Power Playing (Trolled Book 2)

by D. K. Bussell

  POWER PLAYING

  TROLLED: BOOK TWO

  D.K. BUSSELL

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  Copyright © 2017 by D.K. Bussell

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Contents

  Chapter One: Saving Throw

  Chapter Two: House Rule

  Chapter Three: Player Vs Player

  Chapter Four: Trappings

  Chapter Five: Insanity Roll

  Chapter Six: Dungeons & Drequons

  Chapter Seven: Attack of Opportunity

  Chapter Eight: Monster Camp

  Chapter Nine: Party Crashers

  Chapter Ten: Bleed Out

  Chapter Eleven: Fate Points

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  About the Author

  Chapter One: Saving Throw

  Three Days Ago

  Myre’s Quag

  CLIVE SNYDER FELT the marching step of the approaching army as it tremored the bridge beneath his feet. The trolls brought with them a cacophony; a din of drums and pipes that stung the ears like hell's karaoke. The end was coming. Soon the monsters marching across the swamp would have him in their sights, and there would be no outrunning them. He was going to die. Die a shabby little death in a miserable, foreign land.

  And yet still he had options, limited as they were. His end was a foregone conclusion, but he could at least choose the manner of his demise. Given the chance, the looming trolls would make a tormented plaything of him, but he needn’t give them the satisfaction.

  What if he let the swamp take him instead?

  Surely that had to be a better way to go than being hacked to pieces and cannibalised? No pain. No horror. Just a slow sink into the slough. Swallowed by darkness. The world turned black and quiet.

  Clive hoisted the burlap sack he was carrying over his shoulder and clambered aboard the bridge’s balustrade. He teetered on the precipice, swaying to and fro, willing himself to take the plunge, then—

  “—I wouldn’t do that if I were you, sunshine.”

  The voice came from inside the sack. It was Cleaver, the talking sword he’d swiped from his former companions.

  “Why not?” Clive asked. “It’s got to be better than what they’ll do to me.”

  “Not likely,” the sword replied though the burlap. “Swamp’s full of razor leeches for one thing. Once those buggers latch on there’s no getting rid of them. I’ve heard stories of men—hard men—hacking off their own legs just to end the pain.” He sucked some air through his metal teeth. “Of course, that’s if you’re lucky...”

  “What if I’m unlucky?”

  “Then you’ll get the bog worms.”

  Clive broke a sweat. “What do they do?”

  “Nasty little buggers. Burrow through your eyeball and lay their eggs in your brain pan, they do. Takes six months for them to hatch and kill you, but it’ll feel like a lifetime.”

  Clive’s lily-white skin turned a shade lighter still.

  “Look, do yourself a favour,” Cleaver went on, “chuck me in the swamp and hand yourself over to the trolls. Rile ‘em up and they’ll do you in quick.”

  Clive thought on it, but not for long. Whatever happened to him in that swamp—suffocation, leeches, worms—at least he’d be the one who put himself there. He might die a waterlogged corpse with invertebrates tunnelling into his brain, but at least he’d be the engineer of his own destruction. That had to count for something. Didn’t it?

  Clive caught sight of the approaching trolls. It was now or never. He tied the sack containing Cleaver to his belt, closed his eyes and allowed himself to topple over the side of the bridge.

  SPLASH.

  A haze of flies shot from the surface of the fetid water. Clive hit the swamp face-first and chugged down a great belt of brackish water. It tasted absolutely foul, like rotten eggs with a top note of burnt cat’s piss. Instead of sinking as intended, Clive broke the surface immediately, hacking and spitting, desperate to clear his lungs of the rancid muck. It was a reflex action. If he carried on fighting the inevitable he was going to alert the incoming horde and suffer at their hands. Refusing to allow that to happen, he clasped his arms to his side and forced himself to sink.

