Don Bassingthwaite - The doom of Kings

Geth looked back at her, then at Chetiin. The goblin shook his head. “We can’t wait, Ashi,” he said. “We need to be out of sight before the bugbears come back. We can’t fight all of them.”

“But my sword-” She turned to Geth. “It was my grandfather’s. It was Kagan’s.”

“I’m sorry, Ashi,” said Geth. “We have to leave it. We have to go.”

“Your sword or our lives,” Chetiin added.

Marrow howled again, closer than she’d been before. Ashi looked over at the edge of the forest, just in time to see Midian pop out of the trees and run like fox across the fire-lit vale.

“What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “Go! Go!”

Ashi pressed her lips together and ran down into the valley.

For the third time, Ashi plunged into the thorns that ran along the forest edge. There was a path through them now, thanks partly to their hacking a passage on the way out and partly to the trolls’ headlong pursuit of them. The brambles were bent and chopped, twisted and trampled, and getting through them was no longer a torturous ordeal. Ashi barely noticed. The loss of her sword, the Sentinel Marshal honor blade that had been her first connection to House Deneith, ate at her like sorrow.

Geth kept only a single torch burning so that she could see, extinguishing the others before the light could reveal them to the bugbears. They heard the tribe return to the burning camp just as they cleared the thorns and made it into the cover of the trees. Shouts of fear and anger drifted down into the valley, followed by shrieks of joy-the children of the tribe must have emerged from the longhouse. There was also one long roar of rage. Ashi knew in her gut that it was Makka, furious at the destruction wrought in the rescue of his prisoners. His wasn’t the only voice of rage to rise from the camp, though. The tribe, it seemed, was angry with their chief. She wondered if they would consider killing him with the stolen sword and leaving it and his body behind as they fled.

The dream was comforting, but unlikely.

“Sage’s shadow,” said Midian as they paused at the inner edge of the forest. “Did any of you happen to carry my everbright lantern out of the camp?”

“Quiet, Midian,” growled Geth.

“I’m not going to be happy if those bugbears still have it. That lantern was really useful.”

The shifter turned on him. “I said, quiet!”

Midian flinched and closed his mouth. Geth caught Ashi’s eye as he turned away from the gnome. She gave him a grateful half-smile.

“You know, we may have fire now,” said Dagii, “but I still don’t like the idea of fighting through the trolls to get back to those stairs.”

“We’ve got another deterrent.” Geth pulled off the bloody bundle that he’d carried across his back and opened it. A troll’s head stared at them. Dagii’s ears twitched back.

“We cut off two of those before,” he pointed out. “It didn’t even slow the other trolls down.”

“This one’s different,” Geth said. He pulled out a long torch, hacked the wooden shaft into a long, sharp stake, and stuck it into the stump of the troll’s neck. Holding the head up like a gruesome standard, he said, “This one’s dead.”

“Dead?” asked Ekhaas. “Dead dead?”

“Dead and not coming back. We found a way to kill them.”

“Maabet! Why don’t we use it?” said Dagii.

“We will if we need to,” said Chetiin. “It will be even better if we can keep the trolls from attacking us in the first place, though.”

Geth-troll head in one hand, Wrath in the other-and Chetiin led the way into the dark forest. Ashi, Ekhaas, and Midian followed with smoldering pitch pots and relit torches. Under the trees, they didn’t need to worry about the bugbears seeing the light, and the open flame was something else to give the trolls pause. As he had before, Dagii came at the end of their party, watching the trail behind.

Ashi carried a pitch pot in each hand, slowly swinging them back and forth in their leather slings so that the thin veil of blue fire atop each hissed and popped. Pungent, resinous smoke made a faint, swirling trail behind her. The forest felt somehow less disturbing the third time through, Ashi thought. Maybe she was getting used to the silent atmosphere. Maybe she was numbed by the loss of Kagan’s sword. Maybe she was just exhausted-she would have happily camped for the remainder of the night and continued in the morning, but there was nowhere to camp. Caught between the bugbears and the trolls, their only choice was to keep going all the way back to the mysterious stairs.

Hiss, went the pots as she swung them. Hiss, hiss, pop, hiss-

Chetiin stopped. “Troll,” he said softly.

“Where?” asked Geth.

Chetiin pointed, then pointed again. And again.

“Behind us, too,” said Dagii. “Two more. Five altogether.”

“Light more torches,” Chetiin said. “One for each of us.”

“Not me,” Ashi told him. She took a careful step away from Ekhaas and Midian and began to spin the pitch pots as the bugbears had when they’d confronted the trolls on the valley’s slope. The slow hiss turned into a steady rush. The pots became blurred, blue-glowing orbs. As more torches were lit and the circle of light around them grew, the blue glow seemed to fade, but the sound of the flame was still there. Hiissshh…

The expanding illumination caught the trolls at its edge. Their lumpy, blue-green flesh seemed to meld with the mossy trees. They almost could have been trees, tall and thin and twisted, still as old wood, their dark eyes like shadowed knots. Geth turned slowly, looking at each of them in turn and making sure that they saw the head that he carried.

“Dead,” he said. “This one is dead. No healing. No coming back. Do you understand?”

They gave no indication that they even heard him.

“They reacted when Makka challenged them,” said Dagii. “Try Goblin.”

“Let me.” Ekhaas moved forward to stand beside Geth. The tallest of the trolls stood directly in front of them, and Ekhaas faced it. She stood up straight and spoke in Goblin, “Let us pass! We carry fire. We can hurt you.” She let her voice drop into a whisper that matched the rush of Ashi’s whirling pots. “We can kill you.” She pointed at the severed head.

The tallest troll blinked and tilted its head slowly, looking first at the severed head, then at Ekhaas. Its warty, rubbery face betrayed nothing more.

“Let us pass,” said Ekhaas again. “We mean you no harm. Let us pass and we will not hurt you.”

Silence again, a silence that stretched out. Ekhaas didn’t move but just kept looking at the troll. None of the other trolls around them moved, nor did Chetiin or Geth. Midian moved, squirming. Dagii moved, tightening his grip on sword and on torch. Ashi tried not to move, but she found herself swinging the pitch pots faster so that their hiss grew louder and more shrill.

Then the troll moved, throwing back its head and letting out a weird hooting sound. Ashi gasped in surprise and might have released both pitch pots right at it if Ekhaas hadn’t thrust out a hand. “Do nothing!” she said. Her eyes were bright. “It’s calling something-or someone.”

They held still. A few moments later, they heard the sound of something being dragged through the forest. Two somethings, Ashi realized, as the sound drew closer. Two trolls came to the edge of the light, each of them pulling another troll. They released their burdens, then stepped back into the darkness.

The first troll must have been the one Geth’s head belonged to. Its neck was cut through and the stump showed no signs of healing. The rubbery flesh of the corpse had turned gray. There was no doubt that the troll was dead.

There was equally no doubt that the second troll was alive. It groaned and wept quietly, moaning like someone with a fever. The injuries that tortured it, however, were far worse. It was the troll they had defeated near the stairs, the one Ashi had cut open and Midian had burned. Its back was an open wound, a mess of scorched bone and flesh that was either black and charred or red and weeping.