A Handful Of Men - The Stricken Field Part 19

Somewhere just ahead, though, was another troll castle. Soon he would discover who lived in it, if anyone. Many trolls were completely solitary. Others lived in strange groupingsa"two or three men and one woman, or the other way around. Once or twice he had met bands of children living together with no evidence of adults to care for them. Little Norp had attached herself to one such band without even a word of farewell. Trolls were peaceable and could eat anything. They had no need for social organization.

Yet they had a culture, of a sort. He had not known of their singing and dancing before, but they existed. Although they were strange to him, he could appreciate them as art. Trolls made strangers welcomea"indeed their hospitality toward other trolls was unlimited. They would share even their mates without jealousy. Rap had refused several offers in the last two months, always with as much tact as he could muster.

Darad had no such inhibitions. Even after exhausting days of scrambling through impenetrable vegetation, he could never resist challenging the men to wrestling matches. He never won, and he never learned. His activities with the women had perhaps been more successful, but he had suffered numerous broken bones in both sorts of encounter, despite his partners' efforts not to hurt him. Had Thrugg not cured his injuries, Darad would have long since been left behind, a helpless cripple.

Darad and Urg were following, probably quite close, but the dense undergrowth blocked noise.

A glimpse of weepy gray sky showed through the trees ahead, and the noise of water grew louder. The day was far from over, but the promise of rest was too tempting to refuse. At this rate, Rap was going to be as old as Sagorn before he even met up with Witch Grunth.

His gloomy meditations were interrupted by a thunderous roar from Thrugg. Trees shuddered and cracked as the giant hurled himself forward and disappeared down a bank. Rap scrambled after, hearing more ferocious bellows, and then others in answer. He emerged from cover at the edge of a small pond. Thrugg and another man were rolling around in the center, roiling the water to spray, punching, roaring, and struggling as if bent on mutual murder. Such was the normal friendly greeting between male trolls. Fortunately, they were rarely so affectionate toward men of other races.

Beyond them stood a wall of gigantic rocks, with the stream cascading down from the front door. Venturing a peek with farsight, Rap established that the castle was indeed s.h.i.+elded against sorcery. That was welcome news, and so was the relative absence of moss on it. It must be very recenta"and that suggested a sorcerer in the neighborhood.

Shortly thereafter, Rap was reclining at ease in a comfortable chair identical to his favorite chair in Krasnegar. Cold drinks stood on a table nearby. He was clean and garbed in loose cotton slacks. He had healed his sc.r.a.pes and bruises, including the dislocated shoulder he had suffered in being introduced to s.h.a.ggi, his new host. Sorcery had a much greater appeal in the Mosweeps than it did anywhere else.

The room was troll size, a modest cathedral, although in shape it was more like a cave, with few level or vertical surfaces. It was dim and relatively cool. A waterfall cascaded down the rear wall to feed a series of pools crossing the floor to the entrance. Jungle was already clambering in through the windows. Apart from Rap's innovations, there was no furniture.

Thrugg and s.h.a.ggi sprawled side by side on a rock ledge, growling and gabbling at each other incomprehensibly. They appeared to be old friends, for they laughed often, and jovially swung killer punches at each other. s.h.a.ggi was something of a mystery. If anything, he was even larger than Thrugg, and of about the same age. He was not, apparently, a sorcerer. Or else he was concealing the fact superbly.

Just when the mayhem seemed to be slowing down and Rap thought he might manage to enter the conversation, a shadow darkened the doorway. Urg came striding in, carrying Darad. He was delirious, thras.h.i.+ng and struggling vainly against her greater strength. Thrugg leaped up in alarm, and his image brightened in the ambience as he inspected the damage. Snakebite, Urg explained casually. A sorcerer of Thrugg's power could heal anything short of death, and in moments the jotunn was sitting up and looking around with his usual ferocious grin. Rap organized another, very solid chair. But of course Darad would have to meet his host, and there would be more violence.

Rap could contain his impatience no longer. "s.h.a.ggi?" he demanded hastily. "Who put the s.h.i.+elding on this house?"

"Uh?" s.h.a.ggi scratched his head. "s.h.i.+elding?"

Thrugg chuckled. "I did." He was sitting on a rock by the stream, crunching on a thick tuber he had magicked up for himself.

Rap's mood turned black again. "Oh."

"He's my brother."

"Oh!" Well, that explained the joviality. "I was hoping maybe we'd met up with another sorcerer."

