King's Army

by Mark Huckerby

  “What’s happening?” gasped Hayley, struggling to take in the nightmarish scene before them.

  “It’s Lock,” said Alfie. “He’s opened the dungeons.”

  Alfie looked back the way they’d come, ready to call for a retreat, but the end of the bridge behind them was blocked. A thousand grunting, drooling berserkers had gathered, barring any chance of an exit.

  “We’re trapped,” said Alfie.

  At the far end of the bridge ahead of them, the first of the dungeons’ escapees had begun to appear. A pack of werewolves baring their fangs, a ghoulish skeleton armed with a spear, a giant snake rearing up and hissing. The army of ordinary citizens was beginning to panic. There was nowhere to turn.

  “We need to make a defensive circle!” shouted Hayley to Alfie. “Yeoman Warders and trained soldiers round the outside. NOW!”

  The Defender flew above the army, relaying Hayley’s instruction. The army closed ranks until they were packed together in the centre of the bridge, ringed by the cabs, weapons pointing outward, ready for the attack. Alfie hovered ahead on Wyvern, sword drawn: a first line of defence. But the wall of monsters approaching along the bridge was almost too much to take in. He didn’t know how long he would be able to hold them back. The faint outline of the setting sun disappeared behind the Tower of London and all was darkness.

  In the Keep, the Lord Chamberlain and Tamara, still under armed Viking guard, watched with growing horror as Lock pulled the black velvet cloth away, revealing Hel’s mirror. The buzzing of flies filled their ears as the dark waters of the mirror’s surface swirled and bubbled, and the hideous face of Hel appeared.

  “It is time, my mistress,” Lock said.

  * * *

  * “Iron ship pirates! Prepare to die! Your graves will be the riverbed!”

  * “Your vessel may be pretty, but she has no weapons!”

  * “Goddess Ran of the Sea, send me your cloak to shroud my enemies!”

  † “Sink the souls of mortal men, drag them into the depths!”

  Most people like the sun on their skin. It makes them feel warm and full of life. But for half-trolls it’s the other way round. Only when the sun goes down do they truly come alive. So it was for young Queen Freya as the muted light from outside finally disappeared from the House of Commons chamber, leaving her lying in shadow inside her particle-beam cage. The comforting darkness of the coming night awakened the troll within her and that gave her strength. Enough strength for what she had been planning next.

  “You should take it before your friends come back…” she croaked in the ancient tongue of her motherland.

  The single Viking draugar guard looked down at her from the bench where he was slouched.

  “Geturðu ekki drífa þik ok deyast? Bardagi brestr,”* he grunted, wiping a thick rope of drool from his chin and flicking it against the wall.

  “I’ll be with my ancestors soon enough,” replied Freya in Old Norse. “Which is why I want you to have Brísingamen.”

  The Viking flicked his dead, milky eyes to the necklace hanging nearby. He had been trying not to look at it for hours, trying not to think about its glittering gold and sparkling emeralds. Having such treasures within reach but not being allowed to touch them was torture for his kind.

  “Go on,” continued Freya. “You might as well pick it up, at least.”

  “TEGÐU!”† yelled the Viking, turning away and folding his arms like a grumpy toddler.

  “Please yourself,” said Freya. She wasn’t sure how many more words she could muster. The effort to sound like she didn’t care was eating up the last of her reserves. “I suppose your friends will just take it when they get back, then. I heard them whispering about it. They didn’t want to share it with you. How foolish they will feel when they discover you don’t care for priceless jewels.”

  A frown grew across the Viking’s grey forehead until it had become a scowl and before he knew it, he was stomping over to the Speaker’s Chair and lifting the necklace between his fingers. It was dazzling. Just holding it made his skin tingle in a way he hadn’t felt since he was alive. He decided he would kill anyone who ever tried to take it from him.

  “Try it on,” whispered Freya. She was barely clinging to consciousness.

  The Viking looked at her and laughed.

  “Go on. Nobody is here. Feel what it’s like to be royalty!” she urged him.

  The Viking shrugged, opened the necklace and carefully placed it round his neck. Amused, he gazed at his reflection in the polished wood of the dispatch box that sat on the Table of the Commons.

