Bazil Broketail (19 page)

Baz nodded. “Glad to, my lady.”

Lessis let the guardsmen take three more deep breaths before she knocked on the front door of the inn, which was shut up and completely dark. Her knocking died away.

Above their heads the sign of the Blackbird creaked in the wind. Lessis turned to the girl at her side.

“Young Lagdalen, you will remain here with the dragon. Viuris, you will come with me.”

Lagdalen groaned with the disappointment. Of course, she’d expected something of the sort would happen once they reached the most exciting part. They always sent the novices to the rear—it was just so unfair.

Still, Lessis’s knock brought no response. She tried again, then motioned to the guardsmen, who hammered with their spear butts on the stout door.

The inn remained dark. A voice from across the street cursed them for disturbing the peaceful sleep of honest folk.

Lessis told Lagdalen to break a window on the upper floor. In a second Lagdalen had her special stone in her sling. She never questioned how the Grey Lady knew she had a sling. Little did she know there had once been an inveterate young novice in the city of Valmes who had been very good with a sling.

Lagdalen’s stone flew true, as if she’d been saving it for just this mission. A small windowpane shattered and pieces fell into the street.
That ought to do it
, thought Lagdalen with satisfaction.

But the inn continued to maintain a stubborn silence. With a sniff of exasperation Lessis stood close to the door and placed her hands flat upon its surface.

No spell lay upon the door, but she sensed that it was locked with bolts top and bottom, and thus could not be opened quickly by any spell.

She turned to Bazil.

“Sir Dragon, I must needs call upon your strength once more. I fear the innkeeper must be dead or taken captive.”

Bazil examined the door. It was of oak, burnished a deep black from generations of polish. It was a simple door that opened outwards onto the street. It was locked on the right-hand side and set into stonework. The handle was fat and heavy and it was wide enough to get a dragon paw inside. Bazil gripped the thing and tensed and pulled. The door groaned in its position but did not give.

He stood back and took some deep breaths while he sized it up. Then he took hold of the handle once more with both huge hands squeezed in and brought a massive leg up against the wall to increase his leverage.

The door groaned and shuddered. He increased the pressure. The thick muscles in his upper body and fore-limbs stood out like steel ropes.

With a terrific screech the door handle pulled free of the wood, nails and all. Bazil sat down, hard, with the handle in his paw. The ground around him shook.

He picked himself up, muttering the while in dragon tongue. Now he was aroused. He vented a heavy hiss.

All the humans took several steps back at the look in his eye. Then he charged the door and put his full two tons behind his shoulder.

The door broke out of its hinges under the impact and went down. Bazil hurtled through and crash-landed in the tap room, putting a dent into the main bar and splintering furniture wholesale.

The echoes of the crash died away. With a loud groan,

Bazil rolled over again and started to sit up. His body the next day would be more than sore, it would pulsate with aches and pains.

Lessis and the guards were already scrambling up the stairs. The guards’ heavy-shod feet thudded down the passages. The landlord was found cowering in his wife’s wardrobe. He babbled about the dark man who was down in the cellar and begged for mercy.

Meanwhile, in the courtyard, Viuris had discovered the carriage with the driver stabbed through the heart, slumped over in his seat.

“ ‘Tis the Princess Besita’s carriage,” said Lagdalen after a quick examination. “There are her arms on the door.”

Lessis was appalled. The enemy agent was abducting the heir to the throne of Marneri. He had to be stopped!

The cellar door was pulled back. Stone steps led down into a dark hole. Viuris thrust forwards a torch. The odors of beer and yeast were strong, but there was something else—a sour earthiness that Lessis immediately recognized.

“A troll has been here, may still be here.”

They all smelled it now, a stench of mold and sweat curdled with an ancient evil. The guardsmen’s eyes went very wide. “A troll? Here in Marneri?”

“I smell it, be careful, men, be very careful now.”

Now Viuris led the way again with the torch held high. By its light they saw barrels stacked along the wall with mash tuns and brewing vessels at the far end. Through a narrow, well-worn doorway lay another room half-filled with sacks of barley. They reached the bottom of the steps.

