Troll Mountain: The Complete Novel

Chapter 23

Raf went cartwheeling over the edge of the stage.

To the massed crowd of trolls, it looked as if Grondo had dispatched him once and for all with the mighty blow, but both Raf and Grondo knew that Grondo had hit only air.

Out of sheer desperation, Raf had intentionally dived off the Fighting Platform, reaching for the edge with his hands while Grondo’s hammer swished above him, missing him by inches — so that now Raf clung by his fingertips to the Fighting Platform’s rain-spattered edge, his feet dangling high above the deadly drop.

But Grondo knew it wasn’t over.

The big champion stomped forward to see where his opponent had gone, but as he did so, Raf swung himself underneath the platform, gripping his axe handle in his teeth while clutching the network of rafters under the platform with his hands, disappearing completely from every troll’s sight!

After a couple of swings, Raf stopped suddenly. He saw something wedged between two of the support beams. Something that must have been left here by …

He had interpreted Ko correctly.

Raf swung forward with renewed energy.

Up on the Winter Throne Hall, the crowd of trolls grunted and murmured in astonishment. None of them had ever seen this happen before.

Grondo dropped to all fours and peered out over the edge of the platform, when abruptly, Raf’s head appeared at the opposite edge behind him.

“Over there!” the trolls called.

Grondo spun and moving with frightening speed, bounded over to where Raf was trying to climb back up onto the stage, grabbing his axe from between his teeth with his free hand—

— but Grondo was on him too quickly, and he seized the axe from Raf’s hand, wrenching it away—

— only to reveal a knife still in Raf’s hand, the flint knife he kept concealed in the axe’s handle, and with a quick but firm thrust, Raf plunged the knife deep into the soft flesh on the underside of Grondo’s chin.

Grondo froze, his eyes wide — the knife had gone right up into his brain.

There was a flash of lightning.

The assembled trolls fell silent. Even the jesters stood motionless in astonishment.

The drumming of the rain was the only sound.

Then Grondo fell.

His rigid body toppled forward, falling clear over Raf, and he dropped off the Fighting Platform, sailing down, down, down through the air above the eastern side of the mountain before he smashed against the rocks far below, his body spraying blood in every direction. But Grondo had been dead long before he struck the rocks.

The crowd of trolls remained silent, thunderstruck.

This was unheard of.

But what happened next was unthinkable.

Reaching underneath the platform, Raf brought up the object he had spied wedged between the support beams earlier.

Ko’s crossbow.

Tied to it was Ko’s beautiful gold-colored rope.

Before the trolls even knew what he was doing, Raf raised the crossbow and fired it — not at any of them — but upward, at one of the big horns extending out from the battlement crowning the summit of the mountain.

Given the Fighting Platform’s slight protuberance from the Winter Throne Hall, he had a clear shot.

This was Ko’s plan: to complete his mission, Raf had needed to get to the Fighting Platform, where he would find the crossbow — planted there by Düm — and use it to get up to the Supreme Watchtower and get the Elixir.

After that, somehow, he had to get back down.

An arrow shot out of the crossbow with terrific force, soaring up through the rain-streaked air, trailing the rope behind it like a wobbling tail, before it looped over the horn at the north-eastern corner of the battlement and held.

Then Raf did the most outrageous thing of all.

He slung the crossbow over his shoulder, gripped the gold-threaded rope, and, pelted by the rain, took a fast-running leap out to the north of the Fighting Platform and …

… swung …

… in a long swooping arc out, around and behind the king’s winter throne, high above the rear flank of Troll Mountain.

His daring swing ended in the space behind the king’s podium, far from any of the trolls massed near the Fighting Platform.

And before any of them had even started to move from their places near the Fighting Platform, Raf was climbing, nimbly and quickly, hand over hand, up the now-vertical rope, heading for the summit of Troll Mountain for the second time.

The race was on. Only now it was Raf versus the entire population of Troll Mountain.