CHADWICK GINTHER
There had been an “accident” with a troll from the mine.
It was the talk of Svarta Mining, that troll, and how it wouldn’t return to any dwarf ’s call. Brunna Sindradóttir volunteered to try one last time, before it was destroyed, because her parents had crafted more rock trolls for the Company than all other dvergar together – and this rogue troll happened to be one of theirs. She’d been promised right of travel if she succeeded. She’d make the troll recognize her blood.
So far the Company had kept the Flin Flon RCMP out of their business. Locals listened to the Company. Veiled by the illusion of a jackknifed tanker trailer, was a maimed and angry rock troll, wailing over its dead handler and not allowing anyone near the body.
Brunna didn’t know why they’d bothered with a cover story at all. Let the Northern Miner put the troll on its front page. Invite the damned CBC. Her uncle Andvari wanted the dvergar to return to the days of old, crafting legends. How could that happen when mortals turned a blind eye to what happened around them? If humans never saw magic, how would they know to seek out dwarves for weapons to fight monsters? How would they forge new legends?
How would they even know there were dwarves?
On the road leading to the troll, she could see the smokestack from the Company’s smelter – taller than the Eiffel Tower – standing out from the rock like a giant’s middle finger directed at her. There was nowhere in town that she couldn’t see that stack, or its trail of smoke, venting waste from the Company’s mortal and magical labours.
Flin Flon, dubbed “The City Built on Rock,” was about 800 kilometres north of the provincial capital of Winnipeg. It was a border town, straddling the provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan in the same way it bordered the magic and mundane. Not large as cities go – six thousand souls, give or take. But it had been a perfect place for the dvergar to settle, carved out of the Canadian Shield as it was. And the ancient volcanic belt had been a shield indeed, in the days after Ragnarök.
They say that happened. God fought god. Monsters ate the sun and moon. Winter never ended. The dead walked. The very sky shattered. Brunna hadn’t seen it, but it was recorded in Sögusalur the History Hall, that the Nine Worlds had ended. But here we are. Still living.
If one could call being in this tiny town living.
Her wayward troll waited near a path leading to the lake; she hoped it hadn’t rambled. If it had, she’d hunt it through the residential streets, where magic was myth and dwarves were naught but a story.
Which would complicate things.
But that story was changing. Magic was returning to Midgard.
Which meant soon, humans would come to dvergar again. For weapons. For charms. For jewels. And they would pay, in gold or favours. Humans would always pay for glory.
Brunna wanted the time of legends to return as much as any dwarf, if not more. Her parents had talked of nothing else since she was a squalling youth. She also wanted to be long away from the tunnels, seeking adventures of her own when that happened. Once the glory seekers came, a life of crafting supplies for the stories of others would be her doom.
Brunna wanted stories of her own, not to be an after-thought in others’.
“Soon enough,” she whispered, slapping the dash of her pickup.
It was an old truck, big, and ugly, but it could hold the rock troll, and the truck’s covered box would help to hide it and its dead handler from prying eyes.
Brunna stopped at the roadblock, pulling alongside a steep rise of rock. She could see the overturned truck; workers in white suits and respirators. Her stomach trembled, filling her with an overwhelming desire to turn away.
She knew the feeling was false, but it was hard to convince the mind that what it saw was not there. Brunna didn’t like the idea of entering blindly either. The troll would see past the illusion. It would know she was coming. She patted the trumpet case she used to transport her sword: Skeri – The Sever – could cut magic as surely as flesh. The blade had been her mother’s, before Hilde had settled on the forge and given up the fighting life. With Skeri she’d carved truth from giants’ lies, and fought in other campaigns she’d never shared. Comforting to have along, but if she drew Skeri now, it would destroy the illusion of the wreck utterly, and with the troll still rampaging about, that would not end well for her or the Company, troll, or town.
A grue crept up Brunna’s spine as she inched her truck over the line of blood she knew painted the pavement – all dvergar workings required blood. It was afternoon, the autumn sun high overhead, but here, now, in this singular moment, it was twilight. The sun muted, pale, glowing like a full moon, a reflection of its usual intensity.
