“How long will you be gone this time?” Bella asked quietly.
“I won’t be here for the battle.” I admitted to her. “That’s not the plan.”
“I don’t want to hear all of it.” She told me, looking around. Ever since Margot’s body had landed on our doorstep, the only place we felt we could talk freely was the Armory.
“I will not be going out to die.” I sat next to her, David in the crook of my arm. Linnea popped off the breast and looked at me. “They are tracking already?”
“Yes, of course.” Bella smiled. “I don’t know how clearly they see, but they know our voices at least.”
“Ah, hmmm… must watch my language.” I was bemused by the newfound impact of fatherhood. I had never seen this day coming.
Bella chuckled. “Go, my love, and come back quickly.”
I gave her David and went, my eyes a little misty, but in the bubble alone, no one would notice. That, and where I was going, it only really mattered how I smelled, because I wasn’t sure he could see. He certainly didn’t perceive the world like a humanoid did.
The bubble popped, and I shivered. It wasn’t a fear response, it was really cold. The fear came a second later when the rock formation I was standing next to stood up. In my defense, I’d intended to go knock on his door. He had a house, I didn’t expect him to be outdoors in the freezing mist. I was going to have icecicles on my nosehairs if I was out here much longer.
The heap of rocks resolved into a smallish troll, bending over and sniffing loudly at me. I stood still and hoped I didn’t smell too different since I’d last seen him. Trolls really can’t see well, and I suspect they use some sort of sonar to navigate without tripping over obstacles, or falling off cliffs, which would likely be fatal even to a twelve-foot tall silicon based lifeform. He let out a deep sigh.
“Looommm….” His voice was as I remembered it, deep, husky, and lugubrious.
“Hey, Lug.” His name was literally unpronounceable to a human mouth, and after a few tries that felt like gargling with pebbles, and hurt like it, too, I’d just called him as he was. Lugubrious.
He turned his head politely and coughed, sending a gob of sputum into the darkness. “Cooommeee onnnn…”
I followed him toward his home, grateful at the idea of some warmth. Lug was a relative genius among trolls. Most of them eat, sleep, and reproduce. Lug, for some mysterious reason, had built himself a house, and weapons. I had a surprise for him on that score.
He pushed open the door, which was a chunk of tree, and stood aside politely to let me walk in. Lug ducked, and then crawled, to get through the opening of the house he’d created by walling off a cave. I suspected he’d chose this one for the other feature. It opened up a troll’s body-length in, and he could stand up inside. The inside was dark, too, darker than the outside, with only a faint glow from the massive fireplace in the center of the cave.
Lug lit an oil lamp politely. I’d taught him that one. He didn’t need the light, and too much hurt his eyes, but I did need a little light. So I’d showed him how to put a little oil in a hollow of the rock, and some sheep’s wool for a wick. It was smoky as hell, but I could move around the cave with that on. I did so. He’d maneuvered huge slabs of rock near the fireplace, which was built of more slabs of rock, and didn’t have a chimney. Far overhead, a crevice to the outside air mostly provided enough draft to keep the smoke heading out of the cave rather than lingering in it.
He’d also, somehow, I’d never asked but I suspected through mute demonstration of what a troll’s fist could do, persuaded the bats to hang out on the far end of the cave. The only time they flew overhead was on their way in or out. The constant muttering and whispers as the colony moved was disconcerting at first, but became background noise if I concentrated on letting it flow through my brain and right back out again.
Not that talking to Lug was terribly challenging. It was more a matter of being patient. I waited for him to take a seat at the fireplace. It was his only furniture. He slept curled up like a pile of rocks – the same way I had found him earlier, only in one corner of the cave. I’d long ago determined that when he was a small troll, he had imprinted on humans. Only from the outside, largely, both of bodies and dwellings, so he didn’t really get some things. Perhaps a human he’d encountered had had benches. A bed would have been out of sight, a secret from his quest for knowledge.
