“It’s a moot point, lad,” said the dwarf. “She’s boxed in by a chasm on orl sides.”
“What about a full-frontal assault then? If we could design something that got up enough speed, couldn’t we batter down the front gate?”
“Fastest thing we ‘ave is minecarts, ‘n’ them’s ‘auled by rope.”
Neville felt the stick of chalk break in his hands. “What is it with you people?” he pleaded. “You’ve been around for thousands of years and the limit of your tech is shovels and carts? I mean, come on, how about inventing the internal combustion engine at least?”
There was serious work to be done and Neville was already set to crack. There was only one thing for it.
“To the boozer,” he demanded.
Chapter Four: Trappings
DRENSILA WANTED ANSWERS. Specifically she wanted answers to the question “How do I murder Nat Lawler?”
Unfortunately, her new apprentice could provide no such information. Clive had parted ways with his companions before the battle of Bludoch Dungeon took place, and consequently, knew precious little of the dwarves’ military capabilities or defences. Thanks to his treachery, the job of providing any useful intelligence fell to her prisoner, Terry. Unlike Clive though, Terry refused to betray his friends, which left the queen’s new warlord to extract the answers she sought. It was a task the troll took to with no small amount of zeal.
Thrungle examined the array of unsanitary knives, tongs and saws laid before him. Using any one of them, he could have wrested Terry’s secrets from him in moments, but where would be the fun in that? The kind of torture Thungle enjoyed started in the head. The breaking of a man’s mind, that was where his satisfaction lay. Breaking his body was just the cherry on the cake.
He turned to Terry, who lay secured to a rack in the citadel’s least hospitable prison cell. The only other item of furniture in the room was a potty, which whistled and squeaked with a roiling mass of sewer rats. Thrungle leered at his prisoner, then leaned in close and exhaled on him with breath like a freshly-cracked sarcophagus. He let a forked black tongue loll from his mouth and ran it over Terry’s cheek.
“I taste fear in your sweat, human,” he told his victim.
Terry felt the teeth on the troll’s macabre necklaces tickle the bare flesh of his torso. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “You’re not going to waterboard me, are you?”
“What's a water board?
“It's when you put a towel over someone’s head and... actually, why am I telling you this?”
“I’ll tell you how you’re going to die, boy,” said Thungle, the words oozing from his mouth, “just as soon as I’ve made up my mind.” He took a pause then ran through some options. “Perhaps I’ll boil you in oil,” he mused, “or I could hammer spikes under your fingernails. Maybe I’ll fish some of those starving rats from your potty and sew you into a sack with them. How would you like that?”
Terry swallowed. None of that sounded like any fun at all.
Thrungle snapped his fingers and his face lit up. “Better yet,” he announced. “I could send you to The Tub.”
“The Tub?” Terry parroted. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
The troll showed his yellow fangs. “The Tub is a torment unlike any other. Imagine your body trapped within an iron container, only your head outside of it. Now imagine your face, painted with honey, drawing flies that lay their eggs beneath your skin. You’ll be kept fed and watered as the maggots devour your body, as you rot away, puddled in your own filth.” He narrowed his yellow eyes to slits. “Only then will I order you tossed in the pit across the chasm to make manure for my troll army. ”
Terry shivered at the thought, but the troll wasn’t done yet.
Thrungle whisked a black tongue around his lips. “And then, after you’re gone, I’ll murder your woman,” he said. “Murder her, eat her, and pick my teeth with her bones.”
Terry strained at his shackles, veins springing up on his temples. “I’ll kill you!” he raged.
Thrungle laughed. “I very much doubt that,” he said, and laughed some more.
The door to the cell swung open and Drensila appeared.
“My Queen,” Thrungle grovelled, offering a deep bow.
“Report.”
“I was just about to transfer the prisoner to The Tub,” Thrungle explained.
Drensila scowled. “We don’t have time for that. I need what this boy knows, and I need it now.”
Thrungle protested. “But m’lady—”
“Silence!” Before he could bore her any further, she sent him packing with a wave of her rod.