  Cleaver’s weight acted as an anchor, dragging Clive down into the mire, deeper and deeper. Foreign objects brushed his skin as he sank, and he struck out to keep them at bay. He only stopped when he realised they weren’t predators he was floundering at, but harmless stems of bamboo growing from the swamp bed.

  Clive sank to the bottom of the mire and felt his feet dip into sludge. The sediment buried him up to his shins. It was done. All he had to do now was let go. He opened his mouth and prepared to let death in.

  Then a thought, hot and sharp.

  Bamboo.

  If he were able to break off a piece, he could use it as a breathing tube: a snorkel to survive beneath the swamp until the troll army passed by.

  He grabbed a length in both hands and tried to break a piece off, but it was too tough. He tried to tug it from the swamp bed, but it was rooted too deep. Panic overcame him. Every ounce of exertion he’d spent had only succeeded in bringing him closer to suffocation. There was only one thing left to do, and he knew from experience that he was going to suffer for it. A lot.

  The only way Clive getting his snorkel was by using a blade.

  Cleaver.

  Unknotting the sack tied to his belt, he gingerly reached inside. His hand froze. The last time he’d tried picking the sword up it had scorched the fingerprints from him. The only way he’d been able to steal it was by using magical means. He’d used a spell of levitation to get Cleaver in the sack. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a stunt he was able to repeat. Whatever reserves he held for spell-casting were well and truly tapped by this point. To slice through the bamboo, Clive would need to wield Cleaver by hand.

  Gritting his teeth, he thrust his paw into the bottom of the sack and closed his fingers around the weapon’s hilt. The pain, when it hit him—for it was so intense it took a moment for his brain to accept—almost knocked him out cold. He screamed, but the sound was transformed into mute bubbles. Every fibre of Clive’s being begged him to let go of the sword, but he fought them all. He worked quickly, using the agony as fuel, hacking through the bamboo in three frantic chops. With that done, he went to drop the sword back into its sack, but though his fingers loosened their grip, his palm remained welded to the weapon’s white-hot hilt. He tried to pull the weapon free using his other hand, but the sword burned that too. After much thrashing it came free, but only with a good portion of Clive’s skin attached.

  Cleaver sank into the swamp bed and disappeared beneath the mud and grit. Clive grabbed the sliced-off length of bamboo with his scorched hands and put its hollow end to his mouth. With the amount of pain he was in, it’s a wonder he didn’t pipe a scream through the tube and announce himself to the passing trolls in a single, piercing note. Instead he sucked down air. Precious, life-giving air, sweet as nectar. He drank it down until his lungs were full and his breathing had settled into a steady rhythm. A calm descended upon him. Though his stricken hands continued to throb, he needed only wait until the army had passed by, then climb back onto the bridge and be on his way. He’d earned his reprieve. He was going to survive.

 
Just then, something swam by his eye-line: a snake-like shape, propelled by quick flicks of its tail. As Clive eyed it through the murk, the shape changed course suddenly and darted in his direction.

  A bog worm.

  Before Clive could react, the creature shot for his face and found its target, burrowing into the soft jelly of his eyeball like an earthworm through fresh soil.

  It was a new kind of pain. A pain with no end and no limit.

  The creature was on its way to Clive’s brain when he whipped out a hand and snatched it by the hindquarters. He managed to catch the worm just in time to stop it making its way through to the other side and depositing its parasitic load in his grey matter. Half-blinded, Clive tore the worm through the mush of his ruined orbit and crushed the creature in his hand until it was nothing more than ooze between his fingers.

  The effort expelled the last of the oxygen from Clive’s lungs. Unable to stay below any longer, he used his final dregs to wrench his feet from the suck of the swamp bed and thrash his way to the surface. He broke the porridge skin of the mire with a great, greedy gasp and hooked his fingers onto the bridge. Hauling himself out of the muck, he immediately found himself face to face with—

  Nothing.

  The trolls were gone.

  Passed by and marching on Bludoch Dungeon to fight their doomed battle.

