Chương 31: The Gift

Not a second after my father's order, the Pit came apart.

"THE AXIOM! THE AXIOM!"

"ARIDIS! ARIDIS! ARIDIS!"

"KILL IT, YOUNG LORD!" I actually flinched. These were the same nine thousand who had greeted me in a single voice, who had gone silent the moment my father lifted his hand, and now they were on their feet screaming, stamping, whistling, hammering the benches, none of their previous discipline anywhere to see. Then, across the Pit, directly opposite the gryphon doors, a second gate began to open. Two men came through it.

They wore the black of the house without the silver, sleeves bound to the forearm, and each of them held a chain. Between the chains, walking, was the thing they had brought me. I flinched again, harder this time, as the roar of the crowd swelled around me. I had never seen a troll before. I had read about them, certainly, but books had done little to prepare me for the reality of one.

After sixteen years spent almost entirely among humans, the creature standing before me was so unlike anything I had ever seen that, for a moment, I could only stare. It was grey like ash, and its hide was worked all over in a fine pebbled pattern while black hair grew in patches along the shoulders and down the outsides of the arms, coarse as wire.

It stood taller than the men flanking it by a full head and a half, and it was wide, thick through the gut, with hands that hung to the knees and ended in fingers as long as my forearm. The neck was so thick it looked like an extension of the muscular torso. The head sitting on it was big enough to take a man in two bites. It had pointed ears, like what I imagined elves to be. A crooked jaw, and red eyes. Its head was down, and it followed the chains without being pulled.

"Quite a sight, isn't it," my father said. He had come closer beside me, and he did not raise his voice above the noise, so the words arrived just for me.

"This... is a troll?"

"One of the last of its kind, yes." Due to the noise, I looked back up at the stands, noting that they had not sat down. If anything they had gotten worse since the gate opened, leaning out over the tiers, shouting things I could no longer separate from each other.

"They are cheering quite a lot," I said.

"Of course they are. Do you know what you're looking at?"

"Uh... a troll?"

"You're looking at a gift a king would go to war for." He was smiling out at the sand, sounding pleased.

"Ask me why."

"... Why?"

"Start with the blood, since that much the ballads get right. Drink a troll's blood, drawn fresh and kept properly, and your body takes one of two things from it. Either your skin begins to thicken and keeps thickening, year after year, until a blade coming at you bends against it, or breaks. Or you get the healing instead. It's gradual as well, but eventually, cuts close while you're still looking at them, and it costs you nothing at all. No mana, nor potions.

Nothing but your own body healing itself at a rate few beings in this world could compete with." He glanced at me, as if expecting me to smile in excitement, so I obliged. Below us, the handlers had reached the centre of the Pit. One of them said something, and the troll stopped walking, then stood.

"And whichever one your luck lands you, it grows," my father went on.

"Fifty years on, if it gave you the skin, you're carrying a hide that will make a dragon envious. If it gave you the healing, you've long since stopped counting your wounds. Either way you might outlive everyone you started out with by a few years. Long life comes with the blood, you see. But even that pales in comparison to the true value of a troll."

"There's more?"

"Of course!" He laughed.

"The blood is what you settle for when you cannot get the marrow." I looked at him, a bit perplexed.

"Bone marrow," he specified.

"Taken fresh and whole. It gives you both an impenetrable skin and a healing ability at a level the blood could not reach in a century of drinking. Skin that stops a blade sharp enough to cut through stone like butter. And under that skin, if anything ever does get through, a body that closes the wound in seconds. Wounds that kill men outright, you would get up from them annoyed about the ruined robes. Hahaha!" He turned to face me properly.

"You would never fall ill. Not a fever, or even a cough. You would go to your grave never having sneezed once in your life. And you would live hundreds of years past your span, depending on how well your body takes to the marrow, and I have every confidence that yours will take to it well." The troll had not moved. It stood in the centre of the sand with its head down, its arms hanging, and one of its feet was set slightly ahead of the other as it swayed a little. As if...

as if it had been standing there so long that even standing had become exhausting.

"... Father."

"There has not been one taken alive in the eastern provinces for two hundred and sixty years," he said.

"The house has held this one for eight months, feeding it and keeping it healthy for you, my son, so that your reign may endure for centuries and our house may ascend to heights no man has ever dared dream of." Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. I kept looking at it, something not feeling right in my chest.

"Kill it," my father said, "and take the marrow. That's what today is." The crowd was so loud that I had to think about the words twice before I was sure I had them in the right order.

"... N-now?" I did not want to." Now. And go all out, Howl. Do not be careful with it. A troll is not a beast you finesse. It is a great deal faster than it looks, it does not stop when it should stop, and if it gets a hand on you it will fold you in half without any particular malice about it." He said this warmly.

"Everything you claim to have learned on that mountain. Use it. Let us see it." Then he stepped past me to the rail and pulled the mana into his throat, and when he spoke it went out across the whole Pit and came back off the far wall.

"RELEASE IT." The two men were already working. One went for the left wrist, the other for the right, and the shackles came away in two heavy pieces that they let fall into the sand without ceremony.

"Make me proud, son." Said my father as his hand firmly came down on my back, twice. I gulped, my heart racing so much I felt like throwing up. The troll did not react to being freed. Just stood there with its arms hanging, its head down, and neither of the handlers seemed remotely concerned about that.