And this was my payment to him, always. Knowledge. I couldn’t just offer him something, that didn’t work for him. I had to wait until he asked a question. I’d met him when I was called in to deal with a nest of trolls. Similar to ogres, only slightly less nasty in their eating habits, trolls were often used by the Low Court as heavies. Ogres couldn’t be trusted, but if you got through an idea to a troll, they stuck with it. Crush farmers in an area, eat their sheep and knock down houses? No problem, boss.
Only when I had showed up, expecting to be able to pull the usual trick with sunlight, there was Lug. Lug, and his crossbow, which was a trollish impossibility. He had intrigued me. So one night I’d waited by him until he woke up, and talked to him. It had taken most of the night, but to my astonishment, we had gotten to the point where I only needed to say something two or three times, and he got it. For a troll, this was savant-level intelligence. In the years since, he had assisted me a time or two, in exchange for an answered question.
I sat on the slab, my feet dangling above the cave floor, and let the warmth from the embers soak into me. Lug put a log on the fire, and sparks danced toward the opening in the ceiling, like fireflies on a summer night. If only the cave smelled as sweet. Lug dug around behind his slab and came up with the carcass of something, which had been re-wrapped in a slightly torn brown hide. I held up both my hands, palms out, and then rubbed my stomach, miming that I was full.
Even had I been hungry, there was no telling how old that kill was. Germs weren’t really a thing for trolls. This one was likely fresh enough, but I vividly remembered one that had been greenish and added a sharp pong of its own to the cave smells. He simply nodded and pushed it back out of sight. We both sat and stared at the sparks for a while, rising into the night.
“Lom.” He finally spoke, in his ponderous voice. I waited for the rest of it. “Are there… others like me?”
I considered this. I was sure he knew there were other trolls. What he was asking, then, was for trolls who were on his own intellectual level. Since my usual procedure with trolls was to kill first, ask questions later, I didn’t really know. Then again, when a troll and I encountered one another, it was a dire case, where it had not been successfully driven off by an angry mob with torches, or tricked into falling off a cliff, say. I did know that would kill a troll. In fact, the only time I’d encountered a troll doing anything really peculiar was when the troll had attacked Bella, and in doing so, precipitated her into my arms. I looked from the sparks into Lug’s eyes.
“Yes, I think so.”
He smiled, a very odd expression on that stony face. I waited to see if he had more to say. We watched the fire some more. If it hadn’t been for the smell, and my sense of urgency, this would have been a pleasant way to pass the time. What he’d asked me was a good way to broach what I’d come here for, but I wanted to be sure he was done.
“Lom.”
“Yes?” I asked after a particularly long delay, even for him.
“Could I… meet them?” He picked up a massive stick and poked the fire, sending a spiral of sparks skyward.
This was the opening I had been hoping for. “Yes. I have something for you.”
I stood up and used both hands to pull it out of nospace where I had put it before leaving home. That last trip to the Armory had left me trying to figure out just how much I could carry this way. There was, I’d learned a limited amount of ways I could access, so an upper limit to the gear I’d have on this mission. Bringing this had been worth the loss of space, I could tell.
Lug’s face broke into a big grin, exposing rows of g
rey teeth intended for chewing anything from sheep to rocks. “Bow!” He boomed. I staggered a little, and was grateful when he lifted the weight of the thing off me.
“Would you like to come with me? I need your help, and there are trolls where I need to go. You could try talking to them.”
He had already strung the fearsome weapon, a crossbow made from steel and what I could have sworn was a railroad track. I hadn’t brought any quarrels with me, I’d never had any. When I had taken this from him, he’d just used it to put a quarrel through a concrete wall, and negotiations were delicate. In the long run, he’d agreed to abide by some rules that involved not traveling Above, and I’d taken the crossbow for safekeeping.
Lug nodded. He couldn’t stop smiling over the ugly weapon. He’d made it himself.
“Where we go?” He asked, cocking his head to one side. He’d picked up that this was serious, with the bow and my asking him to go with me.
“Have you ever been to Low Court?” I asked him.
He shook his head after a minute of thought.
“I need your help getting in.” I told him. “I can’t use magic, I need to be stealthy.”
