Don't Feed the Trolls Read online

  He moved toward the bridge, forcing himself to take his time, for it would not do to abandon his caution now and go flailing over the edge, not when the promise of salvation, of warmth was so close. It felt like it took a lifetime to reach the bridge but in reality could have taken no more than a few minutes. And despite his eagerness, Dannen forced himself to stop and turn to check on the others. He needn’t have bothered, though, for they were clearly as excited as he was at the prospect of getting off this gods-forsaken mountain and were already standing right behind him.

  He found himself grinning. “Come on,” he said again. And with that, he turned and started walking across the bridge. As he did, he began to sober from his good mood. There was ice caked on the slats of the bridge, so slippery that he was forced to hold onto one side to keep his feet, and that was bad. What was worse was that the bridge itself seemed to sway beneath his feet, as if the wind might knock it over at any moment, though whether that was simply his imagination or not he couldn’t tell for sure. Either way, they were close to salvation and Dannen had seen enough of the world in all its cruel glory to know that it usually saved the worst surprises for when a man thought he was safe.

  So he proceeded cautiously, minding his footing, his hand gripping the railing of the bridge so hard that it ached, and the others followed. They were about halfway across when he thought he saw something in the driving curtain of snow, and he frowned. It had only been for an instant, but it had seemed as if he’d seen the silhouette of a man at the other end of the bridge. Ridiculous, of course, for he could not imagine that anyone would be a fool enough to travel the mountains in winter. At least not anyone except for him and his companions, and it had to be said that they hadn’t exactly been spoiled for choice.

  Still, he paused, and Fedder walked up beside him. “What is it?” the mage asked, having to yell to be heard over the wind.

  Dannen shook his head, frowning, then realized that it was unlikely the mage would be able to see the gesture. “I don’t know,” he shouted back, “I thought I saw someone.”

  “Where?” This from Mariana who had come up to stand next to the mage, Tesler walking up beside her.

  “At the other end of the—” Dannen cut off, shaking his head. It had only been his imagination, had to be, and the embarrassment of the morning, along with the woman’s jokes, was still too fresh in his mind to risk being mocked for seeing things like a child might. “Nothing,” he said, “never mind.”

  Then they were moving again. The wind picked up as they walked, as if it were some spurned lover clinging at them, refusing to allow them to leave, but Dannen gritted his teeth and pressed forward, one hand shielding his eyes, the other gripping the rail.

  Roughly three quarters of the bridge lay behind them when Dannen caught sight of something again. A figure silhouetted in the driving snow. It had been possible that he’d imagined it the first time, but he did not doubt it now, for the figure was no more than two dozen feet away and moving toward them. And, as he watched, he realized it wasn’t just one figure after all but a dozen at least, all of them walking toward him and the others in a shuffling walk similar, he guessed, to that which he and his companions had been forced to employ on the ice-covered bridge. Even as he stared at them, trying to imagine who they were and why they had found themselves on this high mountain pass in the middle of winter, more appeared, one after the other, until there were fifty at least.

  As the figures drew closer, Dannen could still make out none of their specific features, not even so much as to tell whether they were men or women, but he did notice the shadowed shape of what could only be swords sheathed at their sides and that made him frown in thought. Swords were tools, yes, but for such a hike through a winter-blasted landscape, there were other, far more useful ones. An axe came to mind, or a pick. Swords were not so useful when chopping firewood or climbing mountains, were only useful, really, when a man felt the need to poke a hole in another one.

  Which meant that these men, whatever else they were, saw the possible need to do just that in the near future and so had equipped themselves accordingly. As he watched them moving closer, peering and trying—and failing—to make out any distinguishing features through the driving snow, Dannen wondered at who they could be. Then an idea struck him, and he found himself smiling.

