“I doubt you’d have much success,” argued Carnella. “Don’t forget, the trolls are my creation.”
“And now they belong to me, just like everything else that was once yours.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes it is. You are nothing but a genie trapped in a bottle and I am queen of all the land.”
“Oh yes,” said Carnella. “And tell me, dear, how goes our legacy? Do the elves of the Whispering Woods cheer the Durkon name? Do they bend a knee in supplication of their mighty monarch?”
Drensila found herself at a sudden loss to retain her composure, and in a fit of pique went to hurl the magical rod containing Carnella at the chamber wall. Thankfully, she remembered to take a breath, and caught a hold of herself. “Congratulations, mother,” she said smiling, and tucking the rod into her sash, “you almost had me.”
No. She wasn’t going to allow her mother to pull her strings. Wasn’t going to make the mistake of smashing the crystal orb and setting that rotten cow free.
Carnella sighed wistfully. “Ah, but you always were a gentle child.”
*****
ASHLEY SCREAMED BLUE murder as his back continued to sizzle like fresh-served fajita.
Clive stabbed a finger at Nat. “See, this is why we don’t invite girls to LARP.”
“Me?” she protested. “I’m the one who saved your arses!”
“Don't flatter yourself, sweetheart,” said the talking sword in her hand.
“Excuse me,” Nat replied, “You’re just a weapon, I was the one doing the fighting.”
“Like bollocks you did. You fight like a gorilla plays a violin.”
Nat let out a strangled laugh. “Typical man, taking credit for something a woman did. This is Rosalind Franklin all over again.”
“Never heard of her.”
“Exactly!”
Ashley had heard enough. “Will you two shut up?” he spat, grimacing with pain.
“Yeah,” agreed Clive. “Can’t you see the man’s been through enough?”
“Oh, you caught that, did you?” Nat hissed. “I’m surprised you could see it from all the way over there in your hidey hole.”
“Come on, Nat,” said Terry, “this isn’t Clive’s fault. No one knows how they’re going to react when things go sideways. It’s fight or flight, you don’t get to choose.”
Cleaver snorted. “I do, mate. Anyone gets lairy with me, I put ‘em in ribbons.”
Nat had heard enough macho posturing for one day. She stuffed the sword back in his scabbard, putting him on mute.
“This is on me,” said Neville, head hung low. “If I hadn’t rushed in there like that...” He wiped a tear from his cheek. The irony of it. All that time his parents had spent trying to keep him out of harm’s way... if only he’d just shut up and listened.
Nat was through talking. A man was hurting and needed urgent medical attention. She turned to the portal that had brought them to this twisted place and readied for the trip home. There was only one problem. The portal was gone.
“Oh no,” begged Neville. “Oh no no no.”
This was bad. Very bad. Bad squared.
Nat’s hand went instinctively to her mobile to call for help, only it wasn’t there. “Has anyone seen my phone?” she asked, patting herself down.
“You left it back in the van,” answered Terry. “Remember? They wreck the atmos.”
“I didn’t leave it in the van, I snuck it back in my pocket. Damn. I must have lost it while we were fighting that plant thing.”
“Who cares about your phone?” thundered Clive. “As if you’re going to get a signal. Do you see any phone masts around here?”
“He’s right,” said Neville. “Wherever your phone is, it’s a brick.”
“So, now what?” asked Ashley, radiating a pained sincerity that made him seem half his size.
As if to answer the question, Nat’s scabbard began to echo with a muffled voice.
“Are you going to answer that?” asked Terry.
Nat reluctantly unsheathed the blade and held it to her ear. “What?” she asked.
“I’ll do you a deal,” Cleaver offered. “Stop bunging me in that holster and I’ll take you to some folks who can fix up your man.”
