Troll Mountain: The Complete Novel (10 page)

Running at the rear of the group of fleeing captives, Raf, Ko, Vilnar, Düm, and Graia dashed back down to the Great Hall of the Mountain King.

The noise of the trolls rampaging down the stairways and tunnels behind them rang in their ears.

It was now a race to get out.

Hurrying last of all, Raf came to the top of the spiral stairs circling the outer flank of one of the pillars of the Great Hall. Looking behind him, he saw the shadows of the pursuing trolls coming around the corner of the tunnel, heard the thunder of their footsteps.

As he started down the stairs, emerging near the ceiling of the Great Hall, he touched his waist to check that he still had the pouch containing the Elixir—

He felt no pouch.

Raf looked at his waist.

The pouch was gone.

“What in the name of—” Had he dropped it? Had—

“Raf! Hurry!” Ko called back.

“I’ve lost the Elix—”

And then Raf saw him.

He looked out across the hall just in time to see Bader dash out through the huge main doorway.

Gripped tightly in Bader’s hand was Raf’s pouch.

*

Raf’s eyes almost popped out of his head.

Bader! He must have lifted it from my belt when I was busy freeing the other captives
.

His anger was short-lived, for just then, with a terrifying bellow, the first furious troll appeared at the top of the spiral stairs only ten steps away from Raf.

Raf flew down the stone stairs—leaping down them three at a time as the upper reaches of the spiraling stairway filled with more and more trolls.

Having broken through the barricaded door up top, now the full horde of two hundred angry trolls flooded down
all four
of the stair-ringed pillars of the Great Hall!

It was a fearsome and spectacular sight: the mass of trolls looked like a swarm of ants streaming down the four spiraling staircases, trying to head off the fleeing captives, especially the one they thought was stealing their Elixir.

The Southmen captives raced out the main door after Bader but well behind him. They burst out into the stormy night and hurried down the steep royal staircase, heading for the Main Gate at its base. The door and staircase which had once been reserved for troll royalty were now being used as the main route of escape by the fleeing captives.

Raf hit the floor of the hall at a run and saw that all four pillars were now teeming with trolls. He joined Ko at the main door as Düm, Graia, and Vilnar ran out into the rainstorm, heading down the royal stairway.

“Raf!” Ko called. “The barrels! Shoot the barrels!”

Raf turned and saw them: Ko’s three
other
firepowder barrels arrayed around the Great Hall, at the bases of three of the four pillars, the same barrels he had seen Düm placing earlier.

But then, in a fleeting instant, another thought struck Raf: something bigger than his own escape or that of the other prisoners.

To Ko’s surprise, Raf took off, running back into the Great Hall of the Mountain King, but off to the right, to the eastern side, heading for the nearest pillar on that side.

“What are you doing!” Ko called. “Use the flaming arrows to ignite the barrels!”

“Go!” Raf yelled back. “Get out of here!”

“But Raf—”

“Remember your own lesson: to bring down a four-legged creature, I only need to disable two of its legs. Now go!”

Ko just shook his head and raced out the main door, leaving Raf to his madness.

*

As he ran, Raf extracted a flaming arrowhead, struck it against the floor, igniting it, and notched it in his crossbow.

Then with the ranks of trolls streaming down toward him, he fired the flaming arrow diagonally across the width of the hall.

The arrow streaked across the wide interior space and slammed into the green barrel at the base of the north-western pillar, penetrating it with its flaming head.

The barrel exploded.

A moment later, the immense pillar, cracked at its base, toppled. All the trolls on it fell every which way, flung clear.

The mountain trembled.

But the hall was still intact.

Raf reached the pillar he had been running toward—the south-eastern one—and scooped up the small firepowder barrel at its base.

The trolls on this pillar, led by the king and Prince Turv, were almost down its stairs, practically right on top of Raf.

Ignoring their pounding footfalls and their furious roars, Raf calmly armed his crossbow with another flaming arrowhead, leveled the crossbow at the opposite pillar—the south-western one—and fired.

Again, the arrow streaked across the hall and lodged in the barrel just as the first troll leaped off that pillar’s stairway and started running across the hall toward Raf.

The barrel exploded.

With a great rending crash, that pillar crumbled, too, sending trolls sailing off it, tumbling to the floor.

And now the ceiling of the Great Hall began to crack. Enormous chunks of stone began to drop down from it. With two of its supporting pillars now crippled, the weight of the ceiling could no longer be upheld.