  Freya smiled. “I’m glad you like it,” she said. “If only it liked you back. I’ve just remembered that non-trolls aren’t supposed to wear it. Sorry about that.”

  The Viking could smell meat cooking. Yellow smoke filled his vision. He looked down, alarmed to see that it was him that was on fire! The necklace was burning through his dead skin like acid. He grabbed the chain and tried to pull it off, but it was stuck fast. Desperate, he stumbled to Freya’s cage.

  “TAKTU Í HANN, FLAGÐ!”* he screamed.

  “I’ll take it when it’s finished with you, thanks.”

  The Viking punched and kicked the energy beam bars in agony, sending sparks flying and only hastening his own end. Finally the necklace brushed against the cage, overloading the energy-beam bars and evaporating the whole thing in a cloud of smoke and embers.

  Once she had recovered from the explosion, Freya reached into the pile of crackling bones that had until a few moments ago been the gullible guard and plucked out her necklace. She hung Brísingamen around her neck and instantly felt her life force rushing back. The transformation into Holgatroll was like a rebirth.

  It took her less than a minute to sniff out the real Raven Banner planted in a room just behind the chamber. She placed her immense green fist around it and heaved it out of the stone floor with a roar of triumph. The entire Palace of Westminster shook as if struck by an earthquake. The red lines of the banner’s magic crisscrossing Big Ben like poisoned veins vanished in an instant. The crimson glow from the cracks in the earth that spread out like spiders’ legs from the base of the tower dimmed to nothing. A group of berserkers hanging around in the square outside Parliament froze as if electrocuted, shaking and shrinking as the curse left their bodies.

  Across the country, berserkers found the blue warpaint fading from their faces, their thick Viking hair receding and their eyes clearing as they returned to normal. It would take some time for them to understand how they had come to be where they were and why their clothes were in tatters.

  In the garden of Number Ten, Downing Street, Sebastian Mortimer was trying to help his rather large father over a wall, as newly recovered secret service agents retook the building.

  In a sewer somewhere beneath the streets of east London, Prime Minister Thorn awoke as if from a nightmare to find a half-eaten rat hanging from her mouth. Once she had stopped screaming, she made her way above ground, wondering where her chauffeur-driven car could be parked.

  And in the shadow of Hayley’s old block of flats, a restored Turpin was fighting off Fulcher, who was hugging and kissing him for some reason he couldn’t begin to fathom. Soon families everywhere would celebrate the return of loved ones thought lost, unaware of the battle raging in London that could still doom them all.

  Holgatroll bounded out of Parliament clutching her banner and turned north. Soon she would be back in Norway and with it she would free her kingdom from the Viking chaos and return the undead to their eternal slumber beneath the fjords. At a troll’s pace she could be home before sunrise. But as the wind changed direction, her keen nose caught the scent of sulphur. An evil stench was in the air and for once she was pretty sure it wasn’t her fault. Her troll’s ears were not as powerful as her nose, but she could still hear the distant screams of the battle. Holgatroll leapt up the side of Big Ben and on to the roof until she had a clear view downstream. She could make out the unnatural blanket of fog t
hat hugged the river and the swirling mass of bodies on the bridge, along with the bizarre and hideous shapes of the monsters assailing it from every side. But there was something else she noticed. Everywhere she looked there were small groups of people moving through the streets, coming out of houses and offices, gathering and heading for the river – towards the battle.

  She considered the banner in her mighty hand, then thought of Alfie and the others. Making a decision she hoped she would not regret, she turned and jumped down through the roof, back into Parliament.

  On Tower Bridge the king’s army was losing hope. At his last count, Alfie had fought off a sabre-toothed centaur, a black-bearded pirate and a swarm of giant bees armed with meat cleavers. Herne shadowed his master’s every move, savaging any creature that came close and bravely ignoring his own injuries. Hayley had got the better of a stalking werewolf and a pair of hovering harpies with her longbow, but there were more monsters coming at them all the time. The outer ring of Yeoman Warders and soldiers were taking casualties, the injured being dragged back into the middle of the circle. But they couldn’t hold out much longer.

