“Cowards!” roared Skullcap.
A deserter attempted to push by him, and the warlord decapitated him with a single swing of his meat-cleaver. The severed head splashed down into a puddle at Thrungle’s feet, looking up at him with a pair of startled yellow eyes.
“The next man who defies my orders gets the skin peeled from his bones,” vowed Skullcap, quelling the rebellion at once.
*****
DOWN BELOW, TIDBIT was aghast. “By ‘eck!” he exclaimed. “Who knew trolls wor so sensitive t’ a bit o’ leccy?”
Neville’s reaction, upon snatching a look through the periscope, was more straightforward. “Take that, bitches,” he whooped, spinning in his wheelchair like a madman. “I’m a cripple threat!”
It was a victorious moment. The trolls had been systematically whittled down ever since they’d made the mistake of crossing swords with Nat and her crew, and now their numbers were smaller than ever. The travellers weren’t out of the woods yet though, at least not in the metaphorical sense. They still had a few hundred of the beasts left to deal with; the ones now swarming the ruptured sanctuary like maggots on a corpse, pushing a putrid wave of stench as they piled down the stairs.
The trolls tore into Bludoch Dungeon breathing fire and slaughter. The dwarves met them in a berserker rage, foaming at the mouths like mad dogs. The elves threw themselves into the fray, tearing through the monsters like threshers. From the rear line, Nat saw fellow soldiers die in droves, jets of blood hosing out of them in great gushes. A troll thrust a trident into the belly of a dwarf, puncturing his breastplate like a fork through the plastic film of a microwave dinner. Another swung his club at an elf and all but knocked off his jaw. Men were turned from people into diagrams from a Gray's Anatomy manual. It was ruddy-tinted carnage.
Ashley saw an enemy coming his way. The snarling troll tucked his head and charged, carving a path at him like a bowling ball. Unfortunately, his method of attack rendered him next to blind, which allowed Ashley to duck the troll’s commencing slash and sink his blade deep into the creature’s greasy black hide. A bundle of guts flopped from the wound that the troll proceeded to slip in, skating away like a kid in socks across a kitchen floor.
Back-to-back with Ashley, Galanthre traded blows with a combatant of her own. A bulldog-faced troll swung a greatsword at her, but she met his steel and turned with the force of the blow, using the momentum to whip around and saw a great chunk off the beast’s skull. Again and again Ashley and Galanthre were set upon, but together they fought beautifully, exchanging thrusts and parries with their enemies, their blades throwing up showers of sparks as they repelled each menace that came their way. Ashley was on fire. Deep in the flow. He felt like a pair of scissors cutting through gift wrap, slicing and slicing then turning into a long, smooth glide.
Then calamity struck.
Ashley looked over his shoulder to check on his teammate, only to find her pinned to the ground, a troll snapping at her neck with a set of vicious yellow fangs. He ran to assist but failed to spot a new challenger enter the fracas, and took a club to the temple for his trouble. The world turned on its side and Ashley greeted the floor with his face. The pain threw purple and green splotches into his eyes, obscuring his vision. The only thing he was able to make out through the fog was the sight of the troll straddling Galanthre, his teeth almost at her jugular.
Galanthre’s words echoed in his skull. “There is no friendly here.” Of all the lessons the elf had taught him, that's the one that stuck.
The troll’s teeth grazed the fragile skin of Galanthe’s throat, drawing blood, then—
—THWIP—an arrow landed in her assailant’s eye socket and exploded through the back of his cranium.
Stood to one side was Terry, Widowmaker II in hand, the author of this surprising display of marksmanship.
“I’d say that makes us square,” he chirped, balancing the scales for the time he almost robbed the elf of her life.
“Shot!” yelled Ashley, but the celebration came too soon. A troll was on him, closing a pair of muscular claws about his throat. Galanthre lay semiconscious beside him, still gasping for air. Ash knew he wasn’t alone though, he just had to separate himself from the troll and set up Terry’s next shot. Using his brawn, he managed to get his hands around the creature’s rhino neck and force his head high, holding it aloft like the skull in a Shakespeare play.