Lessis already feared she knew why the enemy agent had gone to ground here. The Blackbird was an ancient inn, and there was probably a smuggler’s tunnel from this cellar leading out and under the walls.

The question was, where was the entrance to that tunnel?

And where was that troll? The smell was stronger by the door of the barley room. Lessis motioned to Viuris. Together they slid up to the door. On the count of three Viuris held the torch inside and cast its light into the room while Lessis examined it for signs of the enemy.

Sacks of grain were stacked along the walls with empty spaces at the corners. In the center was a cleared space, beneath a pair of folding doors set into the ceiling.

Viuris pointed upwards to the doors. “They must open into the courtyard.”

Lessis nodded. In the corners were ominous pools of shadow. The smell of troll was stronger than ever in this room. She felt the hair on her neck rise, an instinctive response to the presence of a creature that ate human flesh.

She glanced up at the doors in the ceiling, then she started back to the stairs to tell Bazil to lift them up.

The guards stepped into the room, their spears at the ready. One of them suddenly grunted and shoved his spear into a corner.

He made contact, then his spear was jerked out of his hands and in an explosion of sacks of barley a huge figure erupted out of the corner space.

The troll stood eight feet tall, blue-black, with skin as tough as the bark on trees. It had the rough shape of a man, except that it was far too massive, built more like a bear. The head was surrounded by a thick mane of black hair and dominated by a pair of blazing red eyes. A mouth filled with sharp teeth opened wide and a bellow of rage filled the room. A battle axe with a huge blade appeared in its hands.

The guard that had jabbed him, Durkin by name, drew his sword and held it before him although it seemed puny by comparison, a mere toy. His legs wobbled.

The troll snarled. Its red eyes focused on the guard and it swept the space he stood in with the giant axe. He escaped by leaping backwards.

The others scrambled back, too; Lessis meanwhile frantically putting together a spell, a lethargy spell for the troll. She knew she could not stop it altogether. Trolls were almost as resistant to magical influence as dragons.

Steel rang on steel as the guardsman Durkin struck at the troll and hewed against its axe handle. Durkin bounced back and recovered, but with a swift, canny move the troll rapped the man on the top of his helmet with the butt end of his axe handle and toppled him.

Before their horrified eyes the huge axe came down and split Durkin in half as cleanly as a lobster on the block.

Lessis spat words of power, conjured swiftly and hurled her spell at the troll, but she could feel her spell fail to take root. Her heart sank. The damned troll had been especially conditioned against magic on top of its natural resistance.

The huge axe whooshed through the air again, and they scrambled to the door and escaped back into the barrel cellar. On the way the other guardsman almost lost his head to a vicious cut of the axe in the doorway, and fragments of wood and stone flew through the air. The troll was snarling a steady stream of vicious curses in its thick-syllabled tongue.

Lessis tried the lethargy spell again, and this time used a corkscrew effect that she’d learned long ago from a withered old woman in far away Noldaf.

This time it took. The troll moaned and hung there in the doorway. She breathed a sigh of relief—the thing could be reached! She had it paralyzed there. But not for very long, for to her horror it soon resumed struggling, moaning louder, and the spell could not hold. The troll stepped through the door.

The guard hurled his spear from close range and saw it sink into the troll’s belly a good three inches.

That got to it! It emitted a whistling shriek of rage and jerked the spear out and threw it back at them, missing wildly and sending the spear deep into the side of a mash tun.

Still venting a shrieking cry it leapt at them. They dodged away, the guard only just getting clear to the foot of the steps. He looked up wild-eyed—he was on the verge of running.

“We can’t do nothing to it!” he screamed, and ran up the stairs.

“Tell the dragon to break in from above!” shouted Lessis after him.

The guardsman cannoned into Lagdalen, who was hovering at the top of the steps, drawn by the sound of the fight.

“Get out of the way, stupid girl!” shrieked the guard, almost unmanned by his fear. “There’s a troll down there—it killed Durkin like he was a chicken.”

Lagdalen was tossed aside against the wall and the guard bolted out the door the next moment. She rolled down the steps and ended up on the floor of the cellar. Lessis and Viuris were working to keep the troll off balance, undecided as to which it should strike first.

