The troll yammered. He swung the mutilated arm like a club. The sword was knocked from Holger’s grasp. He scrambled after it. The troll overfell him. A moment he lay under that mass and could not breathe. Papillon attacked. The monster retreated.
Carahue staggered erect and went to battle. Papillon had the troll down. Carahue chopped at a leg, again and yet again. When he got it off, Alianora seized it in both arms. The fire was catching in wood now. Its crackle had become a bellow; it filled the cave with light. She needed her entire strength, but she pushed the kicking leg in among the coals.
Holger came back. A hand closed on his ankle… the other hand cut off by Carahue. He tore it loose and threw it at the fire. Somehow it landed in the clear and pulled itself toward safety under a log. Hugi dove upon it. They rolled over together, dwarf and hand.
The troll’s head was off. It snapped and slobbered as Holger spitted it on his sword. He tossed it into the blaze. It rolled back, burning, spreading the flames, toward Alianora. Holger stabbed it again. Heedless of what would happen to the temper of his blade, he pinned the troll’s head in the fire till it was consumed.
The torso remained. Worst was that task, when Holger and Carahue rolled a thing as heavy as the world toward the furnace heart of the cave, while it fought them with snakes of gut. Afterward he could not remember clearly what had happened. But they burned it.
A last glimmer caught his eye. Red and ragged as the flames themselves, Hugi cast the troll’s hand into destruction. Then he sank to the floor and lay still.
Alianora flung herself above him. “He’s bad hurt,” she cried. Holger could scarcely hear her through the conflagration. Heat and fumes made him too dizzy to think. “Hugi, Hugi!”
“We’d best escape before this whole place becomes a cauldron,” Carahue panted in Holger’s ear. “See how the smoke rushes out yonder tunnel. That must be our way. Let her carry the dwarf. Help me with this idiot horse of mine!”
Somehow they quieted the animal. Somehow they groped their way down a passage where each breath was pain. And they came into the open air.
23
THEY WERE ABOVE the cliffs, Holger realized with a dull surprise. How long they had been underground he didn’t know, but the moon was westering.
The moon? Oh, yes. Yes, the clouds were breaking up, weren’t they? Too much wind for them. The wind went shrieking across a plain of whins and stiff grass, here and there a leafless tree, everything gray under hurried moonlight and unmercifully sharp stars. Holger couldn’t see the smoke from the troll’s bolthole; the wind scattered it too fast. Southward, close at hand, the wold was bounded by the cliff brink, beyond which he saw nothing save darkness, as if he stood at the edge of creation. Northward he thought mountains shouldered the sky, a blink of glaciers, but he wasn’t sure. The chill struck into his marrow.
Carahue limped to join him. Holger wondered if he looked as bad as the Saracen, torn, smeared with blood, black with smoke, in dented helmet and ripped clothes, carrying a ruined sword. Just as well the light was dim. A cloud engulfed the moon and he could not see at all.
“Is everyone here?” he croaked.
Carahue answered so low that the rushing in the grass nearly buried his voice. “I fear the little man came off badly.”
“Nay,” said the remnant of a bass growl. “I gave’s guid as I got.”
The moon broke free again. Holger knelt down beside Alianora. She cradled Hugi’s shaggy head in her lap. Blood pulsed from the dwarf’s side, but the flow ebbed even as Holger watched.
“Hugi,” she whispered. “Ye canna die. I’ll no believe it.”
“Nay, lass, dinna fash yersel’,” he mumbled. “Yon great galoon paid top price for me.”
Holger bent close. In the white unreal moonlight the face below him was like a carving in old dark wood. Only the beard, wind-blown, and a few bubbles of blood on the lips, still moved. He saw the wound could not be staunched. It was too big for so small a body.