Mabele extended her tail. “You must be the famous Nat,” she said said, shaking the Chosen One’s hand. Nat reciprocated, still gobsmacked. “And you must be the elf,” she said, turning to Eathon and giving him stink eye.
“It’s okay,” Terry told her, “we’ve got bigger things to deal with right now.”
“We certainly do,” Mabele replied , “just look at the state of you.”
Using her tongue, she wiped a smudge of dirt from his forehead like a mother taking a wet hankie to her toddler.
It did spoil his heroic entrance somewhat.
Chapter Eleven: Meat Grinder
ASHLEY AWOKE TO two sets of hands grabbing him by the forearms and yanking him from his bed.
He fought them, but his assailants possessed the kind of strength that suggested they spent their free time flipping tractor tyres and punching sides of beef.
The unseen figures hauled him to his feet, dragged him from his chamber and sent him blinking into the torchlit hallway outside. When Ashley’s eyesight returned he was surprised to discover that the hands holding him belonged to two elves, both of which he’d previously fought alongside.
“What’s the drama, guys?” he asked, but his captors wouldn’t answer.
Instead they dragged him along the corridor and down a flight of stairs before thrusting him through the throne room’s doors, making their hinges shriek like ungreased brakes.
They set him down on his knees next to a second prisoner, Neville, who was there already, was sat in his wheelchair at the end of a third elf’s sword. There were others gathered in the wings also—elves, humans and halflings—and not one of them wore a friendly face. Indeed, the room seemed to throb with an ambient hum of menace.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” said Emerdor, who was sat before them in the Durkon throne.
“What you doin’, chief?” spat Ashley. “Sittin’ there acting all bad.” He went to get up, but Tweedledum and Tweedledee kept him in place.
“Answer me a question,” said Emerdor. “Have either of you ever lost someone you were close to?” He cast an imperious eye over them, suggesting the question was not a rhetorical one.
Ashley stayed close-mouthed, so Neville answered first. “No, not really.”
“I’m happy to hear that,” the renegade elf replied. “And what of you?” he inquired of Ashley.
Ash hesitated, but Tweedledum drew a knife to show they weren’t playing. “Nah, man,” he replied grudgingly.
Emerdor nodded. “In that case the two of you, within this room, are quite alone. Every single person you see before you has witnessed the death of a loved one. Uron and Galadon, who were kind enough to escort you here, lost their sister.” He pointed to a human, whom the prisoners hadn’t met before. “Deiter there lost his mother.” He moved on to a female halfling. “Maedry lost a child.” Finally he gestured to himself. “And I lost my wife.” He leant forward in his chair. “And do you know what each of these tragic losses has in common? I’ll give you a guess.”
“Drensila the Black,” Neville replied.
“That’s right. And yet when you were presented with an opportunity to allow us retribution, you hesitated.”
“You’re talking about murder, bruv.”
“No,” Emerdor hissed. “Murder is sending an army to destroy a village of civilians. What I’m talking about is justice.” He banged a fist on the armrest of the black throne and the toadies holding Ashley’s arms tightened their grip. “So, I’m only going to ask you this one time only… are you with us, or are you against us?”
The implications of the question were perfectly straightforward; the menace altogether uncoded. Ashley was sweating like a boxer trying to make weight. He looked around the room at the angry faces staring back at him. “This ain’t right,” he told the crowd. “Drensila the Black ain’t the only one out there been gankin’ people. What about Clive?” The name sounded so lacking in menace next to Drensila’s, but there it was. “He’s out there all dred and mashin’ shit up. We should be dealin’ with him, not beefin’ with each other.”
“He’s right,” agreed Neville, “and anyway, we can’t green light an execution. Its barbaric. On our planet we’ve moved past capital punishment.”
“Well, mostly,” corrected Ashley.
“Yeah, it’s kind of complicated...”
“Point is,” said, Ash, addressing Emerdor, “we can’t get with no murder.”
The elf sighed. “Very well,” he replied, and ordered his men to haul the prisoners to their feet. “Take them to the gallows.”