  Clive wilted to the deck. The time he’d spent hiding at the bottom of the swamp had saved his life, but it had changed him too. He’d emerged a changed man, as if christened in some unholy baptism.

  Frothing like a rabid dog, he rolled onto his knees, and with scorched fingertips, felt the gruesome hollow where his eye used to be. It was ragged and bloody and agonising to the touch. He wanted to cry but he couldn’t. This world had made a monster of him. A horror, hard of heart and brimming with spite. A creature as foul on the inside as without.

  Very well, he thought.

  He would be all of those things.

  All of those things and more.

  With a magic black as pitch, Clive dredged the enchanted sword from the bed of the swamp and planted it by his side.

  *****

  One Day Ago

  Bludoch Dungeon

  IF NAT LAWLER were a racehorse, she’d have been shot.

  The Battle of Bludoch Dungeon had cost her five broken ribs, a shattered cheekbone and a set of swellings on her throat so vicious she looked as though she was wearing a green and purple choker.

  She’d spent the last two days confined to a hospital bed convalescing, her body smothered with lumps, her mind roiling with fitful dreams. When she finally drifted back to the land of the living, the first thing she did was ask after Terry. Having discovered he’d been kidnapped by a rogue troll, she discharged herself from the care of her physician at once. The dwarf protested, insisting Nat recuperate, but she was having none of it. After all, Nat knew better. She was a physician from a world of modern medicine (well, a trainee physician), while he was a medieval quack working with lard-soaked poultices and jars of leeches. Still, Nat soon learned that the dwarf’s advice was right on the money. Though her mind was certainly willing, her body was a broken thing. The moment she made to leave, her knees buckled and she blacked out on the infirmary floor.

  When Nat came to, she found Galanthre sat by her bedside, her platinum mohawk scraped over and tucked behind one ear.

  “Please,” Nat croaked. It hurt to talk, as if she’d swallowed a handful of throwing stars and washed them down with Dettol. “You’ve got to help me find Terry.”

  Galanthre tucked in Nat’s covers, cocooning her tight. “Stay down, girl,” the elf insisted. “You have to heal.”

  “I have to go.”

  It was bad enough losing Cleaver, but losing Terry was unthinkable. Terry was her boyfriend. Her one, true love. She saw that now, and she’d do anything to get him back.

  “You don’t understand—” Nat started.

  “—Yes I do,” Galanthre cut in. She pulled down the shoulder of her blouse to show Nat an old scar. “This is the wound that would have killed me if you hadn’t saved my life. Let me help you now. If you go running off in the state you’re in, you’ll die. Wait for your injuries to heal, then we go rescue the princess.”

  Nat laughed despite herself. It was touching to see how much Galanthre had thawed since they first met. “Okay,” Nat replied, sitting up in her bed. “But as soon as my ribs are set, we’re marching on Drensila’s castle.”

  “You have my word,” said Galanthre, and handed her a goblet of water.

  Nat let a sip roll over her cracked lips. “Did I miss anything while I was out?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “The trolls?”

  “All dead.”

  Nat swore under her breath. She might have learned a thing or two about Drensila’s defences if there was anyone left to question.

  “We did find something of use though,” said Galanthre, as if reading Nat’s mind. “Something among their supplies.”

  She held up a metal cage. Inside it was a messenger raven.

  Nat returned a smile. “I’ll need a pen.”

  *****

  Presently

  The Citadel of Durkon

  DRENSILA THE BLACK screwed Nat Lawler’s declaration of war into a tight ball and sent the scrunched parchment spiralling from her minaret window.

  “I’m going to stick my thumb in her eye and spoon it out like a gooseberry,” she shrieked, as the ball disappeared into the chasm below.

  Her alabaster skin was flushed red and her kohl black eyes bore the menace of a shark in a feeding frenzy. She stomped about the chamber, her stiletto heels carving furrows in the teakwood floor, her black hair trailing behind her like a cloud of squid ink.

