Rincewind took the hand gingerly, bracing himself for the crunch of crushed bone. It didn’t come. The troll’s hand was rough and a bit lichenous around the fingernails.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Rincewind. ‘I never really met trolls before.’
‘We’re a dying race,’ said Kwartz sadly, as the party set off under the stars. ‘Young Jasper’s the only pebble in our tribe. We suffer from philosophy, you know.’
‘Yes?’ said Rincewind, trying to keep up. The troll band moved very quickly, but also very quietly, big round shapes moving like wraiths through the night. Only the occasional flat squeak of a night creature who hadn’t heard them approaching marked their passage.
‘Oh, yes. Martyrs to it. It comes to all of us in the end. One evening, they say, you start to wake up and then you think “Why bother?” and you just don’t. See those boulders over there?’
Rincewind saw some huge shapes lying in the grass.
‘The one on the end’s my aunt. I don’t know what’s she’s thinking about, but she hasn’t moved for two hundred years.’
‘Gosh, I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, it’s no problem with us around to look after them,’ aid Kwartz. ‘Not many humans around here, you see. I know it’s not your fault, but you don’t seem to be able to spot the difference between a thinking troll and an ordinary rock. My great-uncle was actually
‘That’s terrible!’
‘Yes, one minute he was a troll, the next he was an ornamental fireplace.’
They paused in front of a familiar-looking cliff. The scuffed remains of a fire smouldered in the darkness.
‘It looks like there’s been a fight,’ said Beryl.
‘They’re all gone!’ said Rincewind. He ran to the end of the clearing. ‘The horses, too! Even the Luggage!’
‘One of them’s leaked,’ said Kwartz, kneeling down. ‘That red watery stuff you have in your insides. Look.’
‘Blood!’
‘Is that what it’s called? I’ve never really seen the point of it.’
Rincewind scuttled about in the manner of one totally at his wits’ end, peering behind bushes in case anyone was hiding there. That was why he tripped over a small green bottle.
‘Cohen’s linament!’ he moaned. ‘He never goes anywhere without it!’
‘Well,’ said Kwartz, ‘you humans have something you can do, I mean like when we slow right down and catch philosophy, only you just fall to bits—’
‘Dying, it’s called!’ screamed Rincewind.
‘That’s it. They haven’t done that, because they’re not here.’
‘Unless they were eaten!’ suggested Jasper excitedly.
‘Hmm,’ said Kwartz.
‘Wolves?’ said Rincewind.
‘We flattened all the wolves around here years ago,’ said the troll. ‘Old Grandad did, anyway.’
‘He didn’t like them?’
‘No, he just didn’t used to look where he was going. Hmm.’ The trolls looked at the ground again.
‘There’s a trail,’ he said. ‘Quite a lot of horses.’ He looked up at the nearby hills, where sheer cliffs and dangerous crags loomed over the moonlit forests.
‘Old Grandad lives up there,’ he said quietly.
There was something about the way he said it that made Rincewind decide that he didn’t ever want to meet Old Grandad.
‘Dangerous, is he?’ he ventured.
‘He’s very old and big and mean. We haven’t seen him about for years,’ said Kwartz.
‘Centuries,’ corrected Beryl.
‘He’ll squash them all flat!’ added Jasper, jumping up and down on Rincewind’s toes.
‘It just happens sometimes that a really old and big troll will go off by himself into the hills, and—um—the rock takes over, if you follow me.’
‘No?’
Kwartz sighed. ‘People sometimes act like animals, don’t they? And sometimes a troll will start thinking like a rock, and rocks don’t like people much.’
Breccia, a skinny troll with a sandstone finish, rapped on Kwartz’s shoulder.
‘Are we going to follow them, then?’ he said. ‘The legend says we should help this Rincewind squashy.’
Kwartz stood up, thought for a moment, then picked Rincewind up by the scruff of his neck and with a big gritty movement placed him on his shoulders.
‘We go,’ he said firmly. ‘If we meet Old Grandad I’ll try to explain…’
Two miles away a string of horses trotted through the night. Three of them carried captives, expertly gagged and bound. A fourth pulled a rough
Herrena softly called the column to a halt and beckoned one of her men to her.
‘Are you quite sure?’ she said. ‘I can’t hear anything.’
‘I saw troll shapes,’ he said flatly.
She looked around. The trees had thinned out here, there was a lot of scree, and ahead of them the track led towards a bald, rocky hill that looked especially unpleasant by red starlight.
She was worried about that track. It was extremely old, but something had made it, and trolls took a lot of killing.
She sighed. Suddenly it looked as though that secretarial career was not such a bad option, at that.
Not for the first time she reflected that there were many drawbacks to being a swordswoman, not least of which was that men didn’t take you seriously until you’d actually killed them, by which time it didn’t really matter anyway. Then there was all the leather, which brought her out in a rash but seemed to be unbreakably traditional. And then there was the ale. It was all right for the likes of Hrun the Barbarian or Cimbar the Assassin to carouse all night in low bars, but Herrena drew the line at it unless they sold proper drinks in small glasses, preferably with a cherry in. As for the toilet facilities…
But she was too big to be a thief, too honest to be an assassin, too intelligent to be a wife, and too proud to enter the only other female profession generally available.
So she’d become a swordswoman and had been a good one, amassing a modest fortune that she was carefully husbanding for a future that she hadn’t quite worked out yet but which would certainly include a bidet if she had anything to say about it.
There was a distant sound of splintering timber. Trolls had never seen the point of walking around trees.
She looked up at the hill again. Two arms of high ground swept away to right and left, and up ahead was a large outcrop with—she squinted—some caves in it?
Troll caves. But maybe a better option than blundering around at night. And come sunup, there’d be no problem.
She leaned across to Gancia, leader of the gang of Morpork mercenaries. She wasn’t very happy about him. It was true that he had the muscles of an ox and the stamina of an ox, the trouble was that he seemed to have the brains of an ox. And the viciousness of a ferret. Like most of the lads in downtown Morpork he’d have cheerfully sold his granny for glue, and probably had.
‘We’ll head for the caves and light a big fire in the entrance,’ she said. ‘Trolls don’t like fire.’
He gave her a look which suggested he had his own ideas about who should be giving the orders, but his lips said, ‘You’re the boss.’
‘Right.’
Herrena looked back at the three captives. That was the box all right—Trymon’s description had been absolutely accurate. But neither of the men looked like a wizard. Not even a failed wizard.