After Thrungle had made haste, Drensila approached Terry’s rack and loomed over her prisoner. He stared back at her defiantly, determined not to crack.
“Do what you like,” he said. “I won’t talk.”
“Oh, I won’t be doing anything,” replied Drensila, and called outside. “Get in here, apprentice...”
Terry watched as a second figure entered the room. He was dressed in a dark robe and wore a cowl, which he lowered to reveal a sickly face, webbed in spidery black veins. A ragged leather patch covered one of his eyes. At first Terry didn’t recognise the man, then... “Clive?” he spluttered.
His absent friend stood there like Satan’s own groomsman. Just looking at him made Terry want to take a bath in hand sanitiser.
“Terry?” said Clive, equally surprised.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked. “Wait… no…tell me you’re not with her...?”
Clive pointed his one good eye at the ground.
“Why don’t I answer for you?” offered Drensila, then turned her attention to Terry. “Yes, your friend works for me now. I’m sure that hurts to hear. I shouldn’t worry though, because I assure you, you’re about to hurt a whole lot worse.”
She reached over to the array of torture implements beside Terry’s rack, plucked out a serrated blade and handed it to Clive. “Get to work,” she told him.
“Me?” he objected, pushing it away with a rag-bound hand.
“Yes, you,” replied Drensila. “Consider this your first test. Find out what he knows and prove your loyalty to me.”
“I can’t,” squirmed Clive. “He’s my friend...”
“Your friend? The man you betrayed and left for dead? If that’s how you treat your friends, I’d hate to be your enemy.”
Terry couldn’t believe what he was hearing. And yet he could. “Please,” he begged Clive. “Please say she’s making this up.”
“Just tell me what you know, Terry. Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”
“You did it, didn’t you? You ran out on us and joined the enemy.”
“Terry—” Clive started, but Terry wasn’t done talking.
“You sold us down the river!” he screamed, straining at his bonds. “We were your friends!”
“We’re still friends, Terry. You and me.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah.”
Terry was fizzing with spite. “You wanna know how much I’m not your friend, Clive?”
Clive took a step back.
“You remember that rumour back in school?” Terry went on. “I know you do. The one that started in the boys’ changing room?” He watched as Clive’s remaining eyelid took on a twitch. “It wasn’t the bullies who got that started, Clive. It was just locker room banter to them, out of their heads the moment they were done showering.”
Clive’s lip curled and a rancour began to ferment inside of him. “You!” he said, the word falling from his mouth like a curse.
“Yeah, me,” Terry taunted. “I lit the match. I made you Queer Clive.”
“Do you even know what you did?” Clive snapped, pressing his hook nose into Terry’s. “You ruined everything! I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I begged my parents to move me to another school, but they just told me stand up for myself. They put me on meds, Terry. That month I took off in Year Ten? That was
n’t because I had pneumonia. That was because I tried to kill myself.”
A sliver of empathy cracked Terry’s facade, but he forced himself to go on. “Try harder next time,” he spat.
Maybe he wasn’t the good guy exactly, but he wasn’t the one dressed in black and taking orders from the queen of evil.
“Why did you do it, Tel?” Clive asked. It was candid. Pleading. Almost a whimper.
“Why does anyone do anything?” Terry answered with a shrug. “I did it to impress a girl.”
“Adele Atkins? Your old girlfriend?”
“Yeah. I wanted to tell her a funny story and that’s what came out.”
“You messed up my life for an icebreaker?”
“Yeah. It’s the only reason I stayed your friend all these years, because I felt bad about it.” He grimaced. “I suppose I should say thank you, ‘cause I don’t feel bad anymore.”
Clive loomed over him, hot with malice. “You will, Terry. I’ll make sure you feel every bit of it.”
Terry shrank. It was as though a tear had opened up in Clive and his soul had escaped through the hole. Drensila handed her apprentice the knife, but Clive shook his head.
“We can do better than that,” he said, and snapped his fingers.