Chapter Four: Treasure Haul
WHILE DRENSILA THE Black argued with her mother leagues away, her foot soldiers went about their duties, scouring the Whispering Woods in search of elf scalps. It was upon what looked to be another fruitless patrol that one scouting party happened across the scene of a skirmish. There, in the centre of a small forest glade, they found the shredded remains of a deadly creeper and the squashed body of a tree nymph. Also among the debris were scraps of armour made from a rug-like substance, as well as the broken remnants of swords. These weapons weren’t forged from steel though, they were made of some pliable material, the likes of which the trolls had never seen.
The scouting party was led by a troll named Thrungle. Though smaller than his fellow soldiers, Thrungle commanded an unusually fierce intellect for his kind, which had enabled him to rise up the ranks and secure the position of chief centurion in record time. Around his collar he wore dozens of necklaces made from the threaded teeth of dead elves, and as he moved they produced an awful chattering noise, as though the mouths of his fallen enemies were still jabbering in fear.
Thrungle ordered his troops to comb the surrounding area and went about examining the detritus on the forest floor. Something caught his eye there. A shiny thing in the mud, small enough to fit into the palm of his hand. Its surface was a pane of perfect glass, and when he pressed his claw against it, strange glyphs flared to life. He stroked them and they moved back and forth beneath his touch, sliding as if on water. He jabbed one and it spawned another set of peculiar symbols. Thrungle jabbed one shaped like two concentric circles and a flash of light struck him in the eyes, rendering him temporarily blind. When his sight returned, he found his image embedded behind the shiny thing’s glass. His mind went immediately to the Night Queen, frozen in her daughter’s stained glass window, and he instinctively patted himself down to make sure his body remained on the material plane.
“Magic,” Thrungle whispered, astonished.
One of the trolls returned from his reconnaissance. Thrungle thrust the device into a pocket and ordered the corporal to report.
“Sir, we’ve found something,” he announced. “Tracks leading away from the clearing and heading south, deeper into the woods.”
Thrungle’s lips peeled back from his teeth like a corpse decomposing at speed. “Show me,” he said.
*****
USING CLEAVER LIKE a dowsing rod, Nat pushed onwards through the Whispering Woods. Neville rolled alongside in his wheelchair, and bringing up the rear were Terry and Clive, who carried Ashley on a stretcher made from the lashed together the remains of the vampire tree. Nat worried about how conspicuous they were. How little they belonged in this place. It felt like they were photobombing an entire dimension.
Terry shook his head, blown away by it all. “How great is this though?” he gushed. “Can you believe we’re going on an actual quest?”
This prompted a flurry of questions that landed atop one another like a playground dirt pile.
“You call this a quest?” cried Nat.
“Is there going to be more fighting?” fretted Neville.
“Do we all get magic swords?” wondered Clive.
“Where are we even going?” demanded Ashley.
All heads turned to the only one among them qualified to answer those questions: the sword in Nat’s fist.
“What is this, the bleedin’ inquisition?” spat Cleaver.
“At least tell us if we’re in danger,” blurted Nev. “Are we in a safe place or are we behind enemy lines?”
Cleaver laughed. “Mate, we’re in the Broken Lands. Anywhere outside of Drensila’s citadel is behind enemy lines.”
“Drensila the Black?” Nat asked, furrowing her brow. “That’s the na
me the dead guy gave us. We’re supposed to kill her.”
“Good luck with that, sunshine,” chuckled Cleaver.
“Why are we listening to him anyway?” Clive asked. “He’s just a sword.”
“Just a sword?” Cleaver scoffed. “I’ll have you know this “sword” was made from the heart of a meteor, heated in witchfire and cooled in the waters of the Magi River.” He muttered a reprise under his breath, “Just a sword, my arse...”
“So you’re what then?” asked Nat. “Some kind of Excalibur?”
“Pfft,” he spat. “Don’t muddy the air with his name.”
“You’ve heard of him?”
“Heard of him? Geezer owes me fifty gold crowns.”
“No way!” exclaimed Terry.
“Tell me about it, guv. Bloke acts like he’s all that just ‘cause he’s got some king swinging him about. Pfft. Everyone thinks ‘Scally’s so great. What's so great about getting stuck in a stone, eh? You tell me that.”