Her shoulders tightened, waiting for the troll to crush the hood of her truck. For a windshield to spray glass and slice her face.
She needn’t have worried.
The troll was gone. So was the dead dwarf.
There was nothing on the road but a rocky arm and rusty bloodstains.
A raven pecked at the blood, lifting and then discarding a spherical pebble. A second raven landed and the two scavengers cawed imprecations and threats at one another. The birds were everywhere around town. Brunna wondered who they told their secrets to, now that Odin was dead.
She hopped out of the truck. Brunna was tall for a dwarf woman, but it was still a drop. In the chunky soles of her steel-toed boots she topped five feet, if you measured from the top of her curly red hair. And you didn’t push down too hard. She straightened her maroon hoodie, the local hockey team’s exploding “B” logo emblazoned in white, and tugged it down to hide the shining mail shirt she wore beneath.
The ravens hopped aside as she approached, eyeing her warily. They could fly away. Unlike me. They didn’t stay rooted to the earth. Just like me.
If Brunna had possessed wings, she’d have been gone from Flin Flon already. “But that’s not going to happen, is it?” she asked the ravens as she eyed the pebbles scattered from the rock troll’s shattered joint.
The pebbles were spherical, like ball bearings. Thousands of them allowed the giant creature to move and shift its stones. Brunna set her trumpet case down on the road. Her boots crunched over the asphalt. She didn’t call to the pebbles. Not yet. Instead, she listened. She’d wanted a rock troll of her own once, but hadn’t earned the right to make one.
Binding spirit into rock with blood was serious business. Brunna hadn’t taken this task because she’d wanted her freedom, or because her parents had made the troll, but because this was their last creation together. Her father Sindri had been a master of crafting them, his trolls were larger and stronger than any other’s. Her mother Hilde’s gift was instilling instinct and a semblance of thought.
Brunna hoped she could fix this broken troll – assuming she could find him. She felt another rockcaller’s pull; a long-spent song, its last note lingering. She was glad she hadn’t released a call of her own, it would have alerted whomever had sung this song, letting that unknown voice know to expect her.
Strange, she couldn’t place the song. She’d heard all of the voices of the Company’s rockcallers. All, it seemed, but this one. She would not have forgotten this wet, gurgling command. She wrinkled her nose and spat, as if that act could get the song’s vile taste from her mouth. Instead of singing, she put her hand, palm up, on the asphalt, beckoning to the stony spheres. The pebbles rolled up into her palm as if following a track.
She felt their shrill keening. The troll was in pain. She hadn’t known they could feel pain. Holding the pebbles though, she felt its wound, as if one tectonic plate were being ground under another, a shuddering tremor of hurt. The spheres circled in her palm, pulling her toward the broken arm upon the street.
Brunna put a pebble in her mouth, tasting the rock troll’s trail. She felt where the troll had gone; its trajectory ran from here into the centre of town. She knew the place it was going. She knew where it had been called. She opened her trumpet case and nicked her thumb on Skeri’s edge. Brunna squeezed the drops of blood over the pebbles, coating them; the stones drank the liquid like sponges.
It could come in handy, tying my blood to the troll’s mortar.
She stuffed the troll’s arm in a beat-up hockey equipment bag and then drew Skeri from its case, slashing it through the air. The illusion had served its purpose. It wavered, like a heat mirage, and collapsed.
In Flin Flon there was a door in the rock.
Beyond a ragged bit of orange mesh netting, and to the right of a billboard proclaiming the pleasures of McDonald’s coffee, it lurked between two triangular wedges of cement and underneath wooden scaffolding bearing steps up a huge slab of granite. Graffiti stained the rock, the stairs, and the wooden boxes hiding the city’s aboveground water and sewage lines.
The square wooden door had existed as long as Brunna had been alive. There were stories told by locals, and then there were the stories told by the dwarves. It was a bomb shelter left over from the Second World War. It was the abandoned early mines from when the dwarves alone worked this rock. It was a work station for Manitoba Hydro. It led to the last remnants of Ni∂avellir, ancestral home of the dvergar. The only thing dwarves and miners loved more than telling stories was embellishing them.