  The Defender spotted Robyn Hood just in time. She was perched on a strut high above them, aiming her arrow-sleeves at them, but Alfie flew into the arrows’ path, parried them with his armill bracelets, then hurled his nunchuck sceptres at her, sending her tumbling into the foggy river below.

  On the deck of HMS Belfast, Yeomen Sultana and Gillam were fighting the Viking draugar hand-to-hand with their pikes, while Brian steered the submarine into as many longships as he could to stop more invaders boarding them. Tony, frustrated by his inability to blink-shift in the fog, had taken to hovering round the ship, fending off the Vikings as best he could. But they were outnumbered.

  A hand landed on the Defender’s shoulder and spun him round. He was about to elbow whichever villain it was in the face when he saw it was Hayley.

  “Look!” she cried.

  She was pointing at the south end of the bridge behind them. Where there had been a mass of crazed berserkers moments before, there now was just a great deal of very confused people milling about and walking away. Alfie didn’t have to discuss it; he knew what she was saying.

  “Sound the retreat!” he yelled, flying up.

  The cabbies started their engines and began to reverse slowly back the way they had come, providing some cover for the army to withdraw. The three-headed Beast of Bodmin thundered along the bridge through the riot of monsters, charging straight at them. But the Defender used the Ring of Command to lift a strip of asphalt under its paws like a carpet and flip to the side, sending the confused creature tumbling into the water below. Alfie was using his command powers constantly now, to wrap an attacking vampire with the metal walkway railing, to throw an ogre off balance with a well-timed flying bicycle – but it wasn’t enough. More monsters climbed up on to the bridge or landed behind them until the attacks were coming from all sides. With their retreat cut off, Alfie knew his army was seconds from being overrun.

  “What do we do?” cried Ellie.

  “I don’t know,” he said, pulling his sister behind him, cursing himself for being stupid enough to bring her into battle.

  Hayley joined them. She was out of arrows and had resorted to swinging her bow to keep the monstrous attackers at bay.

  “We fight for as long as we can,” she said between gasps.

  Alfie looked at Hayley for a moment – he was sure it would be the last time he would see her face.

  Suddenly a fierce wind blew across the bridge. A stale, hideous odour like a thousand rotten fish was carried on it, a smell so vile that every human and monster on the river stopped what they were doing and held their noses in disgust. The stinking gale swept away the thick fog, revealing the beleaguered HMS Belfast and mini-submarine covered with the marauding draugar undead below. It also revealed the source of the freak wind: Nessie. She was puffing out the intense wind from between her razor-sharp teeth. And sitting astride the magnificent beast was Holgatroll.

  “BABE!” shouted Qilin from the deck of the Belfast, waving at her.

  With his line of sight clear once more, Qilin blink-shifted around the boat grabbing Viking after Viking and delivering them one by one to the top of a distant crane until it collapsed under their weight. He only interrupted his Viking-clearing spree to appear next to Holgatroll for a moment and kiss her on the cheek, blink-shifting away again before her swinging fist could connect with him.

  On his longship, Guthrum raged at his men.

  “DREPIÐ SJÓORMINN, MANNSKRÆFUR!”*

  But as Nessie bore down on them, he abandoned ship like the rest of his crew and within seconds the Viking fleet was reduced to driftwood by her mighty thrashing flippers.

  In a single leap Holgatroll bounded up on to Tower Bridge and roared so loudly that several of the monster villains turned tail and ran away there and then. For a moment, the civilians of the resistance army assumed this was just another escapee from the Tower’s dungeons come to massacre them.

  “It’s OK,” shouted Hayley. “She’s with us!” She turned to Holgatroll. “You are, aren’t you?”

  The troll cracked a smile. “Looks that way. Besides, I have something to return to you.”

  She heaved three large holdalls off her back on to the ground. Hayley gawped at them, amazed.

  “My gunpowder!”

  Qilin appeared next to them with Brian.

  “Well, that could even things up a bit,” said Brian looking at the bags.

  “Where do you want them?” grinned Tony.