“What?” cried Neville. “You can’t be serious?”
But he was.
The mutineers hauled the prisoners from the throne room and marched them outside to the citadel’s courtyard.
The pale moonlight illuminated a wooden gibbet. Stood upon a stool beneath it was Drensila the Black, her head in a hangman’s noose.
The bloodthirsty mob that lay in wait made missiles of whatever came to hand: rotten fruit, mud, even stones.
“Hang alongside her if you love her so much!” screamed an onlooker, as Ashley caught a faceful of mouldy tomato.
Neville was struck by a clod of mud. It was thrown by the old woman who’d visited them to grass on Honest Olaf. “You’re all in it together! Now you’re gonna suffer together!”
The prisoners were lined up next to Drensila with their hands tied behind their backs. The guards forced them atop stools and dressed them in matching black hoods and nooses.
Emerdor quietened the howling throng. “People, come to order. People!”
While the captives stood there, blind to their accuser, the elf explained to the crowd that this gathering was no cause for celebration. “The event you are about to witness isn’t meant as entertainment, but as consolation to the men and women bereaved by Drensila the Black. This is not an act of evil but a toll for justice, and for it to ring true, all who side with the queen must receive their just reward.”
With their death warrants served, the two muscular elves stepped forward to tighten the knots of the convicts’ nooses. Ashley felt the rope go taut about his throat and choked on the hot, panicked breaths collecting in his hood. How could this be happening? They signed up to be heroes, and now they were being lynched for it.
“Do you have any last words?” asked Emerdor, somewhere out in the darkness.
Drensila said nothing. Ash went to plead his case but the noises he wanted to make became clogged somewhere on the way to his mouth.
Emerdor delivered the sentence. “Then by the power vested in me—”
“—Actually, I do have one thing to say,” squeaked Neville, whose voice arrived beside Ashley like a student raising his hand in class.
“Then speak,” replied their self-appointed executioner.
Nev coughed and spoke his final words. “Does anyone else hear that noise?”
“What?” spat Emerdor, convinced the human was stalling for time.
Ashley strained his ears. There was a noise. A rhythmic pounding that the elf, despite his acute hearing, hadn’t noticed over the rush of vengeful blood in his ears.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
The noise grew louder still. Loud enough that it threatened to pulverise eardrums. The citadel’s warning bell sounded and the braying crowd began to panic. A sentry called down from the parapet wall. Something was approaching from the other side of the Durkon Chasm. Something so big it shook the very rock itself.
A gigantic black head appeared over the top of the citadel’s battlements and screamed with a thousand mouths.
Chapter Twelve: Monster Manual
THE TROLL GIANT blotted out the light of the moon like a snuffer dropped over a candle flame.
The creature was immense—a colossus—and yet it’s stride wasn’t so vast that it could span the width of the Durkon Chasm.
Clive arrived at the brink of the abyss and came to a halt. His steed was too unwieldy to cross the t
hin crease of rock that bridged the chasm, and the cable car of the citadel’s gondola system could barely carry a dozen men, let alone a giant. To make it to the citadel he would need to employ some creativity.
Using the Durkon red of power, he commanded the trolls making up the giant’s legs to shift position. The individuals within the monster’s thighs and calves rearranged themselves, clambering up the towering appendages and forcing the connecting torso higher into the sky. The stocky legs of the giant became gradually thinner until they were a pair of towering stilts, tall enough the bridge the chasm in a single step.
The monster crossed the gap and set foot just outside of the citadel walls. As a statement of intent, Clive used the back of the giant’s hand to swat the minaret from the citadel’s black keep, sending the remains of Drensila’s private quarters plunging into the Durkon Chasm.
The giant craned its neck and leaned over to peer inside the fortress walls. “I thought I was crashing a party, not a funeral,” spoke the man sat within the monster’s head.
Neville managed to catch his voice over the pandemonium of the stampeding mob. “Clive? Is that you?”