“Merk this bitch!” he wheezed, doing his best to make a target of the troll’s head.
But Terry’s shot never came. Suddenly, he was nowhere to be seen.
It was Galanthre who came to Ashley’s rescue, cutting in on the troll’s dance and lopping off his head with a practiced swish of her blade.
“Better than sex,” she told him, helping him to his feet.
It was a theory Ashley dearly wanted to test.
Neville and Tidbit were staying the hell out of the way. The moment they saw a pack of enraged trolls smash through their first line of defence, the dwarf grabbed the handles of Nev’s wheelchair and began racing in the opposite direction. The pair had already played their part in this battle, and neither had any business getting involved in a melee.
Unfortunately, the trolls were under orders to eradicate the otherworlders with extreme prejudice, and marked Neville the moment they laid eyes on him. The pack chased Nev and Tidbit from the entrance hall, through the middle of a bloody skirmish, and off down the nearest adjoining corridor. To a casual observer, the scene might have looked something like the Running of the Bulls, only with trolls instead of steers, and Neville and Tidbit replacing drunken Spaniards.
The dwarf pegged it for all he was worth, but the trolls were faster.
“Keep running!” Neville yelled from his wheelchair.
Truth told, what he really wanted to yell was “Mum,” which came as something of a surprise given the lifetime of resentment he’d shown the woman. His father too. Not that they were bad people—far from it—just irritatingly overprotective. All Nev asked for growing up was to be treated like other kids, but his parents had seen him wrapped in cotton wool since his first day of nursery. Now he saw how right they’d been to mollycoddle him. If only he’d knuckled under and listened to their advice, maybe then he wouldn’t be in this mess. To think, his parents had devoted seventeen years of their lives to keeping him safe, and the moment they’d taken their eye off of him he’d walked off-planet and enlisted in a war. What an ungrateful little turd he was.
Tidbit rolled Neville’s wheelchair down a corridor and over a black and silver tiled floor. Suddenly, he took a hard steer, deviated to one side of the passage, and slowed down almost to a halt. He began wheeling Nev along slowly—painfully slowly—as though he were trying to cross a sheet of bubble wrap without making a pop.
“What are you waiting for?” Nev screamed, but the dwarf continued to trundle along at a snail’s pace.
Eventually, Tidbit came to a halt altogether and turned Neville’s chair in the direction of the encroaching horde. Nev remembered an old joke:
Two men are walking through a jungle when they see a tiger in the distance, running towards them. They turn and flee, but then one of them stops, takes some running shoes from his bag, and starts putting them on. “What are you doing?” says the other man. “Do you think you’ll run faster than the tiger with those?”
“I don’t have to run faster than the tiger,” says the man with the running shoes. “I just have to run faster than you.”
Neville was sure Tidbit was about to leave him behind, but instead he stooped down to pick a loose rock from the floor.
“What the hell is he doing?” screamed Nev’s soon-to-be-scooped-out brain.
The trolls stopped in front of their prey, leaving just a few metres separating them. One of them spat up a laugh. “Is that your weapon, halfling?” he asked Tidbit, looking at the stone in his hand.
“I’m going to pull out your guts and wear them for a hat,” said one of his companions, gurgling with pleas
ure.
Tidbit threw the rock. It was a pathetic, underhand toss that landed nowhere near the trolls.
It did land on a hidden pressure plate however—one that Tidbit had taken great care to manoeuvre Nev’s wheelchair around—and set in motion a lethal dungeon trap.
A section of ceiling descended suddenly above the intruders, crushing them like the Monty Python foot. When it retracted back into the roof, all that was left of the trolls was a jigsaw of mashed bodies.
Neville saw the black and silver tiles beneath him and recognised them as the Tidbit’s signature. “God, I love your work,” he told the dwarf, grinning ear to ear.
The entrance hall had become a kill floor. The air was thick with the ammonia stench of vented troll spores and flaps of sawn-off black flesh lay strewn everywhere, as though a convoy of 18-wheelers had simultaneously burst their tyres. The noise of it all was incredible, like a kid with Parkinson's trying to carry the entire wind section of the London Philharmonic down a rickety staircase.