Dropping the hockey bag holding the troll’s arm to the ground, Brunna squinted at the door. It was padlocked on the left and had a bolt that went up and into the rock. Rusted hinges, almost the length of her forearm were on the right. The door mocked her with a spray-painted profanity.
Fuck, indeed.
Brunna tried to pop the padlock, but it held fast. Unwritten on the door, but just as apparent, was the “off.”
The last time Brunna had walked by, there’d been a two-by-four nailed across the door as an additional security measure. Brunna saw it, snapped in two and tangled in the orange mesh. Otherwise, the door didn’t appear to be damaged, although some of the supporting scaffolding for the stairs above it was.
The door might be locked, but that lock was made of metal and she spoke its language. Brunna didn’t hear or see anyone. Feeling safely alone, she spoke to the metal.
“Open,” she said, coaxing it. Nothing. It was stubborn. She commanded it, and it dug in like a deer tick. She whispered, using a lover’s tongue. It remained shut up tight.
She puckered her lips, ready to spit. How had the troll even gotten in there? The lock wouldn’t budge. It should have opened. She remembered that strange rockcaller’s song. Her rock troll wasn’t missing. It’d been stolen.
More than one way to crack a lock, Brunna knew.
She spoke stone as well as steel. And she was tired of illusions and subtleties. Brunna laid her palm flat against the granite; the rocks shuddered, cracking the door jamb, and splintering the door. The metal bar screeched as it was pushed out of the stone. Brunna slid the broken padlock out of its bar and opened the door.
She hefted her bag over one arm, carrying Skeri’s case in the other. Beyond the door was a room of rough-hewn stone so heavily clad by pipes and conduits it seemed the stones were dressed in serpents – as if Brunna had walked into Hel’s hall itself.
Boxes and crates littered the floor. They’d been pried open and long since emptied, now guardians to broken beer and whisky bottles, spent cigarette butts, and discarded homemade water pipes.
Some local party boys must have a key.
She shut the door behind her and grimaced when it wouldn’t close flush. There was no troll, and even to Brunna’s sight, there was no other way out of the room.
There was a squeak, followed by a burring rumble. The troll was here. It had blended into the rock seamlessly. She called it, trying to drown out that other, more insistent voice, the one she didn’t know. Now that she was here, and had the troll in her grasp, she didn’t care who heard her. Brunna drew the pebbles out of her pocket. They rolled up her body and into her palm. She sought the tie in her blood, her parents’ blood, that would allow her to wrest command of the troll.
It limped toward her, head cocked like a curious hound’s, revealing a tunnel its bulk had obscured. Brunna hadn’t remembered hearing its leg had been damaged too. She stared, trying to sense any other hurts, rocking a little unsteadily, her head buzzing from the sharp throb of effort and the thrill of conflict, of testing her voice against another. The troll rocked along with her, its joints sounding like car tires on a gravel road. With a booming thud, it dropped to its knees and looked her in the eye.
Kneeling, the troll was taller than Brunna. It must’ve topped ten feet standing. Her parents’ work was reflected in its polished quartz eyes as much as it was in her. She felt a kinship with this troll. Even in the dim light, dwarf eyes saw much. The dried, rusty stain along the troll’s damaged side. A spring still weeping blood. She pocketed the pebbles, and knelt to unzip her bag. With a grunt, she hefted the troll’s arm to its broken, ragged socket.
The troll let out a rumbling growl before it loosed a landslide roar. Brunna cut her left palm on her sword, hoping the mixture of blood and Skeri’s magical steel might cut through whatever was agitating the troll. It pointed at itself, then Brunna, and back to itself; rocky fist cracking against slate chest. Imploring for aid. Comfort.
Rock trolls were neither once-living souls bound into stone, nor stone given life. They weren’t living at all. Fossilized bones and a jumble of mismatched stone all mortared together with blood, given a semblance of human form, and sung awake by the will and voice of a rockcaller. Tireless. Near-invulnerable hunters. Unfathomably strong. Smart as a truck full of rocks. When they slept they looked like a pile of stones to the magic-blinded eyes of Midgard. This was what Brunna had always been told. But facing this one, feeling its pain and sadness, she felt what she’d been told was wrong. They could possess a semblance of life.