A flash of light flooded the cell, blinding all but Clive. Drensila rubbed her eyes, and when she opened them she found Cleaver hanging mid-air above Terry’s torso. Drensila’s eyebrows practically lifted off her head. Not only was the sword meant to be locked away inside a trophy cabinet, but her apprentice had managed to summon it with a spell that usually too a lifetime of schooling to perfect. Drensila herself had spent almost a decade learning to master teleportation, and the many cat skeletons that lay half-buried in the citadel’s walls stood as a testament to the spell’s difficulty. Even more impressively, Clive had performed the conjuration without the need of any hand gestures or arcane recitations, making Drensila feel like a dim-witted school child who couldn’t read without her lips flapping.
Terry was shocked too, though in a more straightforward sense. “You can do magic?” he blurted.
Clive grinned like a Halloween pumpkin. “I’m going to enjoy this,” he told Terry.
“Put us down, you ponce!” bawled Cleaver, powerless to resist Clive’s magic.
The enchanted sword descended to hover inches from the bare skin of Terry’s stomach.
“You made me what I am,” Clive told Terry. “I want you to remember that.”
And so the screaming began, not just from Terry, but from the object of his torture also.
Chapter Five: Insanity Roll
“BOOZE ME,” SAID Neville, hailing the barman.
A dwarf wearing a beard sculpted to look like an ale cask ambled over with a brown bottle in his hand. “Two fingers?” he asked.
“Just a drink for now,” replied Nev with a saucy wink.
The dwarf stared at him contemptuously.
“Sure, I’ll take a double,” said Neville, sensing a distinct lack of repartee. “One for my friend too.”
Tidbit settled the bill, and the two withdrew to a table to sample whatever fermented potato juice it was that passed for alcohol in Bludoch Dungeon.
The Hammer & Anvil was known to be a busy establishment full of thirsty patrons and rollicking good cheer, but not at ten in the morning on a weekday. At that hour the barstools were empty, the floor freshly swabbed and the air stagnant with the smell of last night’s beer.
“Well,” said Neville, watching the publican chase a spider across the bar, “It’s not exactly fiddle music and lusty wenches, but at least we won’t be distracted.” He held up his breakfast sharpener for a toast. “Cheers.”
“A smidge early in t’ morn for me, lad,” remarked Tidbit, leaving his drink on the table. “It’s barely first light.”
“There is no light down here,” replied Nev, “no clocks either. It’s like Vegas in this place.” He knocked back his whiskey and made a face like a bulldog chewing a thistle. “Wow. That is… provocative,” he gasped.
Given his bodyweight, it didn’t take much to get Neville drunk, and after a couple more glasses, his wheels were fairly spinning.
“So, I’ve been thinking,” he slurred. “We can’t go through Drensila’s defences and we can’t go under them, right? Well, what if we were to go over?”
“‘N’ ‘ow do ye plan on doing tha’?” said the dwarf. “Carry on drinkin’ until a pink elephant shows oop’ ‘n’ spirits ye away on it’s back?”
Neville banged his forehead on the table. “I don’t know, dude, I just want to make this work.”
Things weren’t going as planned at all. The booze had loosened him up, but it was doing nothing to aid his creativity. He was meant to be Nat’s pit crew, her one-man brain trust, and he was ballsing it up royal.
“‘Ere,” said Tidbit, sighing reluctantly and handing Nev a scrap of something green. “Ah don’ like t’ be party t’ this, but despret times call for despret measures.”
Neville’s eyes lit up at the sight of the bud. “You saved it,” he beamed, recognising the lone morsel of weed he’d tossed on the floor of the dwarf’s workshop during his last “I quit” moment.
He reached into his top pocket and fished out his pipe. “This calls for something special,” he said, and cast his eyes about the tavern. Spying a fruit bowl, he selected something that looked a bit like an apple and began to core it with a nearby paring knife.
“Wha’ ar ye oop te naw?” asked Tidbit, who watched as Nev scooped out the fruit’s innards and inserted his pipe into a carefully carved hole.
“Making a bong,” Neville replied.
“Out o’ a pitfruit?”
“I can make a bong out of pretty much anything,” Nev bragged. “One time I made one out of a Mr Potato Head.”
“Wha’ manner o’ creature is tha’?” asked Tidbit, taken aback.
