006 – Steal

***

Breaking Malisent from her cage required moving the giant log. That wasn’t so hard. I could saw it in half, pry it out, burn it, lift it with pulleys. But all those methods needed time and tools that I didn’t have. Also, I had to operate in silence, because any noise would alert the residents of the sub-building. The pair of obese female trolls slept in the far room.

Nimblesto the thief scoured the Chief’s abode, looking for items to claim. I had no clue what he was after. A tiny goblin couldn’t use the swords or pole-mounted blades affixed to the wall. I examined the axes, but none of them looked good for chopping wood; they were people choppers. Nimblesto yanked a tiger skin off the top of a small chest. He cracked open the lid and began giggling to himself in excitement. I looked over his shoulder into the chest.

“What is it? Did you find some real tools?”

“Human no take! Nimblesto want treasure,” the goblin hissed.

The chest contained a pile of small metal disks the size of buttons, along with a few colorful rocks and glass beads. Many of the disks looked like gold, which made me wonder if the array’s gold conduits had been salvaged.

“This is just scrap metal, Nimblesto.”

“No. Treasure.” He started stuffing the pockets of his coat. The metal buttons were heavy and jangled around, not good for a professional sneak.

I reached in and plucked out one of the shiny rocks, a prism of cloudy glass. It was a lumestone. A broken one that produced no light.

“Human no take treasure!”

“Buzz off, runt. You already have more than you can carry.” I shoved him away with my foot as he lunged for the stone. He acted like a toddler greedy for another child’s toy, jumping up and down clutching his hands in the air.

Our play fight ended at the booming of a drum. It thundered from just outside the front door. Someone beat on a kettle drum to wake the pair of trolls within. When they did not immediately answer the call to open the door, the drumming grew louder and more impatient.

“Chief!” Nimblesto said. He hurriedly threw the tiger pelt back over the chest.

“Gah! The balcony.”

We ran through the hanging flap that covered the exit to the balcony. This narrow platform gave a dizzying view of the valley below. The base of the superstructure melded into the mountain, and the mergestone had the same dull gray color as the natural granite, making it look like one ragged slope down to the valley floor. Although the mountain did not reach the snow line, frigid winds swirled around the peak.

I peeked through the curtain. The two fat female trolls dutifully unbarred the door. Then came through the portal a troll of giant proportions. The chief stood two and half meters tall with a hunched posture, fully the size of a grizzly bear. Its black coat of fur had a white skunk stripe running from head to spine. Most impressive about the troll leader was its tusks, which jutted out and up almost to the level of its squinting yellow eyes.

The chief tossed down a huge axe with a handle made from a sapling tree. The human weapons decorating the lair were too small to use, so it fashioned one to match its stature. Beside the axe, it set down an iron cauldron filled with grain porridge and chunks of animal blubber. The two fat trolls rushed over to the cauldron, and began spooning the stuff into their mouths. The chief sniffed the air.

It looked around the suite, suspecting something was wrong. The monster lumbered over to the chest. In his haste, Nimblesto had put the pelt back incorrectly. The tiger stripes had been horizontal, now they were vertical. The chief ripped the skin away and threw back the lid.

The amount of scrap metal in the junk drawer had not visibly changed, since Nimblesto had small pockets. Running its hands through the jingling disks, the troll grunted in relief. But the presence of the gold did not completely reassure the chief; something wasn’t right.

My heart almost froze. I had left my torch with the end stuck in the adobe fire pit. The troll picked up the end of a burnt stick, an ambiguous clue that someone had trespassed into its domain. The chief growled and shouted at the two pregnant trolls. He knocked the spoon from one’s hand and grabbed the other by the fur on its scalp. The females whined their innocence.

The balcony was not a good place to be. There was no place to hide on this bare stone platform. Nimblesto scurried across a narrow ledge that ran around the exterior of the sub-building. The ledge was fine for a goblin, but perilously small for a grown human. I could tiptoe on the ledge and shuffle sideways against the wall. The smooth walls gave nothing to grip onto. If I could make it around the corner in time, I’d be out of the balcony’s view and safe from the chief.

At the edge of a window, I stopped to peek inside. The troll chief left the mewling females and stomped loudly toward his human prisoner. When it went to the jail, I hustled past the row of windows, clinging to the wicker grilles for support.

Once again, I climbed at a ridiculous height, but this time I could clearly see what waited for me below. The side of the station dropped down at about an eighty degree angle. That was solid mergestone slab, with no windows or features. Twenty meters below, another sub-building jutted out. Any mistakes could send me down to splatter across its rooftop.

Around the corner, Nimblesto huddled beneath the windows to the jail, which a cage of iron bars kept secure. Inside, the chief growled at his prisoner.

“No more of your tricks, witch. You cannot escape Browk the Mighty. Your lot is cast. Right now, our warriors stack logs for your pyre.”

“Don’t threaten me with such weak, troll magic,” she replied.

“Fear our god Grulchomon, human! Tonight you meet him at the ritual of refleshing. One of my wives will carry the next great chief. Your fires will nurse our unborn god, and your flesh will fill the bellies of our warriors.”

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“You celebrate too soon, worm. My own spirits will topple your idol and scatter your kin. Never underestimate a witch’s blade in the gloam.”

After this weird and, to me, mostly incomprehensible exchange, the troll chief roared in anger. He stomped from the jail and rampaged through the suite of rooms. In a rage, or maybe stirred by some deeper fear, Browsk the Mighty ripped down his collection of human swords from the walls. From the edge of the balcony, he hurled the blades into the sky. The gleaming weapons struck the rooftops far below or glanced against the station’s walls and went spinning into space.

