Growing ever more angry, Clive continued to swing his weapon arm at the winged lizard that buzzed about his head like a fly on a starving child.
Cleaver piped up. “Put yer toffee hammer away, you nonce!”
Clive snarled and the splinter in his brain throbbed. Why were they delaying the inevitable? Didn’t they realise their efforts were in vain?
Using the giant’s free hand, he dug into the flesh of his monster’s flank and scooped out a fistful of trolls before propelling them at the dragon like a volley of rocks.
Screaming trolls whistled by the dragon, one of them almost knocking Nat from her seat.
“Man, that guy has zero chill,” she noted.
“Can’t you see I’m going to win?” Clive screamed. “Come down here and let me kill you.”
Finally, he caught hold of one of Mabele’s feet and plucked her from the sky. The giant clawed at the thrashing dragon and came away with a generous scraping of scales. Nat and Terry fought to hang on, clutching Mabele’s spines to keep from falling. Clive grabbed the dragon’s wings, one in each hand, and began to pry her apart. He cackled over the sound of Mabele’s agonised screams, tugging at her like a friendless man pulling both halves of a Christmas wishbone. The dragon felt her ribcage about to separate, then—
—The giant lost its footing.
Looking down, Nat saw a great rush of rocks go tumbling along the ground beneath Clive’s behemoth. They were the size of pebbles under the giant’s feet, but like a silent era movie star across a spill of marbles, arse over tit it went. Clive loosened his grip on Mabele as he sought to regain his balance, and the dragon and her passengers were able to catch an updraft and head off into the wind.
“I’ve had just about enough of that boy,” spat Mabele, circling around and folding back her wings to dive-bomb Clive like a hunting falcon.
As the colossus attempted to right itself Mabele struck, swooping down and hooking her talons into its brow. With a triumphant cry she ploughed on, tearing the giant’s head from its neck and sending trolls streaming from the wound like a jet of arterial blood from a slashed throat.
Clive roared with fury, wrenched free of his steed and sent tumbling to the ground.
From atop the citadel battlements, Eathon and Galanthre watched the giant go down and threw their fists in the air. “What extraordinary fortune,” thought Eathon. A chance rockslide arriving to unbalance the monster just as it was about to triumph. The gods must be smiling upon them.
But Galanthre knew better. Her keen eyes inspected the avalanche and noticed that it had yet to settle. In fact, it had altered its bearing and was heading in the opposite direction. How could this be? Against all logic, the rocks came together in a cluster and skidded to a halt.
Eathon squinted to get a better look. The rocks began to unfurl like hedgehogs, growing in height and standing erect upon granite legs.
Of course!
This was no chance rockslide. These were the earth elementals he and Tidbit had encountered along the river rapids. Apparently, they had chosen to heed his advice and venture out into the world instead of sitting in a river posing riddles. Eathon laughed, recalling the elemental’s puzzle. “Marbles,” he said out loud.
The rock creatures had come to realise something most valuable. Sometimes it’s not about the answer. Sometimes the question is the thing.
Stood by her brother’s side, Galanthre watched Mabele land and saw her passengers disembark. She could see from here that the dragon was out of fight; too injured from her tussle with the giant to stay airborne. Let her rest, Galanthre thought, she had earned her respite. Clive was gone now. His reign of terror at an end.
So why was his headless giant staggering back to its feet?
Ashley saw the decapitated monster rise up over the citadel battlements and decided enough was enough. Clive had to be stopped. He raced across the courtyard to the stables, determined to make a speedy journey across the chasm and take the fight to Clive’s monster.
Barrelling through the hue and cry of panicking villagers, he accidentally shoulder-barged a figure fleeing in the opposite direction. The figure had tan skin and was dressed in a conspicuous patchwork garment of clashing hues.
Honest Olaf.
The shifty merchant who had sold Ashley a magic wand that looked, to all the world, like a twig.
“You!” Ashley roared, and grabbed him by the lapels of his technicolour dreamcoat. He was furious. Positively boiling in his armour.