Lessis had pulled out a knife that glowed faintly in the dark, for it had been forged by Cir Celadon himself and it carried a bane to all things of the dark force—in their presence it shone. Now it glittered between the frail woman in grey and the towering monster.

At the sight of Lagdalen the thing snarled and then raised its huge axe and rushed forward. Lessis didn’t wait for it but gave a shout and darted in on an erratic, twisting path. The huge axe blade swung but missed her, and then she was past the monster and behind it.

The axe reversed, Lagdalen screamed, and Viuris ran in and dashed the torch into the troll’s face. It gave out a huge bellow and staggered back off balance. Its free hand swung out and by ill luck caught Viuris’s robe on its fingertips.

It pulled and she was yanked from her feet and taken up into the huge hand that fastened around her head. Viuris’s scream cut off as her head was crushed like a rotten melon in that giant fist.

“Noooo!” howled Lessis as she hurled herself forward. The axe scythed towards her, but she dodged it and was beside the monster for a split second. Her glittering blade lanced in and she was away before the troll could slap her like a mosquito against its thigh.

The troll was stung! It bellowed and whistled in agony. It trampled Viuris’s body for a moment and then charged Lessis.

She evaded another sweep of the axe and it buried itself in a big laagering tank. The troll pulled it free, and beer under pressure came foaming out in a shower of suds. The torch on the floor went out, leaving them in almost complete darkness. The troll’s red eyes looked down to Lagdalen again, crouched, paralyzed with fear at the bottom of the stairs.

It lurched towards her, a huge hand reaching out. A scream froze in her throat. Desperately she tried to move her legs to run back up the stairs, but she could not get her muscles to obey.

And then there was a tremendous noise above them and something huge dropped into the barley room. The whole structure shuddered.

The troll’s head turned.

“Get up girl, get up those stairs!” hissed Lessis.

Lagdalen’s legs finally came back to life, she bounded up, two at a time.

But before she reached the top, the doorway to the barley room was abruptly enlarged. Something big and green exploded through it in a shower of wood and plaster.

And now there was very little room at all in the cellar with a troll and a dragon confronting each other.

The troll snarled, but with a much different timbre, for if trolls ate human flesh, so dragons ate troll flesh, and the only living thing that a grown troll would fear was one of the wyvern kind.

The axe swung, but Bazil was carrying a heavy steel ladle from the inn kitchen and he parried the blow and then struck the troll with an immense green fist, bouncing it hard against the wall.

It came back as if it were made of rubber, and Baz caught its axe arm by the wrist and held that steady while they traded blows with fists and knees. They grappled at last and it tried to sink its big canines into his shoulder, so he picked up the ladle with his new tail tip and rapped the troll hard over the head a couple of times with it to make it desist and back off.

The axe flashed and Bazil barely lurched back out of range. He was trapped against the wall now, no room to maneuver. The axe rose again and Lagdalen, from the top of the stairs, fired a stone with her sling that bounced off its head.

Distracted for a moment, the monster snarled and looked up—Bazil sprang from the wall. While he held its wrists, he hammered away with his tail tip and at last was rewarded with a deep groan from the troll as it sank into unconsciousness.

Lessis gave a cry of triumph.

“Well done, Sir Dragon! That was very well done. But now we must find that tunnel and catch our villain.”

The dragon looked up the stairs to the girl with the sling.

“And my thanks to you, young Lagdalen of the Tarcho. That was a close thing there.”

Lessis picked up the smoldering torch and blew it back to life. Then she went back through the shattered doorway to the barley room. She examined the entrance to the tunnel. It was wide enough for a smuggler’s cart and pony, which was why the troll had been able to get through.

More guards had finally arrived, and now Lessis led a party of six into the tunnel. Unbidden but not forbidden, Lagdalen slipped in at the rear.

The tunnel was dark and well built and probably very old. After one hundred yards it suddenly split into three tunnels. Lessis sent a pair of guards into the right- and left-hand side tunnels, and then went on down the central one herself. Lagdalen followed her, discreetly.