"You did!" a new voice said. A monstrous old female came lumbering out of the shadows under the waterfall. Her hair was gray and tied behind her head in a ponytail, which was an odd affectation for a troll. She wore a loose cotton gown, which was even odder.

Thrugg leaped up and tried to embrace her. She swung a sideways punch that would have smashed any normal skull like an egg. It bowled the young giant right off his feet, and he flipped into the pool with a splash that soaked half the chamber.

"Idiot!" she snarled. "Why did you bring these vermin here?"

Wiping water from his face, Rap sprang to his feet. He had done it! All those weeks of torment in the horrible jungle had not been wasteda"he had found the woman he came to seek. He bowed low.

"Greetings, your Omnipotence!"

Grunth glared at him and then spat. "Go away!" she said. The ambience flared dangerously, with images of molten rocks. "Go away before I b.u.m you to ashes."

2.

s.h.a.ggi bounded over the stream to Rap and enfolded him in a bone-creaking hug. "He is my guest!" he bellowed, apparently believing that his mother would be unable to damage Rap without hurting him at the same timea"which was far from the case, of course.

Even before he had spoken, though, or Darad had stopped blinking his surprise, Thrugg spoke out in the much faster world of the ambience. In a stream of images almost instantaneous, he described Rap's attempt to rescue the slaves at Casfrel. He explained how that had been an act of pure altruism, and a very dangerous one. His appreciation and grat.i.tude were obviousa"embarra.s.singly so. Rap himself had almost forgotten the incident, and thought nothing much of it anyway.

But it cooled the witch's anger. She sat down on a convenient rock and scowled at him. "My thanks, then," she said reluctantly. "But you are not welcome here."

"I see that," Rap muttered, still breathless from s.h.a.ggi's embrace. "Can we talk about it?"

The molten rocks glowed again briefly. "Talk. I'll listen. " Grunth turned her attention to Urg, holding out her arms in welcome. While the two hugged in the mundane world, Rap started to speak in the ambience. Thrugg introduced Darad, who was as far out of his depth as usual, and s.h.a.ggi went splas.h.i.+ng out down the stream. He returned very shortly with a double armful of branches for supper. And while all this was going on, Rap was bringing Witch Grunth up to date on everything that had happened since she had made her brief appearance in the Rotunda. It was a real shock to realize six months had gone by since that fateful day the old imperor died. During those six months, the usurper had undoubtedly been consolidating his grip on the world. Time was slipping away.

Only once did Grunth comment. When Rap described the new protocol he hoped would bring peace to the world, she projected a fragrant image of an ill-kept barnyard. Somehow that did not seem like a very hopeful sign.

As soon as he had done, her son flashed some queries at her. To his astonishment, Rap now learned that the two of them had been corresponding mundanely, by messenger, ever since Thrugg reached the forest. He had never bothered to mention the fact, but many of the trolls he and Rap had met on their journey had then gone off to summon known sorcerers to this meeting, here at s.h.a.ggi's castle. Outside the Mosweeps no one would believe that trolls were capable of such organization, and the idea of them acting as messengers would be a joke, a contradiction in terms.

Grunth's scowl grew more hostile, and for a moment she sat in silence, giving away nothing.

"Well?" her son demanded. "Did they come?"

"Some," she admitted. She turned her gruesome glare on Rap. "You bring trouble! If that dwarf monster suspects what you do here, then he will enslave us all. No one can resist the power he wields."

"Will you do nothing? He will come for you anyway, when he gets around to it. He'll settle with Lith'rian first, I expect, then he'll come for you."

He thought he had scored a point; angry flames flickered again.

"How many sorcerers are there in the Mosweeps?" he demanded.

Thrugg was sitting with his knees up like a child, chewing a wad of leaves. "Thousands!"

"Silence!" His mother hurled a bed-size boulder at him in the ambience.

He deflected it easily, grinning a disgusting cud at her. "How many, then? "

"Fifty, maybe. No more."

Fifty sorcerers together would wield power to move mountains!

Grunth jumped on Rap's thought. "So they would, faun, but how do you find them all? How do you bribe a troll, faun? And do you think all fifty together could hurt the Covin?"

Worry it a little, maybe. And how did one bribe a troll? Apparently Thrugg had invited some of those sorcerers to come here for the meeting. Either they had declined, or the witch had sent them home again, or she was keeping them out of sight. Rap had always known that she might refuse to aid his quest, but he had never considered that she might seek to block it. She was vastly more powerful than he was, and so was her son. Although Thrugg seemed more inclined to support Rap at the moment, surely in a crunch he would side with his mother?