Neville didn’t bother to put him straight. Instead he lit the weed and drank down a hefty slug of smoke. “Here, get a toke on that,” he told the dwarf, “it’ll make you feel... more inventive.”
Tidbit gingerly received the forbidden fruit, and after much prompting, took a puff. He immediately broke into a coughing fit. “It kicks like a troglodyte,” he spluttered.
“I don’t know about you,” said Neville, “but I’m feeling more creative already.” He spread a sheet of vellum on the table then handed Tidbit a stick of charcoal and kept one for himself. “Let’s get busy,” he told the dwarf.
The two of them sat there a while, musing, mulling, meditating. There was doodling too. For all their effort though, nothing much came of it.
“Ah don’ gerrit,” said Tidbit. “Ma mind’s more befuddled than it were befor’, an ahm so piggin’ ‘ungry.”
“The trick is to smoke through it,” advised Neville, pushing the bong back in the dwarf’s direction.
Tidbit batted it away. “Nay more, lad,” he protested.
Neville slouched back in his seat. It was barely eleven o’clock in the morning and his mind was already shot. It was time Neville admitted the truth to himself. Weed wasn’t his Popeye spinach, weed was his crutch. It wasn’t something he did to expand his mind, it was a tranquiliser for his nerves. Calpo for a mewling wean.
As he sat there feeling sorry for himself, he absent-mindedly plucked rolling papers from a pack of Rizla and put them to the flame of his Zippo. He watched the tissue-thin papers ignite, then right before they burned down to his fingers he let them go and watched their ashes float off into the air.
He suddenly sat up in his chair. “I’ve got it!” he blurted.
“Wha’ is it?” said Tidbit, intrigued. “Are ye ‘avin’ another of yer notions?”
Neville grinned, snatched up a stick of charcoal and began to sketch.
*****
DRENSILA RETURNED TO the throne room.
“Well, what did you learn?” asked Carnella, who’d made herself comfortable in the Durkon throne in her daughter’s brief a
bsence.
“Everything,” Drensila replied, bullying her mother from her seat. “My new apprentice was most… thorough.”
Clive offered a sweeping bow. “Thanks to the prisoner we now have a complete overview of the enemy’s defences: numbers, resources, weapons. The lot.”
Drensila chimed in. “We also learned the whereabouts of a secret escape hatch leading into the heart of the dwarf dungeon.”
“He even gave up the location of the bedchamber Nat sleeps in,” Clive sneered. “His own girlfriend.”
Carnella seemed particularly interested in that news. “I see,” she said. “And what do you plan on doing with this newfound knowledge?”
Nibbling at an idea, Drensila twirled her rod of power like a majorette’s baton. “My first thought is to send a detachment of elite trolls through the hatch,” she replied. “Murder that pesky interloper while she sleeps.”
“The march to Bludoch Dungeon would take days,” noted Carnella.
“Not if my soldiers rode in tanks,” she replied, holding up the purloined smart phone to remind Carnella of her technological dominance.
“I believe I know of a more elegant solution.”
“What do you propose, mother?” asked Drensila, black fingernails drumming the armrest of her throne.
Carnella explained the plan to her daugher.
Clive didn’t hear it.
Clive was too distracted by Drensila’s rod, which—to him at least—hummed with an unbridled power so loud and so insistent that it deafened him to all else.
*****
THE ELVES WEREN’T the only one’s capable of sending assassins to do their dirty work. The Durkon’s had their ways too; sinister ways, spiteful and obscene.
All was still in Nat Lawler’s bed chamber until a pale hand appeared from the antique dress mirror stood by her bed. Nat wasn’t there to see it, nor did she see the arm that appeared after it, dragging a raven-haired woman into the sanctuary of her boudoir. The flame of the room’s brazier flickered and turned from orange to blue. The temperature of the chamber plunged and webs of frost etched across its walls. Startled cockroaches scattered and scurried back into their cracks. Carnella the Cruel stepped through the mirror fully and regarded her surroundings with contempt.
Power Playing (Trolled Book 2) Page 4