“Hey. Malisent. Over here. At the window,” I whispered.

“Minion! What the hell are you doing out there?”

“Escaping. Could you do a guy a favor and tie this rope for me?” I thrust the end of a rope into the jail cell. She secured it to the iron bars, and then I let the rest of the rope uncoil as it fell. “Thanks. I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

The descent was not an easy one. I had no rappelling gear or safety harness. Loosening my grip on the rope would cause me to slide and burn my hands from friction. Gusts of winds buffeted me back and forth and chilled me to the bone. My climb down the side of Power Station Thirteen endangered me more than my climb up the elevator shaft. At least the trip down didn’t take long with gravity on my side. At the bottom, I held the rope from swaying so that Nimblesto the goblin could follow me down.

At the end of this adventure, I would either be in great shape or dead. Strythe must have undergone an arduous regime of exercise. Maybe climbing up and down cliffs had been a regular day for him.

“Nimblesto go inside. Goblin hate birds.”

“We just got out of that dingy hole, and now you want to go back in?” Truthfully, the cold air made me want to seek shelter too. I was shivering. The reptile around my neck slithered under my collar to stay warm. I took in a lungful of crisp fresh air and looked to the setting sun. Soon it would be nightfall.

Above us, just north of the sky’s zenith, the moon hung in the sky. Half lit by the setting sun, it gave off a pale violet glow in the rapidly darkening sky.

“What? What is that?” I yelled, pointing straight up in shock.

“Moon.”

“Why is it purple?”

“Moon purple.”

“It wasn’t the last time I saw it!”

The moon’s sandy orange and yellow stripes had all but disappeared. Now violet and magenta splotches spread across its face like ugly bruises or mildew. Life on our planet had evolved, whole biomes shifted places, but that could not explain changes on the surface of the moon. Both this world and the next one over had gone crazy.

“Bird home roof. Bird fly, catch, eat. Roof bad.”

Passing in front of the half waxing moon, a great winged creature soared above us. I could not tell the exact altitude of the bird or its size, but it was big, far bigger than a condor. Monsters here grew larger than the animals of my era. I noticed that bird waste littered the roof, including molted feathers as long as my arm. Nimblesto’s appeals to get inside finally convinced me.

The stations rooftops remained solid for ages owing to the nature of their construction. The merged panels of rock had no gaps for water to leak inside. Cracks came from rare tremors or slight pressures in the mountain twisting the station over geological time. Our roof had no obvious holes to enter, so we dangled from the soffit and swung in through an open window.

“Just once, I’d like to take the stairs in this joint.”

Nimblesto took out his bits of metal and rolled them through his hands with delight. He skipped around cackling. “Nimblesto take treasure. Nimblesto trick, sneak, steal. Nimblesto best!”

“What are you even going to do with that junk?”

“Go village. Make box. Give treasure. Girlgob give shmaktul.”

“Sounds nice. Please do not tell me what shmaktul is. My brain is one blown neuron from total collapse.”

The troll tribe did not occupy every part of the power station. The golem made the lower levels off limits. Giant birds made their perches on the highest rooftop. Xlobats nested in any spot they could squirm into. And unknown types of monsters prowled the rest of the ruins. The trolls wisely blocked off their sections with crude walls and stout gates to keep out large predators. We found ourselves in one of the many unclaimed sub-buildings outside their domain.

“What’s next? We escaped, but that doesn’t help Malisent. I need a way to break that cell open.”

“Chief no go. Keep human. Watch jail. Wait night.”

“You’re right. He won’t leave her alone again. He’ll be alert for anything suspicious.”

Saving Malisent looked hopeless. I didn’t have the strength to overcome a hundred trolls, much less their gigantic, axe wielding leader. There were no other humans in this remote wilderness to turn to for assistance. But Malisent had been correct that I needed her alive. She belonged to this world and understood how it worked. I couldn’t find my way to the nearest outpost without her, or cross the monster filled wastelands.

“Maybe, I should accept failure. There’s no way to free her. The river will flow to the ocean eventually, and the coast will have outposts somewhere…”

As I voiced my growing pessimism, the black snake around my neck writhed suddenly. Orma tightened her long body around my throat. I gasped for air and tried in vain to pull her free. The scaly snake felt like a band of iron. She would not let go.

“Oooh. Snake angry,” Nimblesto stated. He watched my ordeal with amusement.

The snake brought her face in front of eyes and hissed, exposing its glistening white fangs.

“Snake. Don’t bite. It was just a joke. Of course, we’ll save your pal. No worries. So let go of my neck, would ya? I’ll feed you mice. Tasty mice.”

I spoke out of panic. Unexpectedly, the snake actually loosened its death grip on my wind pipe, almost as if she could understand my words. But that was impossible; a monster this small had a brain the size of a cherry. She didn’t fully release my neck, waiting to constrict at my next sign of disloyalty. Only Malisent had the key to unlatch this living collar from me.

“All right. We’ll give it a shot at least. No harm in trying. Nimbly, are you going to help me out with this mess?”

“Goblin no help human. Nimblesto go home.”

“After all the fun we’ve had together? C’mon. You’re going to miss out on the big party tonight. The main event.”

“No want.”

“Okay. How about this: you help me rescue Malisent, and I’ll get you a better treasure. One sure to impress the goblin ladies back home. Something that’ll really knock their socks off.”

“What treasure?” The goblin clutched his pockets and scowled at me.

“You like shiny things, right? How about your very own golden, baby head? A big one, the size of a pumpkin. I can guarantee no one in your village has seen anything like it.”

“Mmmm…” He sounded skeptical.

“Come on. Let’s get to work. We’ll have this licked in no time.”