  “I’ll leave that up to you lot,” Holgatroll said. She extended one mighty arm and grabbed a lunging werewolf by the throat. Then she reached up with her other hand and plucked a dive-bombing harpy from the air. She smashed the two struggling creatures’ heads together with a sickening CRUNCH and barrelled headlong down the bridge, swinging their inert bodies like clubs at anything foolish enough to come near her.

  Meanwhile, Hayley and Ellie carefully ferried generous scoops of gunpowder to Qilin, who blink-shifted from monster to monster, leaving the explosives and a fireball at each one’s feet. Soon it was raining claws, fangs and other assorted monster parts as the king’s army charged forward, filled with courage once more.

  At the rear, the Defender had just dispatched a rampaging goblin with his sword when he felt a strange rumbling shake the bridge from side to side. And it wasn’t just the vibrations passing through his body; it was a sound, so deep it was almost too low to hear, undulating like music. He steadied himself on the side of the bridge and saw that the Vikings who were being carried downstream amid the wreckage of their boats, were singing. Not the same strange tune he had heard before, but a throbbing powerful bass note that made the water around them bubble and froth like it was coming to the boil.

  Suddenly a huge grey hand the size of a car shot from beneath the river and thumped down right next to him. The Defender staggered back and watched incredulously as a giant heaved himself on to the bridge. It was Guthrum, transformed into a truly mammoth form, a hundred feet tall. Black veins ran through his vast, bulging muscles. Huge dead eyes blinked down at the Defender from behind swaying ropes of red hair. Had LC been there, he might have explained to Alfie that he should feel honoured – each undead Viking Lord can only adopt its mega-berserker form once in its existence and will only choose to do so when faced with the most formidable enemy. As it was, Alfie was too busy figuring out how to stay alive for the next five seconds to feel very much aside from armour-wetting terror.

  “NÚ SKALTU DEYJA, RIDDARINN INN LITILL!”* bellowed the gargantuan Guthrum, spitting foam over the Defender and hefting his equally enormous axe.

  Clearly Guthrum had not taken the destruction of his fleet very well, thought Alfie. A Viking underling suddenly clambered up on to the bridge and ran over to Guthrum, seemingly concerned about something.

  “En Lock hefr sagt at hann skyldi ei at skaða! Hann vil fá honum kvika!”* he calle
d up to his master.

  Whatever he said, Guthrum didn’t want to hear it. He swatted the Viking away with the back of his hand, flinging him back into the river. Alfie summoned Wyvern and hovered up to the giant’s eye level. There was no outrunning him this time – he would have to deal with Guthrum once and for all.

  “The last time you picked a fight with a king it didn’t go so well, remember?” he said.

  Guthrum’s eyes flared with rage and he launched himself at the Defender, swinging his axe. Wyvern dodged the blows like a fly avoiding a swatter, each impact of the Viking’s blade shaking the bridge so much Alfie thought it could collapse at any moment. He readied his sword to strike back, but Guthrum was in a full berserker fury, spinning and swiping with such speed that he couldn’t deliver a clean thrust. Severed steel suspension chains whipped past the Defender like demented snakes, threatening to unseat him. Alfie held out his ring finger and commanded a chain to wrap itself round Guthrum’s axe-arm, which slowed him down long enough for Alfie to look around and figure out a plan. While Guthrum struggled to pull the chain from its mooring, the Defender flew to the centre of the bridge, hovering between the South and North Towers. At the far end of the bridge, Hayley had spotted what was happening and was rounding up Qilin and Holgatroll, who were mopping up the last of the remaining monsters, to come to the Defender’s aid. But seeing them approach, Alfie signalled for them to stay back.

  “What’s he up to?” asked Tony.

  “He’s handling it.” Hayley smiled.

  Guthrum swung his axe, removing the top half of the South Tower in a shower of glass and masonry, clearing the way for him to make a grab for the Defender. Alfie held tight as Wyvern looped-the-loop round the giant’s arm. Somehow she understood what Alfie had planned, the telepathic bond between rider and horse in full flow. The upper walkway, now untethered at one end, groaned as it fell past them, crashing on to the bridge below. Alfie knew he needed Guthrum to come closer for his idea to work. Close enough to kill Alfie if it went wrong.