Perhaps Rap had endured this nightmare journey to no purposea"the thought was crippling.

"And how many in the Nogids, would you suppose?" The witch's muzzle wrinkled in a sneer. "None."

Rap's heart sank even farther. He sat down again to give himself a moment to consider and took a swig of cold beer. "Zinixo got them already?"

She nodded contemptuously. "You thought you were so smart that no one else would think of that?"

The dwarf had once been warlock of the west. He would have investigated the anthropophagi's islands very thoroughly in those days.

"When?" Rap demanded.

"About three months ago." There was a hesitancy there, though. It showed in the ambience, where lies were impossible and even evasion improbable.

"And he conscripted all the sorcerers?"

"Most." She would volunteer nothing.

Rap took another drink, feeling more despondent than ever. His quest was starting to seem utterly hopeless. Thrugg gulped down his fodder and said aloud, "Come on, you mangy old hag! What're you hiding behind that new s.h.i.+elding?"

Her response was a blinding bolt of lightning that shattered rocks in front of his toes. The cave rocked with the blast, the three mundanes yelled out in terrora"and Thrugg just sat and leered while gravel ricocheted off his hide. As the echoes died away and ears stopped ringing, a newcomer came strolling out of those sinister shadows at the back. Darad growled. Rap scrambled to his feet. He had never seen such an apparition before.

The man's skin was a dark mola.s.ses shade, but his face and chest and limbs were scrolled with bright white and blue and green tattoos. In size he would rank as taller than an average imp and skinnier, but it was only fat that was missinga"the muscles were there and he moved with grace, even barefoot on rock. He wore an ap.r.o.n of white beads that jangled as he moved. He had a red flower in the bush of his hair and a bone through his nose, and when he flashed a smile at Grunth, he revealed very white teeth that had been filed to points.

"Begging your parson, your Omnivorous," the newcomer said apologetically, "I feel it is time for me to include on your deliverations. " He turned his chilling smile on Rap and advanced with both hands out and the white beads of his garment clattering. They were human finger bones.

He was a sight to curdle the blood, and yet an enormously exciting one. He was a sorcerer, and probably a strong one. He was also an anthropophagus. Rap knew almost nothing of such people, and had never heard of them leaving their native Nogids, because any other race would kill them on sight. Was this some of Grunth's doing? Or a Zinixo trick? He bore no loyalty spell that Rap could detect; could even the powers of the Covin achieve that?

"Your repudiation has proceeded you, your Majesty King Rap. I am horrid to make your acquaintance."

"I am likewise honored," Rap said warily, submitting to an embrace. He thought of a stormy night many years ago, and a terrified sailor boy running along a beach with several hundred cannibals in close pursuit. None had come this close, fortunately. Those gruesome teeth were smiling much too close as the man continued his speech.

"My full name you would find quite unrenounceable, but you may abominate it to Tok." The dark eyes shone with amus.e.m.e.nt over the ends of the bone. It was probably a clavicle. "My t.i.tle is Tik, convoying a heretical right to certain delicacies when my village feasts. My friends call me Tik Tok."

"And you call me Rap. I visited your native lands once, Tik Tok, but only briefly."

"Ah!" The anthropophagus sighed. "It was a shame you could not stay for dinner."

"The invitation was extended, but I felt I had to rush off."

Sharpened teeth showed again. "But your green friend remained behind? That was at Fort Emshandar. I was there, as a child. My first feast! But I should like to hear the perpendiculars from you some time."

"You mean that was how the goblin escaped? You let him go?"

"Of course. My grandfather and some others defected his destiny. Even we do not argue with the G.o.ds, Majesty Rap!"

"You speak impish very well."

Mischief gleamed in the s.h.i.+ny black eyes. "I picked it up as a youngster, in the kitchens." Tik Tok swung around in a clink of bones to face the trolls. "And I am delighted to meet Sorcerer Thrugg, the great libertine. Your brother has been telling me how you emasculated so many slaves!"

Thrugg did not rise. "Looks as if I have some more to free," he said, still grinning like a hungry grizzly.

A line of trolls came lumbering out of that shadowed cornera"male and female, ranging in age from a couple of youths up to white-haired oldsters. Big as it was, the chamber began to seem crowded. There was not enough level floor for them all, and some climbed up the slopes and peered down like living gargoyles from shadowed ledges. Darad was backing to the door, looking worried by such impossible odds. s.h.a.ggi wore a shamed expression at this treatment of guests.

