Troll Mountain: The Complete Novel

Chapter 17

Flanked by the four guards, terrified and alone, Raf was marched down through the Supreme Watchtower, then down a tight spiral staircase concealed within the north-western pillar of the Winter Throne Hall. He emerged from a secret door cut into the base of that pillar, stepping out onto the open-air space. It was still dark. Dawn was a couple of hours away.

“Take this scum to the cells,” the head guard growled to the others. He held Raf’s rope and lightweight axe in his huge hands. “The king sleeps. I shall inform him of this thief when he wakes in the morning.”

Raf was pushed across the Winter Throne Hall and down through some more tunnels cut into the main body of the mountain, before he abruptly emerged into fresh air again, arriving at a wooden platform erected high above the western flank of Troll Mountain.

A large wooden box-like contraption — had he known the word, Raf would have called it an “elevator”—hung before him, dangling from a thick rope in such a way that it could be lowered through a rectangular hole in the floor of the wooden platform. (Raf couldn’t see it, but a huge cogwheel housed in a shack above the platform raised and lowered the elevator when the cogwheel was turned by a single muscular troll.)

Escorted by two guards, Raf was shoved onto the box and lowered down the western face of the mountain.

He recalled that during his ascent he had been unable to scale the western face because it was sheer and vertical.

Now he saw that it was more than that.

The entire western side of the mountain had been smoothed by the hand of some outside agent — man or troll, it didn’t matter — so that it formed a perfectly vertical surface.

And now, as he was lowered down that sheer polished rock face, Raf saw that cut into it were shallow recesses. Each recess was shaped like an upside-down triangle, with a sharp point at the base, and inside many of the oddly-shaped recesses were …

… human prisoners.

The cells had no bars. They didn’t need them. The drop below their brinks was two thousand feet and at the wall’s base was a tangled forest of upwardly pointed stakes.

From what Raf could see, the cells were arranged in a grid formation. There were about thirty cells, widely spaced, in three vertical columns. Roughly half of them were occupied.

Forlorn bearded faces stared out at Raf from the cells as he was lowered past them. The prisoners were mostly men and they appeared emaciated and starved. By virtue of the inverted triangular shape of each cell, the prisoners sat in them awkwardly, curled and hunched.

And then suddenly, among the despairing faces, Raf saw one that he recognized.

“Bader …!” he gasped.

The prisoner’s eyes sprang open in recognition, but before he could reply, Raf’s elevator had gone past him, descending lower still.

Raf was finally deposited in a triangular cell of his own. The elevator withdrew upward, taking the guards with it, but not before one of them gave Raf some parting advice:

“Sleep well, thief. If you cannot sleep, you might consider throwing yourself from your cell before the morning, for when the king sees you tomorrow, you will wish you were dead.”

When his captors were gone, Raf sat glumly in his cell, pressed against its sloping walls.

The mountain wind was the only sound.

The triangular walls of the cell were perfectly cut, made of hard polished stone without a chip or a notch. The cell was perhaps seven feet high but only four feet deep. The brink yawned before Raf, rimless and railless. Out of the rear wall of the cell poked many tiny bronze spear-tips which prevented a prisoner from leaning against that wall.

Just sitting hunched over in the upside-down triangular hole was uncomfortable enough, but the combination of the spear-tips and the deadly drop meant that Raf had to sit essentially motionless.

He looked up, whispering in the darkness. “Bader! Bader! Can you hear me?”

A moment of silence. Then:

“I hear you.” The voice, once haughty and proud, was listless and flat.

“What happened to you and your party?”

“We made our case to the Troll King and the dirty beast imprisoned us for our trouble.”

“What of the other members of your party?”

A pause. The mountain wind whistled.

Bader said, “So far as I can tell, only I remain. Every now and then, the trolls take a prisoner away for eating or sport. We can hear their gleeful shouts when they gather on the Winter Throne Hall. They leave us here to wither and lose all energy. Then, when we are weary from hunger and thirst, they take us. Once taken away, no prisoner ever returns.”

Raf swallowed.

He spent what remained of that night curled up in his uncomfortable stone hole, staring out at the westward view: beyond the snow-capped peaks of the Black Mountains, he saw the vast northern plains. In other circumstances it would have been beautiful.

At length, dawn broke.

Around mid-morning, they came for him.