By this point Nat had grown as weary of the talking as she had the walking, so decided to change tack. “If you’re not going to tell us where we’re going, can you at least tell us how long till we get there?”
“Not long at all,” replied Cleaver. “Matter of fact, if you’re all done pissing and moaning, we’re here.”
“Here,” was nowhere much. A beautiful patch of forest for sure, but around these parts it was a patch like any other.
“What am I looking at?” asked Nat.
“Nothing,” said Ashley, still suffering. “Ain’t nothing here.”
“Keep going,” Cleaver insisted, egging them on. “You’re almost there.”
The gang were doing as they were told when suddenly they were possessed by a singular thought. “Turn around!” said a voice in their heads. “Leave this place! Go back the way you came!”
Unquestioningly, the travellers made an about-face and began to head off in the opposite direction. Their minds were no longer their own. They were pawns, moving at the behest of some invisible chess player.
“No!” shouted Cleaver. “Ignore the voices and turn around! Turn around, you mugs!”
Instead, they ignored the talking sword and continued their zombified retreat, traipsing back the way they came like catwalk models that had reached the end of their runway.
“Stop wandering about like farts in a trance,” Cleaver yelled. Still nothing. He shouted at Nat. “Come on, sort yourself out, you dizzy bint!”
She heard that alright. Nat stopped in her tracks, stupefied, as did the rest of her companions. The voice telling them to go back had stopped calling. Their minds were their own again.
“What the hell just happened?” asked Neville, taking a hand from the wheel of his chair to scratch his dome. “I was going that way and then… it’s like I was possessed or something.”
“It’s called a spell of bewilderment,” Cleaver explained. “Head magic. Makes you go doolally and sends you off the wrong way.”
“The wrong way from what?” asked Terry.
“The wrong way from that...”
The gang followed the flick of Cleaver’s eyes to the patch of forest that had—only moments ago—been a patch like any other. Now it was a treetop village: a collection of nest-like dwellings situated in the upper canopy of the forest. It were as though they group had stepped inside of a bubble and found a whole new world. Once empty trees acted as stilts for thatched cottages and cabins gilded with intricate, hand-carved engravings, all stitched together by elevated catwalks. Every part of the village was born from nature or handmade; there was nothing synthetic about it. Whoever had chosen to make their home here didn’t just live in the middle of nature, Nat realised, they were one with it. She thought back to her own home and remembered the creeping ivy that had managed to find its way through her bedroom window and snake across the ceiling. She’d allowed it to grow that way; let it form over her bed, where she’d lay and admire the living canopy. She loved it. Nature on the inside. It wasn’t to last. Nature was put back in its place the day she got into a row with her mother, who went out back and hacked the ivy apart at the root, leaving Nat to shake a shower of brown leaves from her bed sheets.
A tinkle of wind chimes brought Nat back to the present. Suddenly all thoughts of home were banished, washed away by the treetop utopia that hovered above. Nat had simply never seen anything so beautiful. So honest. So absolutely perfect.
Terry thought it looked like an ewok village. Terry hated ewoks. Everyone hated ewoks.
As the gang gazed up at the treetops, curious figures emerged from their huts and began to rappel down vines. Men and women with wildflowers braided into their hair and lithe, sun-kissed bodies landed barefoot on the forest floor, surrounded the party and drew swords from their back-scabbards. There must have been a hundred of them. A hundred elves. They regarded the intruders with a mixture of curiosity and grim fascination, as a child might a pack of faeces-hurling zoo creatures.
One of the females stepped forward to address Nat, who she identified as being the group leader. Her flaxen hair was spiked into a mohawk with tree resin, and her almond-shaped, cerulean eyes sparkled like sapphires. She moved with a balletic grace and wore armour made of thick, lacquered palm fronds laced together with leather cord. Nat couldn’t help but notice her exposed midriff, which bore the washboard abs of a lesbian gym owner.
“Come,” the elf said, and motioned to a rope ladder that climbed into the treetops.