The crowd surged to get away from the giant, and as they ran, the mass of fleeing bodies barged into the hangman’s gibbet, knocking it over and setting the captives back on the ground.
The condemned had been offered a last minute reprieve it seemed, though not the one they might have hoped for.
Ashley felt his hood being whipped from his head. He opened his eyes he find Drensila before him, smiling, knife in hand. She lunged at him—
—but only to get to the rope binding his wrists.
“There,” she said, cutting his bonds, then moved on to help Neville from his.
The three of them looked up at the troll giant to see Clive cemented inside its head amongst a complex knot of trolls.
He offered his old friends a smile that made him look as though he were unhinging his jaw to swallow a baby. “Well, well. Looks like I could have saved myself a journey and just let you murder each other.”
Ashley’s eyes went wide when he saw what Clive had become. His skin looked like spoiled mayonnaise and his voice sounded like his throat needed syringing. “Bruvver went bare Palpatine,” he gasped.
“And you?” Clive went on, pointing a giant finger at Drensila, “Aren’t you supposed to be dead?”
Drensila felt his contempt as he regarded her, looking down from on high as though she were nothing. She saw something inside him too. Something lodged in Clive’s mind. Something black and noxious.
Clive turned suddenly, his eye drawn to Emerdor, who was attempting to escape.
Before he could melt into the masses, Clive used his giant to reach over the parapet wall and pluck the fleeing elf from his feet. He dangled him in the air by his ankles. “And where do you think you’re going?” he asked. He used his free hand to point to the remains of the gallows. “Nobody executes my friends, little man. Nobody but me.”
Clive wrapped the giant’s fist around Emerdor and crushed him like a miser squeezing the last of the toothpaste from its tube.
Carnella the Cruel watched the troll giant as it smashed apart her ancestral home. She watched from the opposite side of the Durkon Chasm, where Clive had unceremoniously deposited her before heading into battle. She muttered some unsavoury words under her breath. Carnella would need to get a good deal closer to the action if she was going to influence its outcome. She started to cast a spell of levitation but was interrupted by a flapping noise from above. A shadow fell upon her and she looked up to see something incredible passing beneath the silver moon.
A myth occupied the sky.
Soaring high above, Mabele dipped a wing and angled towards the beleaguered citadel. As she laid eyes on the scene before her, she tutted and snorted a plume of blue smoke. A lifetime spent steering clear of human affairs, and here she was, carrying a pack of them on her back and getting caught up in one of their daft kerfuffles. Still, what could she do? What use was it reuniting two star-crossed lovers if their fairytale castle was about to get smashed to pieces by a wicked giant?
As Mabele passed over the monster’s shoulder she dipped her head and roasted him with a searing jet of dragonfire. The giant’s arm caught ablaze and a shower of trolls fell from the mighty limb, crumbling away like a shedding of blackened skin.
From his festering seat in the giant’s head, Clive watched in awe as the dragon rocketed off and circled around for another run. He couldn’t believe it. Nat had been right all along. Dragons weren’t just the stuff of black velvet paintings and pewter figurines. They were real. Real and vicious as hell.
Terry and his crew held on tight as Mabele blasted the giant again, baking the monster like an ant under a magnifying glass. The giant became engulfed in a sea of red and yellow as another layer of troll flesh melted away. Tendrils of smoke reached desperately into the sky, as if trying to escape the blazing inferno below. Clive saw the flames rushing up to his seat in the giant’s head and frantically used the monster’s hands to beat out the flames.
Mabele took advantage of the distraction, passing by the flailing giant and setting down in the citadel courtyard. As they came in to land, Eathon noted that the place was a lot fuller than they’d left it. Strangers scattered to make way for the dragon’s touchdown, humans and halflings, running every which way.
Galanthre saw the pandemonium and made the same observation as her brother. Who were all these people and how did they come to be here? What had the citadel’s custodians been up to in their absence?