  The guard captain, before they’d left Palden, had intimated that he suspected King Ufrith would send men to deal with the duke and his misconduct. Dannen had doubted the man’s word, namely because he doubted a king who had just had his army defeated by an undead horde would bother sending what few troops he had remaining to him to an out of the way town on the edge of his territory to deal with a philandering duke. No if what Perandius said was true then King Ufrith had far more pressing things to worry about than some asshole duke on the outskirts of his kingdom. Such as whether or not he would have a kingdom—or a life—at all.

  Still, despite Dannen’s doubts, he could see the silhouette of the soldiers’ swords clearly enough as they moved closer to him. And considering the fact that he had just spent the last day and a half struggling up it, certain he would slip and fall, Dannen knew that the bridge—and the path which preceded it—led directly to Palden. Soldiers, then, and ones which were moving toward the town he had so recently fled—those two things could not be denied.

  And why would anyone risk the mountain passes in the cold of winter? They would not, that was all, not unless they were, like Dannen and his companions, fleeing something worse. Or if they were soldiers obeying their king’s orders. That was it—it had to be. Ufrith had sent troops after all. Perhaps he had heard of his duke’s misconduct before the battle and, confident that he could spare them, had dispatched what appeared to be around fifty of his troops to deal with it. Or perhaps Perandius had been wrong.

  After all, whatever else they were, whatever other powers they possessed, the gods were not infallible. In fact, Dannen had seen enough of them to know that, in many ways, they were just as screwed up and clueless as the mortals they watched over. It was certainly possible that Perandius had misinterpreted the situation or—considering what had happened to those teams of champions who had attempted to defeat the necromancer and his brother before Dannen and his own companions—perhaps he had been duped.

  Either way, Dannen was glad to see the soldiers. At worst, perhaps they might have some spare blankets or coats, maybe even some food he and the others could have. At best, he could get a better idea of how far away this village the guard captain had spoken of was and, if it were too far, they might allow him and the others to return to Palden with them. Palden, where he and his companions could sit by a warm fire with a hot mug of something—he’d take water at this point—in their hands and watch the bastard of a duke, who was the reason Dannen was currently freezing his balls off on this gods-forsaken mountainside, receive his punishment.

  Dannen had never much cared for attending executions and those crowds of people who always gathered, eager to watch a stranger’s head leave his shoulders. They reminded him of those creatures some stories spoke of, creatures that survived by consuming the flesh and blood of others. Only, for such people, it seemed that it was not the blood or the flesh of others which sustained them. Instead, it seemed that they consumed something else—misery, perhaps, or despair, the pure terror which grips a man or woman when they see their death come upon them and know that, this time, there is no avoiding it.

  Such people, such creatures, might look like men and women, but Dannen thought they were less than that, were monsters in their own right, ones who, by his reckoning, were far worse than those monsters which lurked underneath the beds and inside the closets of frightened children. After all, these monsters wore human faces, spoke human words, but they were not. Were something less than human. Something evil.

  Still, Dannen thought that, in the duke’s case, he could stomach it, and he watched the figures—more appearing all the time, so that their numbers were near a hundred now, and
him left to wonder why Ufrith would have sent so many—approach with eagerness. At least, mostly eagerness. There was, he had to admit, some small bit of trepidation as more and more of the figures appeared out of the blizzard, still little more than silhouettes—but strangely, he noted that some had appeared to draw the swords they’d had sheathed at their sides.

  Dannen decided he had best move forward and explain who he and the others were, lest there be some fatal misunderstanding and the soldiers took them for bandits or something else. He began to shamble forward until he paused, frowning. Closer now, he still could not make out individual features of the soldiers moving toward him, but he could not help but note that there was something odd about the way they walked, the way they moved.

  There was a hitching, wooden jerkiness to their movements he did not like and even as he noted it, he became aware of something else, too. A smell, one he recognized all too well. It was the smell of death, of blood and desiccated flesh. He told himself he must be imagining it, that the smell was no more than a creation of his own mind, one born of the not inconsiderable stress he’d been under for…well, the last thirty years or so. He told himself also that there was nothing unusual about the shapes of those figures moving toward him as some part of his mind was whispering frantically, told himself that their strange, unusual movements were simply because of the cold. Certainly, he himself was moving strangely, questing carefully with his feet while gripping the rail.