Three of the newcomers barely showed at all in the ambience and thus were probably not full sorcerers. The other eight were. Every one of the eleven wore a sheen of ensorcelment. Grunth's occult image seemed to swell and solidify, and her glower had become even more threatening. These were her votaries. No question who ruled here.

Rap cursed himself for a reckless fool. He had blithely let himself be trapped in a s.h.i.+elded building at the mercy of a deposed witch. What sort of woman lurked within that hideous bulk? She was very old. She had been overthrown after ruling a quarter of the world for twenty years, falling back from absolute power to heaving rocks around in a jungle. Had she managed to convince herself that she was enjoying an honorable retirement, or did she see it as humiliating exile? Either way, she would not want him intruding and reopening the wound. And why the gown? All the other trolls were nude. It showed she was not the innocent savage she must have been in her youth. She must know from her years in Hub how trolls were regarded by the rest of the worlda"and she could read his thoughts much better than he could read hers.

"Will you go now, faun?" she barked. "Or must I use force?"

Again the ambience gave her away, and Rap felt a surge of hope. She was not quite as implacable as she was trying to convey. Moreover, the limber anthropophagus at his side seemed completely unworried. He was studying the trolls, wriggling his nose thoughtfully to make the bone in it wiggle up and down.

"What do you think of the odds, Tik Tok?" Rap asked cautiously.

"Mouth watering!"

If one's taste ran to such beef, there was certainly a year's supply in view.

"The lady can overpower us," Rap said, fis.h.i.+ng for information.

"But it would be unwise under the circ.u.mcisions."

"What circ.u.m . .. To what do you refer, exactly?"

Tik Tok smiled his nightmare smile. "When the Covin invaded my homeland, I was not the only one to allude capture. Several of us made our escapade in a large canoe and came in search of her Omniscience. My companions are not far off, and are aware of my thereabouts." "And how many companions do you have?"

"Nineteen sorcerers and five mages."

G.o.d of Battle! Rap felt a rush of relief and excitement. The witch was outnumbered! . . . but was she any worse than a cannibal chief would be?

Only Thrugg was still sitting, munching noisily on the stub end of a branch. "You will have to repeat your proposal, faun. They were behind the s.h.i.+elding."

Rap glanced at Grunth but she made no move to stop him. Quickly, in case she changed her mind, he repeated the story he had related earlier, outlining the new protocol. The trolls listened with stolid faces, unmoved.

But Tik Tok beamed and slapped him powerfully on the shoulder. "This is a preposition of hysterical significance, your Majesty! I should like to hear our meaty friends' reactants."

"Well, Mother?" Thrugg asked, picking splinters out of his teeth with a claw.

"They don't approve!" she snapped. "Trolls do not make war."

Rumbles of agreement echoed through the great chamber, momentarily drowning out the rush of the waterfall. "But their views cannot differ from yours," her son said. He rose to his feet, moving lightly despite his enormous bulk. Then he could look down on her. "Why is what you have done to them better than what the imps do to us?" Amen! Mother and son bared teeth at each other as if this was a long-standing dispute between them.

"Both would appear to be invaluable solitude," Tik Tok murmured.

Failing to move Thrugg, the old woman turned her anger on Rap. "I repeat that war is not our way. And suppose I did agree? I could loan them to you, to aid your cause. If I free them, they will just vanish into the jungles."

"No!" Rap said. "They join of their own free will, or not, as they please. They will not need to use violence. If they wish to limit their help to defense, I will still welcome them. We do not seek to destroy the usurper's agents, but to liberate them."

"There is much to be said for violets," Tik Tok muttered.

"Mother?" Thrugg demanded. He towered in the mundane chamber as a column of muscle, and in the ambience he was still the most solid of them all.

Grunth sighed and waved a great paw. "Do it then." The ambience blazed as the young sorcerer stripped away the loyalty spells. For a moment the released votaries just stood and stared, mumbling with surprise as they adjusted to their new thinking. Then, with deafening roars, they converged on their liberator, men and women both, some even leaping down bodily on him from their higher perches. Thrugg disappeared below a bellowing, squirming riot of monsters. Dust rose in clouds.

Tik Tok sighed and licked his lips.

Speech was impossible in that din. "Well, your Omnipotence? " Rap sent. "You seem to be mistaken so far. Will you also join our cause?"