The living deserved names. Names were important. If her sword could have a name, so should the troll.
You are alive, aren’t you, Rocky?
She wanted to know for certain. Focusing her will on the troll, Brunna sang to its stones; a ballad of stitching Loki’s lying mouth shut. It flinched and rumbled backward, circling as if it were trying to roll into a fetal ball. She reached out a calming hand with her whispered song.
Rocky brushed her cheek with its rough, stony finger. Even that gesture, meant to be gentle, hurt. She ignored the throb in her cheek where a bruise would surely form. She held the arm to the broken joint, keeping her voice steady and she sang. She could see where it should fit together. But it wouldn’t.
She felt sorry for him. And then realized with a start that she was no longer thinking of Rocky as a pile of stones, as just a thing. She called to the spherical pebbles, and they rolled out of her pocket, up the rock troll’s body, and settled into grooves in his wounded arm. He roared, trying to backpedal when stone touched stone.
“I’m trying to fix you, you clod!”
He didn’t react to the insult – but someone else did.
In the troll’s moment of shock, that foreign rockcaller resumed their song. The voice sounded like the wet gurgle of blood-filled lungs.
“Maggoty child of cowards and thieves.”
It sang to Rocky. The vileness of the song was overwhelming, pushing Brunna to her knees. The song didn’t stop, but the singer spoke, “Kill her!”
The troll shot up like a geyser and Brunna jumped back with a startled yelp. Rocky’s good arm slammed into her, hurling her into the wall. She heard a grunting pained cry from behind her before she was enveloped in a darkness too deep for even dwarven eyes.
Brunna awoke, amazed at the simple fact of her survival, head pounding and ribs throbbing. The troll was gone. A sound like an avalanche rumbled off in the distance. Rocky had run off. Again. So had the other caller. She could feel them, moving down, ever down.
She smiled though it made her wince. You can’t lose a dwarf under the earth.
Rocky was bound to that other call, its drowned voice echoing in her ears, fouling her mind. She grimaced. But she’d found her troll, and she’d return him intact. Alive.
She found Skeri. A man’s running shoe lay next to its case. Perhaps it belonged to whomever she’d crashed into. With the force the troll had struck Brunna, she half-expected to find a foot inside it. She hefted it cautiously, happy to be proven wrong.
Rubbing at her ribs, she winced; her chain shirt had dissipated the force of the troll’s blow, turning it from crippling to inconvenient. It was good that her skull was almost as sturdy.
Why would the caller leave her? Had he tried to kill her? Had Rocky stopped him? The troll must have resisted. Both caller and troll had had every possible chance to finish her, but had not. She’d heard the voice’s words: Kill her. If she was alive, it was the troll’s doing, not that caller’s. Brunna wasn’t out of this fight yet.
The entrance, obvious now with Rocky gone, gaped and waited. She had to delve deeper to get out.
Down, down, down, following the call.
The pull of the earthen darkness emboldened Brunna as she felt the massive weight of the rock above her. If she’d been born among mortals, the dark underground would be overpowering. A tomb of stone, enough to drive a timid person mad. But rock was home to her, even if she wished to part ways with it for a time. She trailed her hands over the tunnel, admiring the work. A dwarf had made this place. The work was too fine for human hands.
It was strange she didn’t know it. In her desire to get away from this town, she’d walked every tunnel dwarves and men had carved. At least, she’d thought she had. Listening to the rock, it was as old as any tunnels she’d ever been in. Older. Brunna felt like she could have delved into Ni∂avellir itself – if only the first home of the dwarves had survived Ragnarök.
Down, down, down, following the call.
This tunnel wasn’t mentioned in Sögusalur. Brunna had walked the History Hall with her family, and she had read much. Dvergur did not keep secrets from dvergur. She’d always been told this.