And as Raf raced out the door in the eastern wall with the barrel under his arm and dashed down the dragging ramp there, the magnificent ceiling of the Great Hall of the Mountain King came crashing down on the mass of trolls, crushing them in a thunderous and devastating avalanche of stone.

The Hall of the Mountain King was no more.

*

But it wasn’t over yet.

Troll Mountain itself was collapsing.

With the hall at its heart imploding,
the entire mountain
now began to fall.

For Raf’s arrow shots had not been random: since he had destroyed the pillars on the
western
side of the hall, the mountain now toppled in that direction.

Backlit by lightning and veiled by rain, with a great crashing noise, the top half of Troll Mountain—having already lost its summit—tilted westward, breaking away from its base, folding at the waist like a slow-falling tree. As the mountain crumbled, it turned boulders to dust and sent a great cloud of that dust billowing outward.

The whole great mountain then disappeared inside its own dust cloud as it smashed down against the nearest mountain to the west.

Ko, Vilnar, Düm, and Graia only barely managed to outrun the toppling peak. As it fell westward, it took the top half of the royal staircase with it, but fortunately for them, they had just hurried past the point where the staircase was violently ripped away.

It was likewise for Raf.

Safe on the eastern flank of the mountain, with the last little green barrel held under his arm, he just watched the great mountain peak break off from its base and fall away from him.

He found himself at the top of the dragging ramp, near a couple of stone sleds.

It was raining so hard that a small stream of water now flowed down the path as if it were a broad gutter.

Raf thought about using one of the sleds to slide down the sloping ramp, but figured he’d never be able to move one into position, so he just started running down the slick wet path.

He hadn’t taken twenty steps when a furious shout from behind made him spin.

The Troll King stood above him, covered head to toe in stone dust, his tusked face twisted with rage, his eyes red with fury.

“You!” he cried.

The pouring rain quickly mixed with the layer of dust on his huge body, turning it into streaking rivulets of mud that looked like grim war paint.

The king also spied the sleds and, one-handed, hurled one onto the dragging ramp. He leaped onto it, then pushed it hard so that it began to slide toward Raf down the rain-slicked stone path.

Raf saw two choices: be crushed under the weight of the heavy stone sled or dive off the outer edge of the path to avoid the sled and die that way.

The sled came rushing toward him, picking up speed. Through years of daily use, the dragging path was worn smooth. In this storm, with the added lubricant of the stream flowing down it, the path became a slick trench that could convey a sled at great speed.

The sled rushed toward Raf, aided by the water, but instead of going under it or diving clear of it, Raf did something else: he leaped up and
onto
the speeding sled—still gripping his green barrel—crashing into the Troll King and, thanks to the extra weight of the barrel, knocking the big troll onto his backside.

Now they were
both
on the sled and the sled was still speeding down the path.

Raf hauled himself off the Troll King, just in time to avoid a lashing blow from the angry troll.

Raf regathered his footing as the sled swept around the curve of the dragging path, rushing toward the Main Gate.

As it came round the base of the mountain—with the upper half of the mountain still collapsing and boulders bouncing down the mountainside and rain pouring and lightning flashing—Raf saw the end of the path come into view.

The path opened onto a small wooden loading enclosure built beneath the solid stone bridge of the Main Gate. Beyond the slats of the little loading enclosure was nothing but a vertical drop into the deep ravine beneath the Main Gate.

If they didn’t slow down soon, Raf saw, he and the Troll King would go blasting right through those puny wooden slats.

The king swung at Raf. Raf ducked the blow, standing with surprising balance on the speeding sled, balance that the troll didn’t have.

The sled careened down the slope.

The Troll King grew angrier. He swung again, but Raf dived past him and just as the sled whipped under the bridge at the base of the path, Raf scooped up his barrel and leaped skyward, as high as he could, his free arm outstretched, and he gripped an overhanging rafter of the bridge one-handed while the king and the sled shot onward, blasting through the wooden slats of the loading enclosure as if they were twigs and out into the air above the ravine.

Raf’s legs swung high, but he managed to hold on just long enough to fall in a clumsy heap on the path, its flowing stream coursing over his body.

His last memory of the cruel Troll King was an image of the big troll’s mud-painted face disappearing into the darkness, awash with shock and incomprehension at his defeat. He fell into darkness, falling with the rain, never to be seen again.

*

Exhausted, bleeding, and soaked to the bone, Raf climbed some nearby stairs to join Düm and Ko at the Main Gate.