He scratched his head. “Lug not very quiet unless in woods.”
He was right about that. Fortunately, that was where I needed him.
Play the Death March
The last time I had attempted to enter Low Court in secret I had miscalculated. I had trusted a kelpie, and she had kidnapped me with malice, to father her children. This time, I wasn’t alone, and I wasn’t going near the river. The forest around the massive castle that held Low Court had been designed to keep unwanted visitors out of the fortress, and so far as I knew, it was impenetrable. I was going to test that with the help of a wily Alaskan spirit, and a super-intelligent (relatively) troll.
We’d met up with Raven, who hadn’t been at all ruffled at being introduced to Lug. He knew the plan, and told us that he had overflown the forest as much as he dared without venturing into the Low Court wards. He’d found a thin area, he told me, which looked like it was the result of a long-ago forest fire.
“Brush. That’s what you get when a fire goes through.”
He would know, being a person who preferred the wilderness.
“And how is brush good for us?” I looked sideways at Lug’s chest. He was listening in silence. I wasn’t sure how much he was catching of the conversation.
“We can travel without being seen in it. In the deep woods, it is very open.” He spread out his arms in an exaggerated shrug. “And there are spider webs.”
Somehow he’d never struck me as the kind to dance and squeal like a little girl when he got a web across the face.
“But open means faster travel,” I pointed out. “And this needs to happen as close as possible to the first moments of battle.”
He nodded. “There are game trails in the brush, no problem. And you don’t understand about the spiders. I think I’ll wait to see your face when you do.”
Raven turned and looked at the faint light coming from the rising sun. “Right now, we should find Lug a place to sleep.”
Lug spoke, startling me. “I sleep anywhere.”
“Yes, but we need cover.” I looked around. The dark forest loomed at the edge of the field we were standing in. The farmhouse it had belonged to was on the far side of it, the chimney an accusing finger pointing at the sky. The wood which remained was charred and scattered. The barn was sagging in the middle, and had holes in the side. I pointed. “That will do.”
It had been a long time since people had been here. Something scurried out of the heap of rust and junk that had once been farm equipment. Magic was a limited tool, Underhill. Some things could be enhanced, but the procedures would have been familiar to a human farmer a mere century before, Above. Lug grunted and kicked the heap. Several more small brown things scurried out. I couldn’t see them well enough to identify them. It was dark in the barn. Lug curled up and did his pile of rocks impression. He didn’t snore. I contemplated his sleeping form. Snoring could be fatal to a troll, in this state they were vulnerable, as he could not waken until nightfall.
“Might as well rest, ourselves.” Raven pointed out.
I nodded in agreement. I pulled a sleeping bag and groundcloth out of my stash. We would have two nights to get into place, for when Trytion launched the attack and drew most of Low Court down on his head. All so I could sneak in the back door.
Raven transformed into bird-shape, and flew up into the loft. The beams creaked alarmingly under his weight, but nothing came crashing down on me. I found a pile of ancient hay, poked it until things stopped moving, and set up wards before lying down. I had no fancy to be nibbled on in my sleep.
Sleep came slowly. I resisted the urge to send Bella messages. She would be busy, and didn’t need me jogging her elbow from a distance, not with Trytion, Joe, and Dean all running the war preparation. Joe and Dean were trained in this sort of thing, even if they hadn’t needed it on a large scale. I tried to push memories of goblin raids out of my head, and finally, despite the light streaming in dusty beams through the broken walls, I slept.
Raven woke me at nightfall. He was back in human form, and had a tiny fire glowing in the earth floor of the barn. He’d dug a little pit, and had the dirt heaped nearby, so he could conceal the ashes when we left. I smelled the meat he had roasting on a spit. And the coffee he’d brewed in a battered enamel pot.
“Where did you find that?” I asked as I rolled up my bedding.
He grinned. “I never tell my secrets, boy.”
The tin cup he handed me was scorching hot, but the coffee tasted... well, as bad as Raven’s coffee ever tasted. He’d told me one time it was meant to be strong enough to float a mule shoe. With the mule still attached. For the moment, that was all that mattered. Hot and caffeinated. Food followed it, and I didn’t ask where that had come from. Or what it was. It was tasty, although that might have been contrast with the coffee.