Amidst the furore, a wall of a dozen trolls sought out Eathon and set upon him, each determined to be the one to trim his scalp. The elf met them like a bionic gazelle, launching from his spring-loaded legs and driving his blade through the ribcage of the first of them, before ricocheting towards another and hacking off his sword arm. Without taking pause, Eathon moved to the next, shattering the troll’s shield with a mighty swing of his steel, not to mention the forearm beneath it. The creature brayed with rage, but was quickly silenced when the elf sheathed his sword in his heart. One of the creature’s comrades moved in from behind, but Eathon pushed the sword through the pierced troll’s back and piledrived into the new assailant, making a troll kebab. The battle raged on. Blades flashed and rang. Three more trolls met their ends, until finally one was able to circle behind Eathon, grab him about the neck and wrestle him to the ground. The elf fought to get upright but his metal feet wouldn’t find purchase. He was overwhelmed, held down by four of Drensila’s monsters. A troll’s face appeared above his own, his maw oozing with ichor like the discharge from a suppurating wound.
“We’ve got you now, peg legs,” the creature mocked. “Now we’re gonna take those arms off you too...”
Eathon struggled to break free but was pinned like a framed butterfly. The giggling troll placed the edge of his rusty scimitar against the elf’s left shoulder and pressed down on it with his knee—
—just as an axe pommel struck him in the back of the head, caving in his skull like an egg shell. The remaining trolls whirled about to face the attacker, one of them getting his jawbone rearranged for the trouble.
Axe-beard to the rescue.
The dwarf swung the business end of his axe in a wide arc, scoring a two-for-one kill on the last of the elf’s adversaries. He brushed a spackle of gore from his beard before bending down and offering Eathon a hand. “Ye show’d metal thar, longshanks,” he told him, and helped the elf to his feet.
Eathon smiled and placed a hand on his saviour’s shoulder. “Thank you…” he said, pausing to let the dwarf volunteer his name, which he realised he’d never taken the trouble to learn.
“Rundal,” the dwarf replied.
The elf and the dwarf shook hands.
If Nat had been one for video games she might have described the black silhouette coming her way as looking like a locked character from a console beat ‘em up.
It was only as the hulking outline drew closer that she realised who it belonged to. The serrated meat-cleaver in its fist. The disgusting, pointed teeth filling its mouth like two rows of orange candy corns. The cap of human skull it wore atop its head.
Skullcap.
Seeing him pin her with his cruel eyes gave Nat a very real sense of her own mortality. She might have taken some comfort in the idea of an afterlife in that moment, only she didn’t truck with any of that nonsense. Like an iPhone dropped in a toilet, Nat thought, when you're dead you're dead.
The troll warlord strutted towards her, knocking aside the handful of enemies that showed the temerity of getting in his way. There was no stopping him. Skullcap would feel the last puff of Nat’s breath on his cheek as he squeezed the life from her. He picked up the pace. He was within ten yards of his quarry now, a baleful sneer etched across his face. It wasn’t his facial expression that caught Nat’s attention though, it was the pelt he wore about his shoulders. A pelt like golden honey.
“No,” gasped Nat.
The truth was too horrible to bear, but it was there all the same. The pelt Skullcap modelled was the unmistakable coat of her unicorn, flayed from his body and worn like a ragged cape.
“Goldie!” she screamed. “You bastard.”
To add insult to injury, the pelt was clasped at the neck by the unicorn’s horn, which Skullcap had prised from the bone like an ivory poacher claiming his tusk.
He flashed Nat a rictus grin. “Your steed tasted sweet,” he scoffed, “like candied plums.”
Tears burning her cheeks, Nat raised her sword. It felt like a piece of junkyard trash in her hand, but she no longer cared. Rage flowed through her body like a flume of bile. She was going to jam that piece of trash so far up Skullcap’s arse he’d it.