Olaf’s eyes darted madly, his forehead sweating bullets. “Please, sire,” he pleaded. “Let me go, I have done you no harm.”
Ashley tightened his grip, lifting Olaf’s feet from the ground.
“Swear down, bruv,” he implored the trader. “This wand you sold me… is it for real?”
Olaf flashed Ashley a vicar’s smile. “On my life,” he assured him.
Ashley caught a glimpse of that colourful uncle of his; the one that worked on Walthamstow Market selling fruit by the bowl. A good man. An honest man.
He set Olaf back down on the floor and loosened his grip. “Go on,” he told him. “Before I change my mind.”
“Bless you, sire,” the merchant replied as he made off with a succession of scraping bows.
Ashley took the wand from his belt. Either he was right and Olaf was telling the truth, or he didn’t have the sense God gave a kumquat.
He continued to the stables, jumped onto a horse and went galloping out of the citadel portcullis like a chivalrous knight of old.
“Leeeeeeroy Jeeeeeeenkins!” he cried.
While the others ran for the battlements or took to horses, Neville and Tidbit had been left to fend for themselves.
“Wait ‘ere,” said Tidbit. “I’ll no’ be long.”
“Where are you going?” asked Neville. “Don’t tell me you’re going to join the fight?”
“Nay, lad, wha’ good would I be out there? I’m goin’ ta get yer chair.”
“Good idea,” said Nev, who had little choice but to lie in the dirt since being separated from his conveyance. “It’s back in the throne room.”
“Leave it t’me,” replied Tidbit, and made off to retrieve it.
Neville thanked him and propped himself up on his elbows as people stampeded around him. He was surrounded by chaos and blind to what was going on beyond the citadel walls. He scanned the fleeing masses for a sign of Drensila, but it seemed she’d already made herself scarce. God knows where she’d gotten in all of this.
Then a scream.
Neville looked to see a villager drop in the crowd.
A figure stepped over the body. A figure with black skin and a bloodied blade in his fist.
The troll spotted Neville lying prone on the ground and offered him a smile that ought to have come with a trigger warning. The creature’s back was ripped to the bone, Neville saw; torn away from pate to heel like a sheet of old wallpaper. As though the troll had been glued to something and ripped free.
Glued to the giant.
The troll must have become dislodged when Clive’s leviathan set foot in the citadel’s courtyard. Perhaps it had been shaken loose, or maybe it had jettisoned itself deliberately to create tumult from within. Whichever the case, the monster had Neville in his sights and was making for him on a warpath.
Nev’s guts churned as though he'd swallowed something alive that was clawing at him to get out. He watched the troll picking his way through the panicking crowd and began to commando crawl in the opposite direction. The troll moved with robotic determination, savouring the thrill of the hunt as he closed the distance to his prey. Neville wriggled frantically in the dirt, scraping his skin raw as he hurried to escape the monster. He could feel the troll gaining on him though. Could hear the sound of his taut giggle drawing ever closer.
“I’m coming to get you, human,” snickered the troll.
Working like a paralympian, Neville ate up twenty yards in a desperate scrabble towards a wooden trapdoor. He knew from forme
r explorations of the citadel that the access led from the courtyard to an old wine cellar, and hiding there was the best his febrile brain could manage.
Heart beating triple-time, he whipped open the trapdoor and rolled through the drop just in time to avoid the swoop of the troll’s blade. He tumbled down a sharp, bruising flight of steps and hit the cellar floor with his face. The landing knocked the breath out of him and left him with a blood goatee.
Through the hatch, the troll looked down at Neville and offered a razor blade smile. It was the smile of a man who'd spent the best part of the day swatting at a troublesome bluebottle, only to later find it stuck, wriggling in a patch of fly paper.
He stepped through the trapdoor and descended the stairs after his victim, snickering still. Neville crawled along the cellar’s mildewed corridor, exhausted, knowing there was nowhere left for him to go.
“Stop,” he pleaded, as though he and the troll had gotten together beforehand and prearranged the world’s most obvious safe word.