Lug was moving around by now, and Raven offered him some coffee. The troll sniffed it, and handed it back. I upped my estimate of his intelligence a notch. Raven used the rejected cup to put the fire out. Lug helped bury the remains of it, with a quick scoop of the dirt, and a stomp of his foot.
We left the barn as the last streaks of red and purple faded from the sky. The sunset had probably been pretty. Raven pulled something from his pocket and put it on his head. As we walked across the field, he beckoned to me.
“You need to see something.”
I followed him toward the hedgerow that divided this field from the next one over. In the corner of the field, where it merged into the forest, he pointed upward into a tall tree. I had noticed before that unlike a normal forest, this one didn’t really have a softening line of brush and smaller trees. The huge black trunks simply loomed up at the end of the field like a wall. I followed the direction of the point. The light was going fast, and I squinted at the shimmering of something up there.
A movement made the shimmer move along cords, and it resolved into the biggest damn spider web I had ever laid eyes on. The movement was a spider about the length of my forearm, with a roughly rectangular abdomen. It had shifted, and now was disappearing back into the night, long legs stretched out fore and aft on the web. It looked like nothing more than a tree limb.
I looked at Raven, who chuckled softly. “Look on your face was worth it. But that’s the male.”
It took me a minute to remember enough about spiders to cue in on what he was saying. Then, I scanned the trunks of the two trees the web was mostly anchored to. When I finally managed to pick her out, in the dim light, I took an involuntary step backward. Other than one impossibly long, slender leg, she was lined up on the trunk nearest me, so well camouflaged it just looked like that tree was heavy-trunked. The leg, though, was resting possessively on a silk-wrapped bundle, from which protruded…
“Antlers?” I hissed at Raven, deciding that retreat was indeed the better part of valor i
n this case. I’d missed the silk cocoon when we first walked up, as it was behind her, and the tree trunk she was hiding on. She was, just in body, as long as I was tall. The legs tripled that, easily.
We walked back to where Lug was waiting. He hadn’t followed us, but had stayed by the game trail we would use to enter the forest. I saw now why Raven had recommended this. The brush and young trees were too small to support a behemoth like he’d just showed me. I shook my head. Only magic could allow that monstrous growth of a creature with no real skeleton. But this explained much of why those who ventured into the forest rarely came back out.
And the howls that sounded, faintly, as the moon rose. Those were another good reason. I had no illusions about Sean the wolf’s wild cousins. They would have no witty quips, sartorial taste would be limited to tearing off our clothing to better reach our flesh, and they were agile enough to follow us on these paths.
I looked at Raven. “Are you taking point?”
He usually did, an instinct left over from long ago, I suspected. Raven shook his head, and pulled the thing down that he’d put on, adjusting it. I blinked in surprise at the sight.
“Why are you wearing an eye patch?” I asked him. He looked less like a pirate of human lore, and more like a certain irascible… he held out his arm, and two lesser ravens landed on it.
“I will be with them, and with you. You will be the eyes on the ground. I will be in middle, with him,” Raven shook the birds off his arm and pointed at Lug. “Bringing up the rear.”
I bit my tongue on the question of his raven’s names – I really didn’t want to know – and walked into the game trail. I was very grateful there weren’t any spider webs to brush my face just here, I was afraid I’d lose my cool if I encountered them just now.
By the time I did discover a spiderweb, I was able to limit my reaction to a slight jump. It was an eerily silent walk in the woods. Raven wasn't talking, distracted by having to split his attention between his eyes in the sky and the path his physical body was walking on. I was glad he could do it - I'd be throwing up and passing out by now. Lug, in some mysterious fashion, could walk through heavy brush without making much noise at all beyond the occasional rustle. I couldn't watch him, as he was behind me in the single file we were walking in, but one of these days I wanted to see how he did it.
Dragon Noir (Pixie for Hire Book 3) Page 24