Tidbit simply sat there, awestruck. It wasn’t so long ago that he had never seen a human before, now he was riding a dragon and doing battle with a troll giant. Perhaps his trip to the overworld had been foolhardy after all. What good was a dwarf in all of this?
Mabele set down within the citadel walls, sending up a great billow of dust. The dragon’s passengers hopped from her back and drew their weapons, ready to defend the stronghold against Clive’s next attack.
Ashley and Neville raced over, excited to meet the late arrivals.
“You came back!” cried Nev, seeing Terry among them. He placed a hand on his old friend’s shoulder and admired the new suit of armour he was wearing. “Nice duds, dude.”
Ashley lifted Galanthre from her feet and scooped her up in a bear hug. “I thought I’d lost you,” he breathed in her ear, clinching her tight.
For once, the elf didn’t stiffen at a public display of affection. Feeling Ashley’s thick arms around her, she melted in his embrace. “I’m not going anywhere,” she whispered back.
Nat smiled, warmed by the reunion, then she noticed the nooses Ashley and Neville were wearing about their throats. “What’s with the neckwear?” she asked.
“Um, bit of a misunderstanding…” replied Nev.
“They tried to hang us, innit?” said Ash, putting it plainly.
“Me too,” said a third voice.
The gang turned to see Drensila the Black stood there. The deposed queen of evil—the one Nat had personally delivered to hell—waltzing about her old stomping ground as though she’d never left the place. She didn’t look herself at all. The lipstick upon her Cupid's bow lips was smeared, her black nail varnish chipped and her hair in anarchic disarray. Her stylish dress was tattered and mud-stained, and her perfect, alabaster skin ruined by a messy wound on her leg where Cleaver had bitten into her shin. Nat could almost feel sorry for her. Cleaver, not so much.
“I’ll facking ‘ave her!” the sword roared.
“Easy, bruv!” said Ashley, heading him off at the pass. “She’s on our side now.”
Nev backed him up. “She saved our lives.”
Nat couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Honestly, you turn your back for five minutes…”
—BOOM.
The troll giant straddled the citadel’s wall and set a foot down in the courtyard, setting everyone’s knees awobble. Smoke poured from the monster’s scorched body, poi
soning the air with its rancid bouquet. The giant stooped over and crouched low enough for the people on the ground to see Clive at its helm. The dragonfire had taken the hair from his scalp, leaving his head charred and blistered. He looked altogether inhuman.
“This fortress will run crimson with your blood,” he screamed, rather floridly, Nat thought.
She went to look for Terry and found him climbing back onto the dragon. “Where are you going?” she cried.
“I have to lead Clive away,” Terry, answered. “We can’t risk fighting him here.”
He was right. There were too many civilians around to engage the giant in the middle of the citadel. “Wait!” she told Terry, and climbed Mabele’s leg to join him in the saddle. “I’m coming with you.”
Mabele gave a grandmotherly “Awww,” then beat her wings and took flight.
“What about the rest of us?” Eathon shouted, shielding his eyes from detritus kicked up by the gust of the dragon’s wings.
“I don’t know,” Nat called back. “Keep it together back here?” Not knowing what else to say, she offered Eathon a piss-weak thumbs-up.
Eathon slumped his shoulders and watched as Nat and Terry disappeared over the citadel wall and back across the chasm.
Sure enough, Clive gave pursuit, stepping over the chasm to meet them on the other side. Catching them up, he windmilled the fists of his giant in an attempt to knock the dragon from the sky, but Mabele soared just out of reach.
Frustrated, Clive ordered the trolls making up the giant’s right arm to rearrange themselves. The individual modules complied, redistributing their bodies and turning the appendage into a massive, crude hammer.
The giant swung again, missing the dragon by the narrowest of margins.
“What do we do now?” asked Nat, clinging on for dear life.
“I don’t know,” Terry replied , “but that’s okay.”
“Why is it?”
“Well, if we don’t know what our plan is, there’s no way Clive can.” He tapped the side of his helmet, a regular Einstein.
Trolled: The Complete Saga (The Trolled Saga) Page 38
