Troll Mountain: The Complete Novel

Chapter 13

That night, an hour after midnight, Raf made his move. The evening was bright and clear and the full moon illuminated the landscape.

Düm had told Raf that trolls usually slept between midnight and dawn, often in a state of substantial inebriation. That was Raf’s window of opportunity.

Leaving Düm and Ko on the hobgoblin mountain to the east, Raf skulked down to the pinnacle which held up one end of the rope-bridge that gave access to Troll Mountain.

The All’s Well fire burned brightly atop the watchtower on the pinnacle and Raf saw the shadows of two guard-trolls patrolling the tower’s uppermost level. Beyond the pinnacle, Troll Mountain loomed in the moonlight.

Using his rope, a hook and his considerable climbing skills, Raf scaled the side of the pinnacle out of the view of the trolls on its watchtower.

At length, he came to the rope-bridge, approaching it from below. He did indeed intend to use it to get to the mountain, but he wasn’t going to cross it in the usual way. The bridge hung from a pair of sturdy anchor-posts. Raf noticed that each anchor-post was decorated with an impaled human skull. Trolls and hobgoblins, it appeared, used similar methods to instill fear in their visitors.

Arriving at the rocky shoulder under those anchor-posts, Raf wound up his home-made rope and slung it over his shoulders.

As he did so, he looked up at the underside of the rope-bridge and, for a brief moment, paused.

This is it, he thought. My last chance to change my mind. My last chance to turn back.

“You can do this,” he whispered aloud to himself.

And so, taking one final deep breath, he jumped up and gripped the first slat of the long swooping rope-bridge; then he swung across to the next slat, gripping it one-handed with his fingertips.

Thus Raf set out across the rope-bridge, hanging from its underside, swinging from slat to slat, but always moving in a careful, slow way so as not to make the bridge wobble and attract the attention of the guard-trolls on the first watchtower.

His feet dangled above the rocky gorge and the boggy mud moat hundreds of feet below, and for a brief instant he glanced down and saw the immense drop and his heart began to race.

He whipped up his eyes and again breathed, “You can do this, Raf. You can do this.”

After that, he didn’t look down again. With every swing of his arms, he only had eyes for the other end of the bridge.

Only two watchers observed Raf crossing the bridge in this daring way: Ko and Düm, from a quarter of a mile away.

Ko held his breath as he watched the tiny figure swing from slat to slat, high above the deadly fall.

Düm was amazed. “Master Raf clever. Düm would never have thought of crossing bridge like that. Mind you, Düm much heavier.”

Ko kept watching Raf as he replied, “Yes, he is very clever. I just hope that he will also use some wisdom as his mission progresses into a far more dangerous stage.”

At length Raf came to the mountain end of the rope-bridge. There he dismounted onto a shoulder of rock underneath the second troll watchtower, the one Düm had called the Main Gate.

The Main Gate was erected on a small stone outcropping — a mini-pinnacle of sorts — that jutted out from the main body of the mountain, and it too bore a glowing All’s Well fire on its roof.

Raf climbed down this mini-pinnacle and then crossed a shallow ravine connecting it to the mountain.

This took extra time — it would have been faster to swing underneath the two strong-looking wooden bridges connecting the Main Gate directly to Troll Mountain — but Raf preferred to take a detour rather than risk being detected by any stray troll eye.

With a final jump, Raf landed for the first time on the surface of Troll Mountain.

He looked up.

The great rocky behemoth rose above him, soaring into the star-filled sky, the Supreme Watchtower at its summit silhouetted against the glorious full moon.

Raf swallowed as he eyed the glowing All’s Well fire on it.

Then he bent his head and commenced the long climb upward.