But carved into the walls of tunnel in runic script were entries detailing new lore. Families. Histories. Names. None of which Brunna knew. But they were here, and sunk into the stone without the use of tools, in the dvergur fashion.
She looked at these and thought of the stories she’d been told were “lost” in the early days after Ragnarök. Stories don’t get lost. They’re hidden, buried, forgotten. But stories are truth, and the truth will come out. Of days when a great schism fractured the dvergar.
There were those who wanted to subjugate and kill humanity, those who wanted to share the toil (if not the wealth) with them, and those who, having been found, wanted to abandon the mines and start over somewhere else, somewhere even more remote, where they would be done with all of Odin’s creations.
Her uncle Andvari had risen to power when men had come to the Flin Flon region before it had been given an English name. His faction wanted to use the humans, not harm them. What happened to the dissenters was never spoken of. Their names, and in some cases, their entire lines, had been gouged from Sögusalur during the conflict, and they were to be forgotten.
Odd to find their story here, and when she had Rocky in hand, she’d commit it to memory, but it was not the story she was interested in. More relevant to the moment: revenge fantasies. Scrawled more recently, the stones told her, and torturous descriptions of prospectors’ ends in the city’s early wilder days.
Her parents’ names were on those walls. That was troubling. Uncle Andvari’s name was inscribed there too. Seeing how often Andvari’s name repeated, and the varying ways in which it had been defaced, changing its meaning, was more troubling. As was the repetition of the name Bláinn.
Brunna didn’t know a dwarf by that name. But she had heard stories about such a dwarf. They still told stories of his death in hushed whispers in the beer halls, and how it was ages before the stones took him.
When she’d asked her parents, they’d said, “We do not speak of him. He is dead. And each of the Nine Worlds is better for that.”
The light was faint at first, the dying glow of a distant star, but with every step, more and more fire was poured into that light.
With every step, the caller’s gurgling song grew louder, madder. The light grew brighter, and warmth flooded the tunnel. Brunna broached the room where the caller waited, his back to her. A great burning oven filled the chamber with light. The caller sang, and two bladders on his back inflated and deflated like forge bellows with every wheezing word. Sweat poured down Brunna’s brow. The smell of hot metal and burning coal filled her nostrils. Despite those comforting sensations, what she saw made Brunna want to retch. Those bladders were lungs, carved out of his body, and left to flap against his back. A “blood eagle” the torture was named, and it was invariably fatal; but somehow, this dwarf had survived.
This had to be Rocky’s unseen caller. He appeared bent and broken at first glance, the rest of his body as ravaged as his back. More a spider crushed underfoot than a sturdy dwarf. But when he moved, it was with a speed that pained Brunna to watch: undulating, a boneless sack of flesh. She shivered to witness his tortured limbs scurrying about his workshop from one arcane item to another.
Snapping her gaze from the rockcaller, she scanned the chamber for her true quarry. Rocky stood impassive, arm reattached, on the other side of the work table. On the table itself a young human male – barely an adult – was bound.
“You thought you’d killed me. All of you. Bláinn the Bold did not die, even when you made him Bláinn the Bloody, Bláinn Blood-Eagle. Bláinn will not die. His hate keeps him alive.”
Brunna buried a gasp in her hand. The stories were true. She begged the rocks not to reveal her, and found stillness in their touch, and strength in their enveloping presence.
“Please, mister. I didn’t…” the boy stopped, as if trying to fathom what the creature was implying. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Your ancestors, then. And the ancestors of your woman.”
“What woman? Oh, Jesus, I stole the key. I just wanted to smoke up. This isn’t fair.”
The creature gestured at its ruined body. “Fair? Is this fair? What you did to me?”
“I didn’t – I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? I will teach you sorry. Order your lackeys to give me the blood eagle and then wait for me to die? And as I welcomed Hel’s release, even as Sword-Sleep came for me, you healed me, so more of your puppets could do the same? Have you any concept what I have suffered?”
“N-no.”
“You will.” The creature’s voice went from dark to light. Growl to sing-song. “You will.”