  He told himself these things and was still working on believing them—had frozen in place, figuratively and very close to literally, to do just that—when one of the figures suddenly appeared out of the driving snow less than a foot away from him. Then, all of his carefully-crafted theories and explanations vanished as he stared at the cadaverous features of the soldier. Ashen skin and a gaunt face. These things were indicators of the truth, but Dannen didn’t need them. After all, there was the fact that the creature was little more than a skeleton. What ashen skin it possessed—and there was not much of it—hung in tattered strips here and there, and its face was gaunt, mostly because it was a skull.

  Dannen had a chance to let out a shout which was a mixture of panic and disgust, then the creature suddenly closed the distance between them in an instant, moving considerably faster than it had before, its flailing, jerking movements more than a little unnerving. Though, it had to be said, not as unnerving as the blade it brandished, then brought down toward Dannen in a brutal over-hand strike.

  Dannen sidestepped the blow. Or, at least, he intended to. Instead, his foot struck a patch of ice—nearly impossible not to considering that the bridge was covered with the stuff—and he immediately began to slide, or perhaps more accurately, fall. Had his hand still been on the railing, he would have been able to catch himself, but he had been forced to abandon his grip to sidestep the attack. And so he did the only thing he could do—pinwheeled his arms uselessly as his legs flew out from underneath him, the only consolation as he struck the bridge’s surface hard enough to knock the air from his lungs, was that, so far at least, he remained unstabbed.

  A condition which his undead attacker seemed intent on remedying, for it stepped forward again, swinging its notched, rusted blade—it seemed the undead warrior cared no more for its weapon’s state than it did his own—in a two-handed grip meant to cleave Dannen down the middle. It came very near to doing just that, forcing Dannen to scramble away, abandoning any hope of a counter—and more than a bit of his dignity—as he slid away on all fours.

  He was still scrambling away in his crawling, sliding desperation, when he struck something and let out a grunt. He looked up, sure that it was another of the undead creatures, that he’d somehow gotten turned around, but it was not a skeleton looking down at him, although, considering his position, he almost wished it was. Instead, it was Fedder, a curious expression on his face. “Butcher?” he asked. “Everything okay?”

  “Sure,” Dannen snapped. “Just thought I’d see what it felt like to be a dog is all.”

  “So?” Fedder asked.

  “What?” Dannen asked as he took the man’s offered hand and worked his way to his feet.

  “So what did it feel like? Being a dog?”

  “Damnit, forget that. There are undead on the bridge with us.”

  “Wait,” Mariana said as she and Tesler came to stand beside them, “did you say undead dogs?”

  “What?” Dannen asked. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Mariana frowned. “You’re the one that said it, not us. Strange joke, Dannen.”

  “Damnit, I’m not joking,” Dannen snapped. “There are undead on the bridge, you have to belie—”

  “I believe you, Butcher,” Fedder said, and Dannen turned to look at him and saw that the mage was not staring at him but past him. Dannen turned and followed the mage’s gaze, grunting. The falling snow had slowed somewhat, allowing him a far better view of the bridge and those things sharing it with him and his companions. Not that he felt particularly thankful for that just then, for what that break in the storm revealed was no less than a hundred undead soldiers crowding the bridge in front of them. No less than, but almost certainly quite a bit more, for they were pressed in as far back as he could see, so that there might have been thousands of them.

  Either way, at a certain point, the numbers sort of stopped mattering. There were enough, that was the simple truth. Enough to get the job done of killing him and his companions. And all of them moving forward in that shambling, deceptively quick walk.