The creature continued to advance, scraping the tip of his rusty sword along the cellar wall and sending up a shower of sparks. As the spectre of death drew close, Nev felt his bowels loosen and was overcome with a powerful urge to defecate. This is what it was to be human he supposed. A lifetime spent conforming to a set of strict hygiene standards, only to forgo all propriety in our final moments by crapping our pants.
And yet the thought of going out that way only made his sphincter tighten. There was fight left in him yet.
“Not today,” he told the Grim Reaper. “Not today.”
He wasn’t the scared little kid he used to be. Hiding from life, as delicate as a moth’s wing. He was a fighter. The survivor of two great battles. And he wasn’t about to take any shit from some giant’s dropped-off carbuncle.
The passage Neville was crawling along brought him to dead end. He’d arrived at a rack of large wooden casks; the kind you might find on a Jack Daniels advert. Upon finding them, an idea lit up in his mind.
The troll stepped from the darkness to find his quarry cornered. He gave a crooked grin. “Any last words?”
Neville remained silent.
The troll paused and looked at him quizzically. “What’s the matter, human, cat got your tongue?”
But Neville didn’t respond. He couldn’t. While the troll had been busy taunting him, he’d pulled a cork stopper from one of the casks and filled up with a mouthful of grain alcohol.
The troll sensed something was wrong. He quickened his step and raised his sword. Meanwhile, Nev fumbled in his breeches for his trusty Zippo. Just as the troll was about to deliver the deathblow, he struck its wheel.
Woof!
A jet of flaming alcohol lit up Neville’s tormentor like he was made of wicker. The thrashing beast dropped to his knees immediately and began rolling around on the damp floor in an attempt to extinguish the flames.
Sensing that he might succeed, Neville grabbed the nearest weapon he could find: a corkscrew lying on a crate beside him. Using both hands, he grasped hold of the thing, lifted it in the air and drove the sharp end into the troll’s temple. The monster’s skin was as tough and rubbery as a dog’s chew toy, but after two more stabs, the screw finally punctured it.
The troll ceased his thrashing, blazing like a bonfire still.
Neville’s heart felt like a bomb in his chest.
Thundering hooves split the night air as a lone stallion powered across the ridge separating the Citadel of Durkon from the mainland. The horse’s powerful limbs tore into the barren earth, his mane licking the breeze like flames as he galloped across the bleak landscape. Ashley bounced in his stirrups, shivering against a bone-jarring chill as he drew near the towering troll giant. Pulling on the stallion’s reins, he brought the beast to a halt and removed Olaf’s wand from his belt.
“Don’t let me down, liccle twig,” he pleaded.
Ashley took aim at the giant and spoke the words. “Magna Mortem!” he cried, remembering his Harry Potter.
Nothing happened.
He shook the wand like a half-empty bottle of ketchup.
Still nothing.
Olaf had duped him.
The headless giant turned to Ashley and began stomping in his direction.
“Man, I'mma fatality that bitch!” Ashley snarled, remembering the Colgate smile on Olaf’s face.
But payback looked unlikely. The headless giant lifted its massive foot and Ashley found himself buried under its shadow. He clamped his eyes shut and readied for the end—
—When something in his hand began to twitch. His eyes opened to find the tip of the wand hissing and crackling like a roman candle about to light the sky. He managed to overcome his surprise just in time to point the wand’s business end at the giant, at which point it unleashed a bolt of lightning so powerful it boiled the air around him and left him wearing a Seventies afro.
“Rah!” he yelled, as the stream of electricity continued to spurt from the wand, blasting a hole through the giant’s chest.
Honest Olaf had been true to his name.
The smoking hole caused a chain reaction. The coherence of the giant was lost as a cancer of electricity coursed through its body, shaking its torso down to a jumble of component parts. Hundreds of hollering trolls rained to the ground, piling up and forming a giant, black mountain. Within moments, only the two towers of the giant’s legs remained, until finally, they too buckled and collapsed.
All was still.
And then the mountain began to shake.