The dead handler of the rock troll was here also. His body, already going to rot, leaned against a table in the centre of the room; the corpse’s face was turned to look at her, a neat hole in its forehead staring like a third eye. But another body had more of her attention, and given his constant sobbing, Bláinn Blood-Eagle’s as well.
Brunna may have only known Bláinn’s name from stories, and those tales were but tin to the steel of this horror, but she’d seen the boy strapped to the table. She knew him from around town. He’d smiled brightly as Freyr’s golden boar when he asked to buy her a beer. Now his wide eyes hunted escape, not romance. His must have been the cry she’d heard before Rocky had knocked her out.
There were oddities in jars, and the walls engraved with charts of creatures’ anatomy. Brunna saw locals the newspaper had reported dead in a recent wildfire, not burned, but still very, very dead.
The boy’s gaze locked in on where Brunna hid, and he wailed, “Help me.”
Brunna ducked down as Bláinn spun, following the boy’s eyeline, and hoped she hadn’t been seen.
“Please,” the boy cried and that single pleading word seemed to echo for an eternity.
“Enough of that,” Bláinn wheezed.
When the wails finally stopped, Brunna worried the boy had been silenced by death. She chanced a furtive peek and saw an iron bit crammed into the boy’s mouth. It stuck out like a railroad spike waiting to be hammered.
Light reflected in the boy’s tears, which ran freely from red-rimmed eyes down cheeks to spatter on the table.
Oozing around the boy, the once-dwarf inserted needles into his prisoner’s arteries. The rubber tubing attached to the ends began dripping blood pitter pat, pitter pat into a large flat vessel positioned underneath the table.
Rocky stood, impassive and uncaring as the scene unfolded, restrained by bloody runes drawn upon his every stone. Brunna wasn’t certain she could free him, or that she could command him now, even if she won the troll his freedom.
But she called anyway.
STILL ALIVE, he answered, using words, which surprised her. STILL HURT.
“You would try to take my work from me?” Bláinn asked, lungs puffing up in indignation.
Brunna froze.
“You weren’t supposed to be here. You shouldn’t have followed.”
Brunna didn’t answer, but did wonder to herself, Why not?
“I expected you to bring them down to me. Summon the Company. Oh I would have loved to do to them what they did to me.”
The Company did this to him? He had to be wrong.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, her thought echoed, picked up by the caller’s song, mocking her.
“I felt you wandering my halls. You thought you could hide your song from me? I know everything, living or dead under the earth.”
She hadn’t been sure at first if Bláinn had been bluffing, but when he’d named her… Brunna stepped out to face him, Skeri drawn. “You don’t know me.”
“Yessssss,” he whispered, drawing out the word, like a cartoon serpent. Scuttling over the table, and the boy, the once-dwarf said, “Oh yes, I do, Brunna Sindradóttir. I know your entire cursed family.”
“Uncle Andvari wouldn’t have given that order.”
“Such a bright girl you are. Like a ruby in the sun.” He paused. And in the waiting, Brunna saw the truth.
Bláinn charged her. Brunna raised her sword and winced. There was no time for pain. Only the craft.
She hacked at him but his boneless body had no resistance, nothing to cut into. When she slashed, his flesh folded around her blade. She tried stabbing, but his boneless movements were hard to predict. Brunna hit nothing but air.
“Your uncle, your Company—” he spat out that last word “—you think they know better? Crafting weapons? Making humans into weapons? Humanity is wood. Coal. Fuel to be spent in the forge. I will craft my own weapon. When I need blood for a working, I will take it. I will make the mortals fear the night again. Only when they know fear, terror – monsters. Then they will pay for the tools to triumph. And if the world needs monsters to be great – I will forge those monsters. Once-Dwarf. Bláinn Blood-Eagle. Not Bláinn the Bold. Never again, Bláinn the Bold. I will show them bold. I will show them monsters.”
She kicked at him. His leg wrapped around her ankle. Brunna grabbed at Bláinn’s wrist with her free hand and looped the boneless appendage around her arm, dragging him closer and closer.
Close enough to stab.
