The Troll King (The Bowl of Souls Book 9)

by Trevor H. Cooley

  “A little,” she said, shifting her lower body again. “I don’t think Rufus’ was designed for two riders. It didn’t bother me so much in the beginning, but I’m kind of sitting on an awkward place. Part of his backbone is jabbing into my butt.”

  “Ooh! Ooh!” Rufus said, twisting his upper body and turning his head as far as he could in an attempt to look at her. “You want me big-big?”

  The rogue horse was already much larger than he had been when they met. Rufus had known the trick to changing his size before Fist had bonded to him. His natural height was just about the same as Fist’s, but he had grown until he was at a comfortable riding height for both Fist and Maryanne’s tall frames.

  “Well, I don’t know about ‘big-big’,” the gnome replied. “But it might be helpful if you were a little longer in the riding area.”

  “Uh . . . air . . . uh?” Rufus’ large eyes blinked uncertainly, not sure what she meant.

  “I don’t know if he can do that, Maryanne,” Fist said. “It’s one thing to make his body bigger all over, but it’s probably harder to change just one part.”

  “No!” said Rufus. He lifted his left arm from the ground and his stuck his thumb up in the air. The digit suddenly grew to twice its current size. He wiggled it at them. “See?”

  “Okay,” said the ogre, raising his eyebrows in surprise. “I can show you what she wants you to do.” Fist formed an image in his mind and sent Rufus instructions through the bond.

  “Ooh!” said the rogue horse. He screwed his eyes shut and concentrated. Fist felt a slight shifting behind him as Rufus’ back elongated by about an inch.

  “Oh!” said Maryanne, wiggling her hips. “Much better. Now if only I could do something about this shield that keeps smacking me in the face with every bump.”

  “I am sorry about that,” Fist said. The shield was attached to the leather harness on his back. “I have nowhere else to put it.”

  “I know. Keeps me from snuggling too close, though,” she sighed. “Anyway, thank you, Rufus. I hope that didn’t hurt or anything.”

  Rufus snorted. “Nope.”

  “Let’s keep going then,” Fist said. “We really are close and I want to get there before dark.”

  Rufus started down the next slope. He didn’t seek out a specific trail, but climbed agilely down the rocks, at times running on the knuckles of his hands and at times on his palms, whatever best helped him to keep secure footing.

  “You know what? You having a rogue horse is cheating,” Maryanne observed, clinging tightly to Fist while Rufus descended a particularly craggy section of the slope.

  “Cheating? How?” Fist asked.

  “You’ve been a bonding wizard for what? A year?” she asked.

  “More than two, I think,” Fist replied, thinking back to the time he had met squirrel. He still wasn’t sure at what point they had actually bonded, his magic had been so weak back then. It could have been that first moment they met. It had been the day he left the Thunder People and he had been so lost and in pain. Or maybe it was later on, the night when he had killed the giant spider and fought the trolls. He had been so sick after that he almost died, but Squirrel had been there in the morning.

  That first day, replied Squirrel, stirring in his pouch where he had been sleeping. The animal sounded certain and Fist had no reason to doubt him.

  “Well it doesn’t matter,” said Maryanne. “One year or two or three or whatever. Sarine has been waiting for two hundred years and the Prophet never brought her a rogue horse.”

  “That’s strange,” Fist said. Sarine was Justan’s great grandmother and Maryanne’s bonding wizard. She had also been one of the Prophet’s companions during the War of the Dark Prophet. “Maybe it’s because she already has everything she needs from her bonded.”

  One of the requirements for bonding was mutual need. Sarine already had extended life through her bond with Sir Kyrkon the elf, and toughness from her bond with the dwarf Bill. Fist figured that her bond with Maryanne gave her agility and mental focus. What else was there?

  “Come on. Who doesn’t need a rogue horse?” Maryanne griped. “They’re the perfect bonded.”

  “Me?” said Rufus. His gait took on a bit of a strut. He liked the sound of that.

  “Sure,” she replied. “Look at you, climbing all around the mountain with us two on your back. All you rogue horses are great. You’re fast and strong. You’re loyal. Also you have all that energy that bonding wizards can use. Sarine is way old for a human. She can use all the energy she can get.”

  “Then you’re mad that I bonded with him?” Fist asked, feeling oddly ashamed. He hadn’t asked for a rogue horse, but maybe she had a point. Had he done anything to deserve a bonded like Rufus?

  You are good, Fist, Squirrel assured him.

  Good! agreed Rufus, though he really didn’t understand what Fist’s confusion was about.

  “Aww, I’m not mad at you, big guy,” said Maryanne, hearing the uncertainty in his voice. She tightened her grip around his waist, giving him a squeeze. “You’re sweet and you deserve everything. Really, you do. I’m just mad at the Prophet on Sarine’s behalf. She won’t be mad for herself, so sometimes I have to do it for her. I’ll tell John about it, too. Next time I see him.”

  Fist felt a bit better. “Then you’ve seen a lot of rogue horses?”

  “A few, though Sarine’s told me about more,” she replied. “Two of the other bonding wizards we met in Khalpany had them. One of them was part dog and one of them had a regular horse head, but he could breathe fire!”