Chapter Thirteen: Godmodding
NAT WATCHED THE trembling pile as it broke apart like a spider’s egg poked with a stick. Under the light of the rising sun, the clotted black mass seemed to melt, spreading thin across the battlefield as the trolls detached from one another to become a swarm.
In the centre of all this, strolling through the tide like Moses parting the Red Sea, came Clive. He bared his teeth and Nat shivered. Clive’s giant was gone, his king swept from the chess board, but he still had an army of pawns at his disposal. Hundreds of spots glowed in the twilight like sallow lamplights as the trolls pinned her with their yellow eyes.
Clive held aloft the Durkon rod of power and formed his infantry into a tight battalion. “Kill them all,” he commanded.
The trolls charged, snorting, howling, slobbering. The rock elementals linked arms in a bid to hold them back but were overcome and buried beneath a black tsunami. Ashley rushed to Nat and Terry and the three of them formed up, back to back. The trolls bore down on them, a frenzied mass, their feet sounding upon the barren earth like the warning thunder of a coming storm.
“What do we do now?” asked Terry.
“If in doubt, give it a clout,” said Cleaver, and burst into flames in Nat’s hand.
“Hang on a minute,” she said, surprised, “you can go on fire now?”
“Too right I can.”
“I feel like you should have led with that. Like, three quests ago.”
But there was no time to get into a bickering match. The trolls closed in on their victim. Nat and the gang stood firm, readying themselves for the fight of their lives. What happened next was going to make the Battle of Bludoch Dungeon look like a playground scuffle.
Terry planted a fistful of arrows in the soil and nocked one to his bow before loosing it at the encroaching soldiers. The shot landed between the eyes of the first troll and knocked him clean off his feet. Nat was impressed. Terry had come a long way for a guy who used to shoot like he graduated from Stormtrooper Academy.
The trolls kept coming and Terry continued to gun them down, reaching for another arrow, taking another shot...
Thwip.
Thwip.
Thwip.
The arrows found their targets, their tails shivering with spent energy as their sharpened points became embedded in troll skulls. Bodies piled up, causing soldiers charging at the rear to trip over them and go sprawling among the dead. Terry fired his last remaining arrow, punctur
ing the heart of another troll just as he was about to get within sword range. Nat finished the job by lashing out with Cleaver and taking the troll’s head.
“My kill,” boasted the sword.
“No way you get the experience for that,” argued Terry. “I dealt the damage, you just skimmed off his last hit point.”
While Terry and Cleaver debated the finer points of combat etiquette, Ashley and Nat got to work on the charging trolls. Tweaking on adrenalin, Ashley launched into a berserk death charge, tunnelling through the frenzied beasts like he was playing prison football. Nat swung her flaming sword in a great arc, lighting trolls ablaze and setting others running for their lives. Terry took up his sword too, deflecting a blow from an attacker and returning a slash across his midriff that opened a wide smile on his belly. Together they hacked and slashed at the troll army until the battlefield was smeared with more guts that a KFC processing line. They couldn’t hold them all off though. Soon they were overwhelmed and penned in by a tightening aperture of murderous trolls.
It was all over.
Until the cavalry arrived.
Eathon and Galanthre bridged the Durkon chasm using the citadel’s gondola cable, ziplining along the steep length of cord to join the fight just in the nick of time. With them came more elves, landing like panthers, drawing their weapons, ready to to battle. Eathon touched down on his springy metal legs and unhooked a backpack from his shoulder. Tidbit crawled out from inside, armed with a slingshot loaded with a metal ball-bearing. He’d decided to join the fight after all.
“Let’s be ‘avin, ye,” he growled, and got the trolls’ attention with a shot into their ranks that popped a skull and sent a noise like a whipcrack rolling across the battlefield. “Stitch tha’, ye pure fanny!”
Nat and the rest of the penned-in fighters took advantage of the distraction, tearing through the trolls and fighting their way out of the circle to join their companions.
The alliance stood firm against Clive’s army, and the two warring sides met in a clash of steel and thunder.
Trolled: The Complete Saga (The Trolled Saga) Page 39
