Troll Mountain: The Complete Novel

Chapter 24

Raf surmounted the battlement and scanned the area fearfully.

There were no guards up here — they had all gone downstairs, either for the feast or the fight.

Raf dashed inside a thick stone doorway and found the set of spiraling internal stairs that led up to the Supreme Watchtower. (He knew these stairs — he had been marched down them when he had been captured. The spiraling stone stairwell led both up to the watchtower and down to a narrower set of spiral stairs hidden within the north-western column of the Winter Throne Hall.)

As he pounded up the stairwell, Raf heard shouts from below: “He’s up in the watchtower!” “Cover the battlement!”

The trolls were coming.

Raf kept running determinedly upward, his face fixed.

Raf came to the ladder leading to the topmost section of the Supreme Watchtower, clambered up it and burst into Vilnar’s laboratory, warm and candlelit, with its vast collection of jars, barrels and foodstuffs.

He saw Vilnar, rising sleepily from a straw mat on the floor.

“You? Again?”

“Vilnar! Come with me now if you want to escape your confinement!”

“Escape—?”

“Now or not at all!”

The little troll grabbed a small sack of food. “Now it is.”

“I also need these.” Raf moved to the side workbench and grabbed the three small glass bottles with the amber Elixir in them. He wrapped them in rags then put the rags in a pouch which he slung from his waist.

He had his prize.

Now he had to get out of here.

Vilnar came alongside him as they strode back toward the ladder. “Your determination is impressive, but determination alone isn’t enough. What is your plan now? They will cover the battlement and then storm this tower.”

“I’m actually following someone else’s plan,” Raf said. “I’m just trying to figure out what it is.”

The trolls were in a state of shock and bewilderment.

First the death of Grondo. Then the human’s incredible swing off the Fighting Platform and his nimble climb to the summit of Troll Mountain.

He had been caught trying to steal their Elixir … and now he was trying to steal it again, right in front of them all!

“Guards!” the king roared. “Get him or I shall dine on you tonight!”

The guard-trolls burst into action.

A dozen of them threw open the secret door to the stairwell inside the north-western column and started up its internal stairs.

Six of them left the stairwell to cover the battlement while the other six continued up the spiraling stairs toward the watchtower …

… only to hear an ominous booming noise coming from somewhere higher up the stone stairwell.

Boom!

Boom!

Boom!

The guard-trolls swapped confused glances. What was this?

The great booms became louder and faster before suddenly seven large wooden barrels came tumbling out of the upper reaches of the stairwell at speed, rampaging down the steps, careening off the spiraling walls.

The first barrel slammed into the first troll with frightening force and swept him clean off his feet, hurling the big troll backward before bouncing further down the stairs, past the other shocked guards.

The guards managed to dodge and duck the rain of heavy barrels that followed, but not without injury. The tumbling rush of barrels crashed and careered past them, bouncing down the stairs into the darkness below.

The guards pressed on upward and entered the watchtower with their hammers raised …

… only to find it empty.

No thief. No wise old troll either.

The guards rushed down to the battlement to ask the six guards there if the fugitives had come down that way, only to be told that they had not.

The guard-trolls looked at each other, bamboozled.

In the meantime, some of the other trolls had headed for the door leading back down to the Great Hall, only to find it closed and barricaded from the other side.

The Troll King, on his winter throne, looked about in confusion and rage.

At the base of the stairwell hidden inside the north-western column of the Winter Throne Hall, the last of the seven barrels thrown from the watchtower bounced to a halt.

Its lid was kicked open from within, and out of it, wrapped in a padding of cloth and hay, popped Raf.

The barrel beside him wobbled and Raf heard a muffled shout from inside it. He ripped off its lid and pulled out Vilnar.

“This way,” Raf said grimly, pulling Vilnar by the hand.

As they dashed for the door, Raf pulled one of Ko’s bulbous flint-tipped arrows from a clip on the side of the crossbow and struck it against the stone wall, igniting it in a flash of flame.

Raf and Vilnar emerged from the north-western column at a run. The trolls near the king’s throne saw them immediately and took off in pursuit.

But, just before he raced out into the rainstorm, Raf dashed past the small green barrel set up beside the great column — and as he did so, without missing a step, he touched his flaming arrowhead to the barrel’s candlewick.

The wick ignited like a fuse …

Raf saw the trolls massing over by the stopped-up exit to the Winter Throne Hall — and figured that Düm had been there, too — and in that same moment, he also realized that Ko had even suggested his escape route.

“We can’t get down!” Vilnar yelled.

“Yes we can!”

Chased by the horde of trolls, Raf bolted for the western side of the Winter Throne Hall. No rail protected its edge. Mountains loomed beyond it, veiled in rain. Empty air fell away before him and Vilnar.

“Grab hold of me!” Raf yelled as they came to the edge.

Vilnar gripped his waist while Raf pulled out his crossbow and, at the very moment that the sizzling fuse on the firepowder barrel beside the north-western column burned down to its base and the little barrel exploded violently—obliterating the column, transforming it in a single shattering instant into a cloud of stone dust — Raf launched the two of them off the edge of the mountaintop!

As Raf and Vilnar leaped off the western edge of the Winter Throne Hall, a shocking scene occurred behind them.

The blast of the firepowder barrel had completely destroyed the north-western column, thus causing the entire roof of the Winter Throne Hall and the whole summit of the mountain above it to come crashing down on the rear half of the open-air space.

With a momentous boom, the mountain’s summit slammed down onto the Winter Throne Hall and toppled clear off its rear northern edge, where it fell for two thousand feet before splashing into the dam-lake that curled around the rear of Troll Mountain, sending a stupendous gout of white water spraying into the air.

The rearward angle of the summit’s fall meant that none of the two hundred trolls trying to flee the open-air hall were killed or even hurt, but those few guards who were still inside the summit screamed all the way down.