  “Really?” said Fist, thinking how useful that could be.

  “Yes! And hear this. There’s a rumor that there’s one of them still out there that can fly! Can you imagine that?”

  “Ooh! Yes! Sera!” Rufus said, coming near the edge of a short cliff face.

  “You know it?” Maryanne said excitedly. “Hey, show Fist what it looks like so he can describe it to me.”

  “Wait. Hold on,” Fist said. He had seen some movement on a trail not far below them. Stop Rufus. Back up. Quietly.

  Okay, Rufus replied, taking a few steps back from the edge.

  “What is it?” Maryanne asked, trying to look around him to see what he was looking at.

  “Shh!” He mentally prodded Rufus to move forward just a bit so that they could peer down over the lip of the rock. The ape-like beast edged sideways just a bit and leaned so that they could see the trail below.

  Dead things, Rufus sent, baring his teeth in dislike.

  Squirrel exited his pouch at Fist’s waist and ran up to the top of the rogue horse’s head to get a better look. Ick, he said, wrinkling his little nose at the smell.

  A long line of hunched figures shuffled down the trail. They were of various different races, but all of them were in some state of damage or decay. Fist winced at the smell. Back up.

  Rufus backed away from the edge. Fist turned to look at Maryanne. She gazed back at him with annoyed eyes.

  “That’s a lot of them,” she whispered. The line had stretched down the trail in both directions as far as they could see. “I kind of hoped we’d killed most of them back at the lake. What do we do? You wanna fight them?”

  “I don’t know,” Fist replied, making his voice as soft as he could. He wasn’t very good at whispering. “That trail goes to the Thunder People territory, but they are heading away from it.”

  Maryanne frowned. “That could be good or bad.”

  Fist gave her a worried nod. This army of infested dead was either returning from defeat or success with the Thunder People. “I saw many ogres.”

  She gave his shoulder a comforting squeeze. “But mostly goblinoids, I think. Let’s take a closer look.”

  They slid down from Rufus’ back and slid up to the edge on their bellies to make it easier to peer down without being seen. They watched the dead things go by. It was an eerily quiet march. The creatures didn’t groan or hiss or communicate with each other in any way. Someho
w they avoided tripping over each other, but they moved slowly as if they barely remembered how to walk, their eyes looking down. Fist wondered if any trace of their former selves remained.

  The procession seemed unending, but he and Maryanne did a quick count. Only perhaps one out of ten was an ogre. That might have been good news, but the sheer number of dead were overwhelming.

  “I didn’t know there were so many people living up here,” Maryanne whispered.

  “Most people don’t,” Fist said. “There are hundreds of ogres in different tribes all over the mountains and tens of thousands of goblinoids. At least there was before the war. Still . . . This is a lot. The evil has spread far.”

  Fist frowned as he thought about how quiet their journey had been. It was possible that an ogre and gnome mounted on a giant gorilla was too intimidating a force to attack, but there should have at least been some posturing by the tribes of creatures whose territories they had crossed. Thrown rocks or angry shouts at least. He shivered, thinking of how many empty caves they had passed. It truly did seem as if the mountain had been emptied of life and fed to that black lake.

  They scooted back from the edge and sat up. Maryanne scratched her head. “What do you think? There enough ogres down there for your people to be overrun?”

  “It doesn’t look like it,” Fist replied.

  No, Squirrel said. Ogres are strong.

  “Good. So what do we do from here?” asked the gnome. “Looks like they’re in our way. Do we wait until they’ve passed by or do we fight our way around them?”

  Fight! Squirrel urged. I will be Deathclaw again.

  “No, Squirrel,” Fist said. He shook his head. “There is a way around the trail. We will not fight them unless we have to.”

  “You sure?” Maryanne asked. “If you did another of those cloud lightning spells, you could put a nice dent in the number of bodies that evil has control of.”

  “Maybe,” Fist said. “But we don’t have time to destroy the bodies. The worms in them will be dead, but they’ll just put more worms in them and use them again.”

  “Oh, right. I didn’t think of that,” she said, a frown appearing on her face. “Ugh, does this mean that all the creatures we killed this morning are back up again?”

  “I think so,” Fist said, finding his face echoing her frown. “Unless my lightning burned them too bad to be mobile again.”

  “Here I thought we’d done some good,” she moped.

  “We did.” Fist assured her. “We closed up that canyon. And we saved Rufus.”

  “Ooh! Me!” Rufus agreed as quietly as his big voice allowed.

  “I guess,” Maryanne said with a shrug. Then the gnome straightened her back. “And you know what? I think we put a nice scare in that evil. You gave it a taste of your lightning and I bet it didn’t like that.”

  Yes! thought Squirrel.

  A smile spread across Fist’s lips. “I hope you’re right.” He stood. “We should get going. The way around this trail will take us longer than I had hoped.”

  Fist climbed back on to Rufus’ back and Maryanne leapt up behind him. “Say, why do we need to go the long way around? Why not have Rufus run straight across that path? We’ll just knock a bunch of those infested things over and keep going.”

