?”
“I want to be king,” said Clive, altogether satisfied with himself, “and I want you to be my queen.”
That came out of left field, to say the least. “Come again?” said Nat.
“You and me. Ruling this place. Magic and might.”
“I don’t get it,” said Nat, taking extra care with her words. “Is this a joke?”
Clive’s grin turned crooked. “Why would I be joking?”
Nat faltered. “Come on, Clive. All you’ve done since we got here is rip the piss out of me, now you want me on your arm? It doesn’t make sense. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m flattered but, erm, I kind of have feelings for someone else.”
“Who?”
Nat wasn’t telling. “It doesn’t matter. Anyway, since when were you into, you know... my type?”
The giant hands holding Nat tightened their grasp.
“You’ve been talking to Terry, haven’t you?” Clive growled.
“No,” she lied, “it’s just—”
“—He told you about the school showers, didn’t he? About Queer Clive?”
“I don’t care that you’re gay, Clive, I care that you’re a killer.”
He roared and used his monster to kick the lid off a pile of rocks, blasting it to pieces like a child turning over an anthill.
Nat clung on for dear life; Fay Wray in the grip of King Kong. What the hell had gotten into him, she wondered. Had a lifetime of abuse messed Clive up in the head, or was this just denial writ large? Was this his way of proving he was straight after all? Could it be that even now, piloting a walking skyscraper, he was still fighting his bullies?
The giant ceased thrashing as its puppeteer regained his calm. “None of this matters,” Clive told himself. “That was before.” With a lunatic chuckle he turned to Nat. “I used to call myself a Game Master, but I was master of nothing. Now I run this game for real. Don’t you see?” He pointed to the figures below. “Those tree hippies down there got it wrong. You were never the Chosen One. I’m the Chosen One. I’m the one that’s going to bring unity to this place. Me!”
He pulled Nat so close to the giant’s head that she could make out the individual trolls making up the ligaments of its face. “You’re not well, Clive,” she told him. “Why don’t you come back home and we’ll get you some help?”
“You’re not my doctor!” he screamed, and the mouth of his giant opened wide as if to swallow her whole. “Make your mind up right now – are you going to join me or not?”
Nat shook her head. She’d had it with Clive acting like he owned the monopoly on suffering. We all have problems. A rough childhood, a malfunctioning alcoholic for a mother, a dad who played a game of full-body peekaboo that’s still going on to this day. Nat knew her share of suffering too, but that didn’t give her licence to act like the world’s biggest arsehole.
“You keep acting like a victim, Clive, but that’s not what you are anymore. Now you’re the bully.”
He laughed. “You want to see a bully? I’ll show you a bully!”
Nat flinched, expecting to be thrown into the giant’s gaping maw, but
instead Clive had his puppet set her gently on the ground.
“I could crush you under my thumb right now, but I won’t. Not yet. First I’m going to destroy your friends.”
Eathon had heard enough. Nat was free of the giant’s clutches – the time to strike was now. Seizing the element of surprise, the elf unsheathed his sword and bounded into the air on his spring-loaded legs. Reaching the apex of his gravity-defying leap, he slashed at the giant’s ankle, performed a somersault, and touched back down on the ground.
The giant simply stood there.
“What was that?” Clive chuckled, and reached down with his meat puppet to deliver his rebuttal.
The giant made a fist and flicked Eathon with its massive index finger, sending him spinning through the air like a Subbuteo man. What followed seemed to happen in slow motion.
Eathon sailed over the lip of crevasse.
Galanthre screamed and ran to the edge of the fissure in a blind panic.
Tidbit hoisted up the belt of his breeches and made a frantic dash for cover.
Nat hauled Cleaver from his scabbard and ran pell-mell at Clive’s giant, screaming like a Valkyrie.
Then a voice.
“What are you waiting for?” it asked.
Nat looked up to see a figure stood on the giant’s shoulder like the devil of Clive’s conscience. It was the old woman they’d found imprisoned at the citadel, only now she was scrubbed up and dressed like a Disney villain.
“We don’t have time for this,” Carnella told Clive. “Crush them and move on. We have a whole world to conquer.”
Clive turned to her; a pirate conversing with his parrot. “I make the decisions, woman, not you.” He placed Carnella in one of the giant’s fists and raised the monster to its full height.
Trolled: The Complete Saga (The Trolled Saga) Page 36