He found them—with Vilnar, Graia, and the Southmen captives—standing forlornly at the Main Gate’s outer door, looking out at the space where the watchtower’s long rope-bridge had once hung.

Raf saw the cause of their dismay.

The rope-bridge now dangled vertically and uselessly from the stanchions on their side of the chasm.

“It was that fellow from your tribe,” Ko said. “He cut the bridge behind him after he got across.”

“Bader …” Raf breathed, also thinking of the Elixir Bader had stolen. By cutting the bridge, he must have thought he had condemned Raf to capture and death at the hands of the trolls while he would return in triumph to the tribe.

The rain kept falling on Raf and his group as they beheld their sorry plight.

Raf, however, turned away. “It is no matter. I didn’t intend to leave this way anyway. There’s one more thing to be done.”

With the ruined hulk of Troll Mountain towering above him—half as tall as it used to be—Raf hurried down the lower dragging path to the rocky dam at the mountain’s base.

There he placed the last green barrel of firepowder halfway up the dam’s face and lit the fuse.

Moments later, after he had scurried off the ungainly pile of boulders, a great explosion sprayed out from the face of the dam. Rocky chunks went flying outward and then—

—an immense body of water surged through the newly created hole in the dam, rushing through it with awesome force, breaking down the rest of the ugly structure with ease before flowing in a mighty wave down the dry muddy waterway that led out of the Black Mountains.

Raf smiled grimly.

The river had been reborn.

With the trolls vanquished, crushed in their own lair, and the Elixir obtained—if not in the manner Raf had intended—Raf set about returning home.

As the river settled into a more regular flow, he and the others dismantled the trolls’ wooden dock by the dam and set about crafting several broad rafts from its slats.

As they went about their work, Raf conversed with several members of the Southmen tribe and he found them to be fair and decent folk—which was totally contrary to everything he had been told about the Southmen.

Raf pondered this.

So many of the things he had been told had turned out not to be true—the nature of the land to the north of the mountains, the general roguishness of the Southmen. It made him wonder if people accept what they are told too quickly.

In any case, after a time the rafts were completed and soon Raf and the group were sailing down the wide free-flowing river out of the land of the trolls.

*

In the Badlands, the river had reclaimed the muddy bogs and swamps, and at one stage in their journey back, Raf saw the place where he and Ko had met Düm for the first time—only now the gripping mud beneath the Broken Bridge was completely submerged by the river and was no longer a danger.

Although he was keen to return to Kira, Raf stopped at Ko’s shack. There, Ko and the three trolls, Düm, Graia, and Vilnar, stepped off their rafts.

“Thank you both for everything,” Raf said to Düm and Ko. “I would be inside the Troll King’s belly now were it not for your cunning plan, Ko, and your clever following of it, Düm.”

Ko nodded. “It was my pleasure. I always thought there was something in you, Raf, but your bravery is greater than even I imagined. I hope your sister recovers and you both live long and fulfilling lives.”

“I should also return this to you.” Raf offered Ko his crossbow.

“Keep it,” Ko said. “Take it apart and see how it works, and then perhaps build your own version.”

Vilnar stepped forward and took Raf’s hand. “And let
me
thank
you
, young man. You had no obligation to free me and take me with you, but you did. I shall forever be in your debt.”

“Where will you go from here?” Raf asked.

“I will stay with Ko for a while. It will be quite nice to discuss philosophy with an equal mind. Then I plan to head back to the plains I once called home. You know what they say, once a field troll, always a field troll. It will be wonderful to live under the wide blue sky again—that is the gift you have given me.”

Finally, Raf turned to face Düm. “And what will become of you now, my big friend?”

Düm took Raf’s hand in his own giant gray paw. “Strange, but Düm not sad to see trolls finished. Troll society cruel. Now Graia and Düm last trolls left in these parts. Think we head north, to find nice cold place to live in peace, away from humans. Not all humans as nice as Master Raf and may not like trolls living nearby. Thank you again for saving Düm’s life.”

“I think we can safely say that you have repaid your debt to me.” Raf smiled and Düm gave him a sudden hug that almost crushed him.

“It’s time I returned to my tribe,” Raf said, looking away toward his valley.

Ko gave Raf an odd smile. “You have achieved much, young Raf, and you have learned much, too, but I fear there is one more lesson for you to learn and it will be a hard one.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have actually told you already,” Ko said. “But I cannot tell you again. This you must discover for yourself.”

Raf nodded warily. “Goodbye, Ko.”

“Goodbye, Raf. It has been my pleasure to assist you in your noble quest. Now, go and live.”