  Her mother stood by, intangible, her phantom form hovering above the ground like a ghost from the attic. She sighed at the sight of her daughter’s tantrum. Evidently the girl had taken the destruction of her army personally.

  Drensila continued to rage. “Let’s see how this Nat—this gnat—suffers another battalion of my trolls. Trolls armed with cannons and explosives and canisters packed with deadly gasses.” Drensila had learned much from Nat’s mislaid smart phone, and was eager to put her new knowledge to use.

  Carnella wasn’t the least bit surprised by her daughter’s reaction. The girl was headstrong. Easily antagonised. It had always been her weakness. She coughed politely. “There is another way,” she suggested.

  Drensila turned to her mother with a sneer. “Then why don’t you explain it to me?”

  Carnella floated across to the chamber wall, which was decorated with a tapestry bearing the Durkon family sigil: an arachnid embroidered in silver onto a background of midnight blue. “Instead of sending more men to the dwarf stronghold and leaving yourself open to an attack,” she said, “why not let the fly come to the spider?”

  Drensila felt her hackles go up. All her life she’d bucked instinctively against Carnella’s authority, and the habit had embedded itself in her muscles. The reflex was unwarranted this time though. Her mother’s plan, much as it pained her to say it, was a sound one. “You’re right,” Drensila admitted. “As a matter of fact, you’ve been right about a lot of things lately.”

  “Thank you, my dear,” said Carnella, graciously. “It hasn’t been easy, but I’ve served you as best I can under the constraints to which I am bound.”

  She swiped her hand through the tapestry, demonstrating the lack of materiality that made it impossible for her to affect the physical world. The materiality that her daughter had denied her when she trapped her soul in the dead womb of The Nether. When she turned her from a human being into a hungry shadow. A devil’s whisper.

  Drensila scratched her chin. “Maybe it’s time I rewarded you for your loyalty,” she said. They were family after all, united under the same banner, for better or worse. Besides, Carnella’s behaviour since she’d found her mouthpiece in the physical realm had been nothing short of exemplary. Giving her
mother some time to think on her sins had obviously done wonders for her temperament. “I’ll do you a deal,” said Drensila. “Continue to serve as my trusted advisor and I will grant your spirit a physical form… for a probationary period at least.”

  “You would do that?”

  “Perhaps. But understand this, dear mama, if I catch even the slightest whiff of subversion I will send you back to that hellscape like shit off a shovel. Do we understand each other?”

  Carnella smiled from lobe to lobe. “Of course,” she replied. “I promise you, daughter, you will not regret this.”

  *****

  HAVING EMERGED FROM the swamp, Clive continued his desperate advance on the Citadel of Durkon. Cleaver trailed behind in a wet sack, carving a rut into the earth as he was dragged along in his kidnapper’s wake. Every now and then, Clive would stop to catch his bearings, and when he did, the sword would snatch a look at him through a tear in his burlap prison.

  The boy was a mess.

  On top of being covered in green slime—which made him look as though he’d crawled from a leprechaun’s guts—his hands were blistered red raw and swollen like mittens. A swarm of flies buzzed about his face, eager to feast on the remains of his punctured eyeball.

  “Mate, you look like a right dog’s breakfast,” said Cleaver.

  Clive ignored him and stubbornly limped on through the undergrowth.

  Watching him plough ahead with the horrible wounds he’d endured, Cleaver could almost feel sorry for the lad. Clive had given in to cowardice and look where it had gotten him: fouled up, cast out and all alone.

  “Seriously,” urged Cleaver, “you wanna get that eye looked at before the rot sets in.”

  Again, Clive gave him the cold shoulder, pushing through brambles without even registering the thorns snagging at his flesh.

  “You don’t really think Drensila’s gonna fix you up, do ya?” asked the sword. “You’re ‘avin’ a larf, mate.”