The warlord arched his arm back and took a swing, but Nat was faster. Ducking the blow, she delivered a swish to his midsection that landed dead on target. Unfortunately, the sword didn’t have the razor sharpness of Cleaver’s blade, and ate Skullcap’s bone armour instead of chowing through to flesh. By way of reply, the warlord landed a knee in her belly that expelled the air from her lungs and sent her doubling backwards in pain. He followed up with a swipe of his giant meat-cleaver, but Nat managed to raise her sword just in time and their blades met in a sloppy kiss. Undeterred, Skullcap pulled back his fist and mailed a punch to Nat’s face that carried her through the air like a scrap of parchment and landed her in a pile of centuries-old rubble. Against all odds, she managed to stagger back to her feet, head ringing. She tasted the metallic tang of blood in her mouth. Skullcap offered no sympathy, instead he put a most unchivalrous boot in her chest that sent her crashing into a pillar. Nat gasped and felt ribs swimming about freely under her skin. She was done for and she knew it. Skullcap was a champion fighter and she was an amateur hockey player with ideas above her station. The Chosen One might be a special snowflake, but when the heat’s turned up, every snowflake melts.
She decided to make one last, desperate attempt to redeem herself before she blacked out. As a burst of adrenalin momentarily doused her pain, she took her sword in both hands, lifted it over her head like a sledgehammer and brought it down on her enemy as hard as she possibly could.
Crack.
For a moment, Nat thought she’d split the warlord’s skull in two, but it turned out she’d only succeeded in separating his headwear. Two halves of trophy skull hit the floor with a sound like dropped clogs.
The troll looked at her, disappointed. “Someone owes me a new hat,” he said, then snatched a fistful of her red hair and lifted her off the ground. He brought the serrated edge of his meat-cleaver up to Nat’s brainpan like a saw and offered a nightmare grin. Nat closed her eyes. This was it, and “it” was not going to be pretty.
The monster was about to make his first hew when he suddenly cramped up and doubled over at the gut. The pupils of his yellow eyes became the size of fifty pence pieces. Nat fell to the floor and watched as Skullcap teetered backwards, blinking, his free hand pressing against a knot in his stomach. He was woozy. Disorientated. There would never be a better moment to strike. Nat lashed out and kicked him in the groin with all her might. She expected to sink her foot in a bundle of genitalia, but instead found nothing more than a pad of smooth flesh. No wonder trolls were so angry all the time.
The warlord looked down at her, distracted by his ailment, but given a degree of focus by the unexpected flea bite he’d been dealt. He knocked Nat’s sword from her hand with a flick of his wrist. Though he was weakened by whatever it was he was suffering from, the hu
man still didn’t stand a chance against him. He dropped a knee onto her chest and Nat felt the shattered bones of her ribcage head off in separate directions. The pain was horrific. Skullcap closed both hands around her throat. She looked about for help but found none. It was just him and her now.
“Time to die,” Skullcap growled, and tightened his grip. He should have been able to snap her neck like a twig, a creature his size, but whatever was going on in his gut had handicapped him significantly.
Nat’s eyes bulged from their sockets. The tendons on her neck stood up like ropes. Time seemed to slow down. Motes of dust hung in the air like distant, frozen constellations, until finally, blackness began to consume her.
Just then, Nat saw something dangling. The clasp holding the warlord’s golden cape together at the neck. The horn from her dead unicorn. With her last breath of air, she snatched it from the pelt, aimed the pointed end at the troll’s face and pushed it forward with the heel of her palm.
This was for Goldie.
This was for Elderwood.
This was for every elf, human and dwarf that had lost their lives in this pointless war.
The spiral horn entered Skullcap’s eye socket and slid in right to the base. The troll’s eye filled with tar and a black tear rolled down his cheek, dark as a hole in space. He gurgled, keeled on top of her, then twitched his last.
Nat wriggled out from under the warlord’s stinking corpse and yelled in triumph. She’d done it. She’d won the day, and she’d done it without the need of a magic sword. She wasn’t some tourist who’d taken a wrong turn into a place she didn’t belong—a ditzy bit of skirt leading her friends to death’s door—she was a conqueror. A valkyrie. Terry was right; she was stronger than she knew.
Trolled (The Trolled Saga Book 1) Page 19