*****
“IF YOU’D LIKE,” said Carnella the Cruel, “I could help you with your elf problem.”
Drensila sneered at her mother, whose face floated in the orb of her rod wearing an expression like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
“I think not,” Drensila replied. “What I’d rather do is put you out of my sight while I work on a spell to shut you up permanently.”
She pulled on a chain and Stinger emerged from his oubliette to scuttle over, head bowed. The scorpion had already been put back to work since his disappointing run-in with his queen’s would-be assassin. Naturally, Drensila had seen to it that her pet had been suitably punished for his lacklustre performance, the stump of his severed pincer cauterised with no care for comfort.
Drensila held the rod out for the taking and Stinger gripped it delicately in his claws, determined not to drop the precious artifact and incur further wrath.
“Take it away and put it somewhere my mother can’t bother me,” ordered Drensila.
The scorpion complied at once, affording his queen the proper etiquette of reversing from the room in supplication.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said Carnella, and Stinger froze in his tracks.
“What are you doing?” yelled Drensila. “Don’t listen to her.”
The scorpion hesitated, pulled each way by conflicting decrees.
Carnella spoke softly to her daughter. “You mustn’t lose sight of the rod of power. If someone else were to lay their hands on it, even for a moment, you would lose possession of the trolls. If that ever happened they’d kill you along with everyone else in these lands.”
She was right. Drensila had always hated when she was right. “Why did you obey my mother back there?” she ordered Stinger, changing the subject.
Carnella answered on his behalf. “I’ve always had control of him. Even when while you had me trapped in The Nether he was mine to command.”
Drensila wrinkled her nose. “Is this true?” she asked the scorpion, and the creature bobbed his head like a faithful labrador.
This begged an interesting question. “If Stinger were in your possession all along,” said Drensila, “why didn’t you have him kill me?”
“Kill you?” Carnella replied, flabbergasted. “What must you think of me, my dear? You’re my daughter. I gave you life. I could never be the one to take that away.”
More likely she needed a body to keep her throne warm until she figured out a way to escape purgatory, Drensila thought, gripping the
rod of power tighter than a knot of wood.
*****
AFTER ASCENDING THE rope ladder to the treetop village, the gang were directed along a swaying walkway at sword-point. “Is this what it feels like to walk the plank?” Nat wondered, and gulped at the prospect of plummeting like a rock to the forest floor.
The elf with the blonde mohawk pointed towards a mahogany cabin, the chimney of which belched a plume of thick, black smoke. Mohawk and another four guards directed them inside, and one-by-one the gang pushed through the cabin’s entrance.
The interior of the hut functioned as a blacksmith’s forge, and in its centre, positioned behind a large black anvil, was a muscular elf hammering a red hot blade. He sat sideways upon a hammock as he went about his work, tirelessly shaping the metal to his will, a shower of sparks bouncing off his bare, glistening chest. The thick arm he used to swing the hammer was wrapped in an intricate, ivy tattoo that crept from wrist to shoulder. Upon seeing he had visitors, the elf looked up from his work with a face that was almost supernaturally beautiful. His perfect, aquiline features were complemented by a pair of crystal blue eyes and framed with a gorgeous head of flaxen hair. Suddenly, Nat felt desperately underdressed in her Ugg boots and bin bag jerkin. The elf pounded the anvil once more. Was it possible to feel jealous of an anvil? Nat certainly thought so. She did her best to disguise the animal attraction she felt for the blacksmith, but it was clear from the frown Terry wore that it was written all over her face.
“Put a top on, will you?” muttered Terry, who was, in the parlance of his kind, “Well jells.”
“Don’t antagonise the man,” begged Clive, and turned to the elf. “Please, do whatever you want with your top. We surrender unconditionally.”
“Will you stop surrendering to everyone?” Nat cried, digging a finger in Clive’s breadstick arm.
She approached the elf and introduced herself. “Hello—” she started, but Terry slipped in front of her like a bodyguard taking a bullet.
Trolled (The Trolled Saga Book 1) Page 6