Don Bassingthwaite - The doom of Kings

“Rond betch,” she murmured. She saw Chetiin throw a hard glance at Midian. The gnome’s face was expressionless.

The tallest troll hooted again, softly this time, then growled and brought up a gangly arm. It pointed at the dead troll, then at the weeping one. It looked at Ekhaas and hooted again.

“You want us to kill it,” the duur’kala said slowly.

The tallest troll hooted a third time. Once again it pointed from one troll to the other, but this time it followed the gesture by stepping aside for a moment. Its message was clear: Kill the injured troll and they would be allowed to pass.

“These are not normal trolls,” said Dagii under his breath.

Ekhaas looked at Geth, who looked at Chetiin. The goblin nodded. He approached the weeping troll cautiously, drawing the dagger he kept on his right wrist. Ashi didn’t get a good look at the weapon, but what she could see left her with a strange chill. She let the twirling pitch pots slow to a gentle swinging once more.

Chetiin struck with the speed of a serpent, plunging the dagger into the base of the troll’s neck and up into its skull. The troll’s weeping stopped. Its body stiffened for an instant, then relaxed. When Chetiin pulled the dagger out, the blade-dull gray steel set with a thin blue-black crystal-was absolutely clean. He returned the dagger to its sheath and moved back.

The tallest troll looked down at the still, silent body for a long moment, then stepped out of their way. The other trolls around them moved back into the shadows. “Go,” whispered Ekhaas.

“You trust them?” asked Ashi.

“For now,” Ekhaas said. “The next time we meet them, no.”

They filed past the troll, so close Ashi could smell the wet canvas stink of it. Ekhaas and Geth stood where they were until the others had gone, then followed. The troll, however, gave one last hoot and pointed at the headless body.

Ekhaas frowned. “I think it wants-”

“I know what it wants,” said Geth. He went back to the body and laid the severed head beside it, then returned to Ekhaas and the others, taking his place at the head of the party once more. “Let’s get out of here and find those stairs,” he said.

Ashi glanced back at the dead trolls before the light of the torches had completely gone. All of the living trolls had gathered around them as if mourning. It was an eerie, almost tender sight. “I wouldn’t have expected that,” she said to Midian.

Before they’d gone much farther, though, new sounds broke the silence of the valley. Wet tearing. Dry crunching. Popping. Chewing.

“I hate this place,” said Midian.

The sound of the feasting trolls urged them to a faster pace. With the monsters behind them-for the moment at least-they abandoned caution and all but raced through the forest. It seemed to Ashi that they were back at the scene of their first battle with the troll in almost no time at all, then through the trees and standing at the top of the stairs with only a few steps more. When they’d come upon the stairs the first time, there’d been only moonlight, and all she had been able to see was the dim form of the steps. With torchlight, she got a better look and marveled at the carved gray stone, perfectly preserved in spite of its age. No one else seemed much interested in the stairs this time, though. Even Midian scarcely glanced at the carvings in the stone. The party paused at the top of the long flight.

“Go ahead,” Chetiin said. “The way is clear.”

Geth’s first step onto the stairs was almost tentative, but he bared his teeth and his pace became bolder as he led the way down into the pit. Ashi thought she could feel the same thing he had. The stairs were ancient and imposing, but once she was walking on them, they felt like any others. Steep maybe, and subtly higher and wider than normal steps, but ordinary stairs just the same.

Then the edge of the torchlight fell on the massive trees that reached up out of the pit. Ekhaas had described them to her before, but even a duur’kala’s description didn’t do the size of them justice. The trunks were as big as small towers. The thin moonlight that had given some illumination to the upper stairs vanished behind the unseen branches. Darkness closed in, with all the eerie silence and tension of the valley focused, it seemed, on the small pool of light that crept along the stairs.

“There are trees in the Eldeen Reaches that are almost this big,” Geth said, “and they didn’t get that way naturally. How much farther, Chetiin?”

“Not much.”

Just a little farther along, the wet canvas smell of trolls rose to meet them. On each side of the stairs, deep pockets had been gouged into the living wood of the trees and lined with an assortment of leaves and fern fronds. Chetiin gestured for them to keep going. “It’s the troll nest,” he said. “We’re almost at the bottom.”

Ashi studied the dens dug into the trees. Each looked big enough for one troll to sleep curled up inside, but there weren’t just nine pockets for the nine trolls. There were dozens, some disappearing into the shadows high above. The majority, however, seemed abandoned. They had no linings, and the scarred wood had long healed into puckers of bark. Makka had described the valley as being a cursed place since the mountains were young. Ashi wondered how long trolls had been living here.

Beyond the nest was the bottom of the stairs-and the bottom of the pit. The ground leveled out among the roots of the great trees in an expanse of dense, black soil. Somewhere else, Ashi might have called it a small clearing. Here it felt like a kind of void. On its far side rose a sheer rock face. Built against the rock was the front of a simple shrine, fashioned from the same gray stone as the stairs and carved with a band of the same twisting shapes. Through a narrow doorway, the interior of the shrine extended into the rock as the trolls’ dens extended into the trees.

“Aureon’s blue quill,” said Midian. “It’s in perfect condition.”

“Pre-Dhakaani?” Dagii asked.

“Pre-Dhakaani,” Midian confirmed. He stepped off the stairs and walked across the bare earth to hold his torch up before the structure. Illuminated, the carvings sprang into sharp relief. Ashi thought she could see animals in the swirls. Animals, plants, maybe even figures that could have been members of the goblin races. As the others came to join him, Midian frowned and stepped closer, examining the carvings up close. “This isn’t possible,” he said. “The grooves and edges haven’t weathered at all.”

“They’d be well protected down here,” Ashi pointed out. “And you said there was probably some preserving magic on the stone of the stairs. Wouldn’t it have been applied to the shrine as well?”

“Preserving magic doesn’t work that well. There was lichen on the stairs and some weathering, and I thought that was amazing.” He touched a carved swirl. “These are more than fifteen thousand years old, and they might have been carved yesterday.”

“It’s here, though,” said Geth, his voice excited. They all turned to look at him. He was standing in front of the shrine’s door, his eyes bright, and he held Wrath out in front of him with both hands, as if trying to keep a grip on the sword. “The rod is here, in the shrine. If you’re finished looking at carvings, let’s go get it!”

“It’s not going anywhere, Geth,” Ekhaas said. “We’ll go in when we’re ready.”

“Grandfather Rat, how much more ready can we be? Chetiin, Ashi, are you with me?”

Ashi-and Chetiin as well-glanced at Ekhaas before answering. The duur’kala’s ears stood up, but after a moment, she nodded. “You’re right. Let’s go. Just be careful.”