“That’s a damned cart full of slag,” Brunna said, sliding Skeri into the once-dwarf. His rubbery skin was hard to pierce. “I read your twisted History Hall. You were a monster before this happened to you.”
He hissed, as if a forge spark had landed upon his arm, and nothing more.
Through clenched teeth, Brunna said, “And if my uncle hurt you, you deserved it.”
Bláinn choked out a wet laugh and wriggled free of her, biting and scratching. “We all deserve it.”
Brunna reached out to Rocky, hoping the troll could help her. Stone scratched over stone as his head turned to regard her. Bláinn had Rocky penned with a ring of blood. Bláinn recognized her plan, and his lungs pumped against his back as he resumed his song, holding the troll still. Brunna needed to get closer so Skeri could cut through Bláinn’s wards, through his call, and release Rocky.
She stabbed at Bláinn – a feint – and when he shifted away, she dove, her blade crossing the plane of the protective ward, severing the enchantment. Rocky’s eyes enveloped his head as the runes painted on his stones flared and burned away. Rocky rumbled forward and Bláinn howled. Rocky was free. Free to choose whom to serve. To help. To hurt. Or to run. She called to the troll, reached out to her blood and the connection that bound them. Her blood was in his very bones now, just like that of her parents.
Rocky’s newly repaired arm grabbed Brunna by the throat, his other snatched a wriggling Bláinn. Bláinn’s command, “Kill,” burned, hot and loud. By comparison, Brunna’s request, “Please,” seemed almost silent.
Bláinn’s touch, and toxic blood coursed through Rocky’s repaired arm as it strangled Brunna, as rockcaller duelled rockcaller to see whose song was superior. Her eyes dimmed as she rooted out Bláinn’s influence.
Crafters put something of themselves into their work when they created. A bit of heart, a bit of soul – whatever, however, a skald might describe it. And Brunna’s parents’ souls were there in Rocky. Her mother and father had made this rock troll as surely as they’d made Brunna. Brunna rooted it out. Blood leaked from his mortar and the arm fell away from the socket, its grasp still tight on Brunna’s throat.
Brunna couldn’t hear Bláinn’s surprised cry through the pounding of her ears, but she felt the air rush from the room, as if his flapping lungs had blown it away.
Brunna pried Rocky’s arm free of her throat and sang the same song her mother had sung to her in nights past, and Bláinn’s blood poured from Rocky’s arm. It went still.
The rock troll turned to Bláinn, head tilting as he held the dwarf tightly.
Bláinn rasped out, “No.”
Brunna shook her head. “Goodbye, Bláinn Blood-Eagle.”
Rocky made the only choice he could.
Bláinn resisted, his legs wrapping around Brunna’s, hugging tightly even as his fingers pried at Rocky’s hands. She sawed at his rubbery body until he let go of her.
Bláinn may have looked boneless, but judging from the cracking as the rock troll wrung him out, there were still some hard points in his eel-like body. His lungs inflated rapidly, filling until they burst, spilling what seemed to be every drop of blood in his body. The rockcaller’s final song was a wheezing gurgle as Rocky dropped him to the stone, and then ground him underfoot.
Brunna turned aside, not needing to see Bláinn’s end. There was nothing she could do for the troll’s dead handler, but at the least she could get the boy out of here before he woke to a different nightmare.
She cooed at the troll to pick up the dead dwarf.
Gently, gently, now.
Rocky hefted the corpse as if he were holding delicately blown glass.
Brunna freed the boy from his restraints and Bláinn’s instruments, and considerably less carefully, hoisted him over her shoulder. His fingers and toes practically dragged on the stone while she walked back to Rocky’s side.
She held out her hand to the rock troll, who took it, enveloping her palm in his giant stone mitt. “Let’s get you home,” she said, flashing the rock troll a broad smile and wiping away a sooty rune image. “You look terrible.”
Rocky made a pleased little trill, a sound like shale snapping between her fingers, and fell in behind her.
Whether anyone in the Company would believe her story, Brunna didn’t know and she didn’t care. There was nothing left of Bláinn Blood-Eagle to show. His story was over.
Hers had begun.