  “Because then the evil will know where we went,” Fist replied. “If it’s mad at us, I don’t want it following us to the camp.”

  Keeping hidden wouldn’t be too easy. They were too big to blend into the background and he hoped that the larvae inside the dead things weren’t alert enough to notice their passing. Rufus backtracked a little bit and Fist had him climb down into a copse of trees before descending the slope at a different heading away from the trail.

  The way was rough, requiring Rufus to climb down some steep rock shelves before heading up the other side. The rogue horse did so gleefully, huffing and humming an odd tune under his breath as he went. With his large hands and the powerful rear claws, Rufus was well suited to climbing. He was doing exactly what he was created to do and for a rogue horse, nothing could be more enjoyable.

  Maryanne seemed to get a kick out the journey as well, but for Fist it wasn’t nearly as fun. They had to cling to Rufus’ back during some fairly frightening climbs. Fist was constantly reminded how heavy his armor and shield were. On one sheer section of the cliff Rufus was climbing, both the ogre and gnome were dangling; Fist with his arms around Rufus’ chest and Maryanne with her arms wrapped around Fist’s waist.

  The sun was low on the horizon when they finally passed the first rock marked with the lightning symbol of the Thunder People. Fist hadn’t felt so relieved in a long time. Then he caught the smell of burning flesh. It wasn’t a pleasant smell, like a cook fire. It reminded Fist of the cleanup after the war, when they had piled up the bodies of dead goblinoids outside of the Mage School and the wizards had burned them to ash.

  “You see the smoke?” Maryanne asked, pointing over his shoulder.

  Fist could see it now. Puffs of black smoke coming from the other side of the ridge where the Thunder People’s camp was. “This is good, right? The dead things wouldn’t set a fire. This means the ogres won the battle.”

  “That sounds right to me,” Maryanne replied, though her voice didn’t sound so sure.

  “There you two are,” said a gruff voice suddenly from overhead. Fist peered up to see Lyramoor, the elf swordsman, standing on a cliff ledge about ten feet above Rufus’ head. He wore dark leather armor and the hilts of two swords hung at his hips. His heavily scarred face was frowning and he had a throwing dagger balanced in one hand. “What the hell are you riding?”

  “Roo-fuss,” announced the rogue horse, enthusiastically drawing out the sound of his name.

  “He’s a rogue horse, Fist bonded to him this morning,” Maryanne said, frowning back up at him. “What the hell’re you doing up on that cliff, elf? Trying to decide whether to jump?”

  The elf gave her a brief smirk. Lyramoor hadn’t been the most sociable companion on their journey from the academy, but he and the gnome had hit it off. They had a similar acerbic sense of humor. But any amusement faded from his face quickly.

  “I am here because the others were captured by your old tribe, friend Fist,” Lyramoor said.

  “The Thunder People captured you?” Fist said.

  “The others. I wasn’t about to get caught by a bunch of clumsy ogres,” Lyramoor said, correcting him. Lyramoor had spent the majority of his long life as a blood slave, passed around by dwarf smugglers for his body’s magical properties. He was fiercely loyal to the academy for rescuing him, but had vowed never to be anyone’s slave again.

  “Alright tell us exactly what happened,” Maryanne said.

  The elf climbed down the cliff face quickly, leaping down the last ten feet, then stood facing them with his arms folded. “The ogres were fighting off an army of dead creatures when we arrived. We aided their struggle, but when the battle ended, the ogres took the others prisoner.”

  “Why would Crag do that?” Fist wondered. His father knew that their help was the only way that his people could be saved.

  “It wasn’t Crag that did it,” the elf replied. “Someone else is in charge of the tribe now and he doesn’t seem too keen on letting your father have his job back.”

  Fist scowled and Maryanne placed a hand on his shoulder. “Sounds like you need to go sort them out, big guy.”

  “You’d better,” Lyramoor agreed. “‘Cause I was about to go in and rescue Qenzic myself and I was gonna kill as many ogres as I had to along the way.”

  “That shouldn’t be necessary,” Fist said, his mind forming a plan. “Maryanne, you climb down. I want both of you to come, but I need you to walk behind me.”

  “If you say so,” the gnome said and slid down from the rogue horse.

  “We’re walking behind you as if we’re your servants?” Lyramoor growled, obviously not pleased with the idea.

  “Just for now. I don’t know who’s in ch
arge, but Crag will have told them I’m coming,” Fist explained. “I need to make a big entrance and they won’t understand how things work in our tribe. Don’t worry. They will have time enough to understand that you’re not my servants afterwards.”

  “Well, the fact that you’re on that big thing should impress them,” Lyramoor admitted. “They sure were fascinated with Charz. I think the only reason they captured Qenzic and Wizard Locksher instead of killing them was because he said they were under his protection.”

  Fist nodded, grateful that he had made the rock giant stay with the others instead of coming with him and Maryanne. Now he needed to make his arrival as impressive as possible. He pulled his shield from the harness on his back and unsheathed his mace. Squirrel leapt from Rufus’ head to sit on Fist’s shoulder and the rogue horse turned to face the others.