  Dannen stared at them, thinking. It wasn’t as if they could retreat back to Palden, for he somehow doubted that the duke had decided to change his mind regarding them in the day and a half they’d been gone. The man seemed the type to hold a grudge, likely had a ledger he kept of debts owed and debts paid. Neither could they move forward, for the undead crowded the bridge leaving no space through which him and the others might move, even if they took it in mind to try, a try which would inevitably amount to little more than suicide.

  Dannen was thinking they were pretty well screwed—forced to decide on either a terrible, gruesome death now or a terrible, gruesome death a day and a half from now—when he remembered the second bridge the guard captain had told them about. An old rope bridge he said had been used before his cousin had made this new, admittedly fancy, but regrettably undead-infested bridge.

  He was just turning back to Fedder and the others, intent on telling them his plan, when sudden warmth and light bloomed in front of him, and he was forced to hold a hand up to shield his eyes. Blinking, he saw that the mage had extended his arms to his sides, his hands palm up, and that great gouts of flame sputtered and danced above each.

  Dannen stared at the flames, turned and stared back at the undead army—certainly it felt like an army as their numbers continued to swell—and then beyond, past the bridge toward the towering, snow-covered mountainside beyond. Then, with a great roar, Fedder thrust his hands forward and a massive roiling ball of flame taller than Dannen hurled forward at the undead army.

  At them and then through them, not seeming to slow in the slightest as it bowled over the undead, the ice covering them and the bridge hissing and steaming from the shocking heat of it, a heat which, Dannen was pretty sure he had felt singe his eyebrows even through the numbness largely covering his whole body.

  Dannen thought he should have been pleased at the devastation the spell caused—was still causing as the great whirling ball of fire continued rolling through the soldiers’ ranks—but there was something bothering him, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. At least, that was, until the ball of flame reached the other side of the bridge, then went past it, striking the snow-covered rock with an impact that seemed to shake the entire mountainside, and the bridge upon which he and the others stood gave a sudden sickening lurch, the metal frame creaking threateningly.

  Which was bad. What was worse was the great gout of steam and snow that exploded in every direction when the fire struck. Danne
n and the others covered their faces as best they could as clumps of snow and stone were flung outward in all directions, pelting them and the bridge. An errant stone struck Dannen in the thigh, and he shouted in surprised pain as he collapsed to his knees.

  Then suddenly, the roaring thunder of the explosion quieted, and he winced, looking up at the mountainside, one word on his mind and one word only. Avalanche. At first, he thought that they were okay, that somehow they had lucked out. Then he became aware of a hissing. Quiet at first but building by the moment until, in seconds, it wasn’t a hiss but a growl and then not a growl but a roar, as if some great, unearthly beast the size of a castle bellowed its rage. Then the entire mountainside seemed to give way, rushing toward the bridge where he and the others stood.

  “Oh gods,” he breathed. He turned to look at Fedder who was staring at the spectacle, apparently as stunned as Dannen himself at the result of his magic. “Now, you decide to cast a spell!?” Dannen roared.

  “What…what do we do?” This from Tesler beside him, and Dannen spun on the man.

  “Run!”

  He didn’t have to say it twice, and in a moment, the others had turned and were half-sprinting half-sliding toward the end of the bridge from which they’d come. Dannen turned back to the mountainside to see untold tons of snow rushing toward the bridge. He rose from where he’d fallen, desperately trying to rub some feeling back into his thigh where the stone had struck him, then spun, running after his companions.

  At least, he meant to. He’d barely managed a step when something caught his trouser leg, halting his progress and, coupled with the frost-slicked ground, nearly pulling him from his feet. He just managed to catch his balance and turned to see that the thing grasping his trouser leg was one of the undead. The creature’s bottom half was nowhere in sight, likely consumed by the inferno of the mage’s spell, but this seemed to prove no more than a minor inconvenience to it as it had latched onto Dannen’s trousers with one hand and was brandishing a rusty knife with the other, one which it was in the process of trying its best to stick into Dannen’s leg.