"Unbind it," my father called down. The nearer handler raised one hand and cast something I did not recognize, and the other man was already walking backward toward the gate while he did it. A pale line of mana left his palm, hit the troll somewhere between the shoulder blades, and unravelled. Then he ran. Both of them cleared the gate at speed, as the troll's head suddenly came up as if it had been shaken awake.

The great crooked jaw worked once, then it slowly turned, taking in the sand, the walls, the tiers, the noise, and it looked at the sky as though it was the strangest part of all of it.

"A mental lock," my father said next to me.

"It's been asleep behind its own eyes for a moment, so it will take a moment to remember itself." I was not sure what to reply to that, so I said nothing.

"There is nothing in that thing a Sixth Seal cannot handle. Go at it however you like, Howl. Fire, earth, whatever you want, I don't much care." He grabbed my shoulder gently.

"One condition, though. Do not destroy the spine." The troll had found the crowd. It was staring up at the tiers now with its mouth slightly open.

"The marrow you want is not in the limbs," my father went on.

"There's very little of it in the whole creature, and almost all of what matters sits in the spine. That is where the thing's gifts live. Break the arms, break the ribs, take the head off if it pleases you, but leave the back intact." The troll was still turning, and then it stopped, and it found us. Its eyes were a shade of red you'd never find in a human, but for all their uncanniness, they... they were not the eyes of a beast.

There was a quality in them that made killing it unthinkable; the same quality I trusted to stop me from ever killing an innocent man and become a murderer, like the villains depicted in the books I read. My father suddenly took off. One moment he was beside me, the next he was rising into the air over the Pit, robes snapping, hands casually folded behind his back while he looked down at me, smiling.

"Give us a good spectacle, son!"

"W-Father, wait—" He did not look back at me once. Which left me standing at the mouth of the gryphon doors, alone on the sand. And the troll, who was still looking at me. I put my hand up, hoping to perhaps make the troll understand me.

"Hey. Wait." My voice came out small and got eaten instantly by the crowd, so I tried again, louder this time.

"I don't want to fight you. Do you understand me? I don't—" Something suddenly changed in its face. The confusion went out of it and everything came forward at once, as the great crooked jaw opened, and it screamed.

"RAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!" It was so loud a ring of sand lifted off the floor of the Pit and hung there as I took a step back, shocked beyond words. The sound climbed the tiers, came off the far wall and came back doubled, filling the whole enormous bowl of the place until every soul in the Pit went silent. Then it immediately charged at me. Fast.

"WAITWAITWAIT—" I threw myself sideways, and suddenly, [Greater Focus] came up on its own. I did not call it. It simply arrived, and was nothing like what I had expected. The sound around me went wrong first. People were still screaming, only the screaming had dropped. All of it, every voice at once, sliding down out of the range a voice belongs in until it was a long low rumble with nothing human left in it. I could not have picked out a single word.

And my father's shout, somewhere above me, came in slower than the rest and stretched so far out of shape that it was just a groan. Everything was moving slowly and I could observe the sand going white under the troll's fist and begin to rise, a ring of it lifting so gradually I could count the grains, each one apart from every other and turning in the light. My body was going exactly as fast as it had been going a second ago. It could do nothing about any of this.

My shoulder was still turning through the air at normal speed, and my hand had not even begun to open. But my mind had become the fastest thing in the Pit.

I thought of a wind push and discarded it, and then a barrier, which was too thin at that angle and would have folded around my arms the moment the fist reached it, so I discarded that too, and I was already looking past both of them at the ground he was standing on, the way his weight sat on his right foot, and I knew what I was going to do to him before my boots had touched the sand. This was incredible. Normally, one did not get to do this in a fight.

A mage picks his spell before he needs it, and then the next one, and the one after that, and he commits to the chain and adapts, because the fight is always half a step ahead of the hand. Every drill Bellos ever put me through had been built on that. Now I understood why this was ranked S. Soon enough, I landed nine feet away, both feet under me, and the world resumed its normal rhythm as soon as I stopped using the skill. The troll pulled its arm out of the crater it had made and turned to find me.

Then it screamed again and came. Now with a clear plan, I tapped my heel against the sand sending mana molded as a spell in it, and the ground answered. A wall came up out of the floor of the Pit between us, twelve feet of packed sand fused hard, and the troll hit it at full stride without any attempt to stop. BOOM! The wall detonated and went through in a spray that reached the third tier. The crowd flinched as one body, and I was already casting.

Every grain of that wall was still in the air until I closed my hand and the sand reversed. It came back inward from every direction at once, found the troll in the middle of its own follow-through, and it packed. Around the ankles first, then the knees, the hips, the chest, the arms pinned to the ribs, layer on layer on layer, compressed until the shape of it was buried and the only thing left uncovered was the head.

It stood there in the middle of the Pit, encased to the neck, and it screamed at me as the people encouraged me in unisson.

"GOOD THINKING, SON!" Said my father somewhere above, delighted. Heart still racing, I slowly walked toward the troll, with my hands open as it thrashed inside the shell and roared. Its eyes never once left my face, and I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do when I got there. Six paces out, it screamed.

"RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!" It was louder than the first one. Louder than anything, and I was standing right in front of it. The sound went into my head and stunned me. My knees stopped answering me, the sand in front of my boots swam sideways, and every other noise in the Pit had been replaced by a single high ringing that would not stop, a thin steady diiiiiiiiiing that filled the whole inside of my skull. I could not hear the shell crack. I only saw it go.

The sand blew apart in a wave that took my legs out from under me, and I was still falling when something closed around my chest. The troll's inhumane fingers folded over my ribs and lifted me off the ground.