“I’ll take the smaller one,” he whispered.
“That’s your plan?” I hissed.
“What? The smaller one looks tricky.”
“Tricky? He’s almost blind!”
“Oh, yeah? Well, I bet he’s got perfect hearing.”
With trembling hands, he fit the arrow into the string and began to pull it back.
“Aim for the heart,” I urged.
At least five different spots on Blinky’s chest beat in spasmodic rhythm.
“Which one?” Tub demanded.
“Any of them!”
“Fine, fine!” Tub winced as he pulled the bowstring as far back as he could. The arrowhead dodged around like crazy—up, down, left, right. I took a step back, uninterested in falling victim to a spectacular misfire. Tub squinted and aimed. “You get ready to go apeshit on the furry one.”
I raised the puny baseball bat and insignificant hockey stick. They felt about as lethal as a couple of pretzel rods. The only optimistic thought I could conjure was that ARRRGH!!! filled the entire room. No matter where I struck, no matter how sorry the attack, it would be impossible to miss.
Tobias F. Dershowitz had spent his entire youth as the target of ridicule. The Trophy Cave was only the latest in a long series of treacherous locations, Steve Jorgensen-Warner only the most infamous of those who’d dedicated their lives to his debasement. But on that night, in that kitchen, against the most daunting of foes and armed with the flimsiest of weapons, Tub’s aim was true. The bowstring fired with a melodic bing and the arrow cut through the air, hard and fast, right at the center of the multi-tentacled monster. It was entirely possible that Tub might have felled the troll had not the man of metal leapt in from the living room and deflected the arrow with his leg of bicycle chains.
The microwave beeped, its nonexistent meal done cooking.
The metal man came for us.
I backed against the wall and hit the lights. ARRRGH!!! flinched from the brightness and Blinky’s eight eyes dove for dimmer cover. Rude fluorescents shone off the man’s armor but we were the only ones fazed. He withdrew both swords from his back with such force that a sugar bowl was sliced cleanly in two. The sugar itself seemed to suspend midair before scattering.
Tub wailed and threw the bow at him, but the metal man flicked a sword and the wood split in half. I let loose with a strangled cry and swung the bat. The metal man stepped easily to the left, caught the head of the bat with his spiked glove, and used the forward momentum to send me flying against the stove. The hockey stick clattered to the ground, but Tub picked it up and with a girlish yelp swung a spastic uppercut. The man of metal brought both swords together in X formation, catching the stick in the crux before giving another shove and chopping the blade of it clean off. Tub dropped the rest of it like it was hot.
The kitchen was a maelstrom of noise. Tub was screaming. I was screaming. ARRRGH!!! and Blinky were doing the troll version of screaming. The man of metal spun his swords in either hand, cutting the air with swooping sounds until both weapons faced skyward. The bottle caps on his arms jangled and the die-cast cars on his torso spun their wheels. He roared.
“QUIET!”
With simultaneous swipes, he sliced the hockey mask free from Tub’s face with one sword while splitting the bill of my baseball helmet with the other. Tub reached to his temple and I did the same to my forehead, but neither of us found so much as a scrape. We had stopped screaming, though, and so had the trolls. Tub and I blinked at each other, unarmed and unmasked.
The man of metal sheathed his swords and put both gloved hands behind his head. The aviator goggles of his eyes wiggled out of place and the boom box grill of his mouth pulled to one side. He next unlatched the slingshot band that served as his chinstrap and lifted off the headphone ears, along with the football-helmet exterior. I braced myself for the kind of scarred, gnarled visage a lifetime of sci-fi films had prepared me for.
The smooth, healthy face I saw was a less welcome surprise.
I knew that face.
It was my Uncle Jack.
Not Uncle Jack if he had lived and matured to be fifty-eight years old. This Uncle Jack was the same kid who stared at me every day from the milk carton photo on our living room shelf: tall for his age, loose blond hair flopping over his forehead, eyes flashing with intelligence and courage. The difference was that this boy was not freshly scrubbed and smirking with confidence. Instead, his frowning face was scored with mud and grime, and he sniffed at the air as if uncomfortable with the smells of dish soap, pine air freshener, and peanut butter.
“Uncle Jack?” I managed.
His eyes were guarded.
He nodded once.
“Get a grip, Jim.” Tub’s voice was shaky. “That’s nobody’s uncle. That’s some kid. Some crazy kid. Some crazy kid with swords who broke into your house and…” Tub leaned forward and the recognition hit him. “Oh, wow. Oh, geez. Jim, you know who that is? That’s Uncle freaking Jack.”
The trolls moved into positions behind Jack. ARRRGH!!! lowered its boulder-sized head so that the straggly hairs of its chin tickled Jack’s ear. Blinky’s tentacles twisted around Jack’s arm while two of the long-stemmed eyes hovered about Jack’s head as if lending him doubled sight. Both trolls made noises back and forth. Jack nodded as if he understood. I gripped the oven door and brought myself to my feet.
Jack stepped toward me, his metal parts jangling, and reached for my neck with one of his tack-edged gloves. I held my breath and wondered if this was it—the premature, and quite weird, death of Jim Sturges Jr. Instead of squeezing, though, Jack looped his finger around my chain and pulled the bronze medallion out from where it hid under my shirt. Jack flashed me an impatient look, then took hold of the sword on the face of the medallion and twisted it. It went from horizontal to vertical.
My ears popped. Suddenly I was hearing Blinky in midrant.
“—a doltish look about the face, doesn’t he? And that slackness of jaw? That hunch of back? Ignominious breeding, I’m afraid. Ignominious! I ask you, what are we to assume from that outrageously bland ceremonial garb? Where is the roguish joie de vivre? The vainglorious family crest? And no battle scarf? No battle scarf? That’s an affront! A direct affront! But hark! I see a spark of intelligence! Why, it’s rather adorable. The little fellow is…Is he…? Oh dear. Oh dear, indeed. He can understand me now, can’t he?”
Though mostly blind, Blinky had extended one of his eyes so that it hovered and squinted from a foot away. His peanut butter–covered appendages dithered a bit at the faux pas. In short order all eight of the eyes were turned in my general direction and blinking rapidly. His bigger companion licked the inside of its cheeks thoughtfully before lowering its head to look at me.
“Hullo.” Peanut butter slime dripped from ARRRGH!!!’s fangs. “Boy. Human.”
“They talk,” I mumbled. “Tub, they talk.”
“Don’t go crazy on me, Jim,” Tub said.
“Of course we talk,” Blinky said. His English accent was impeccable. “We are hardly cattle. We are, by the best estimates of troll intelligentsia, the most advanced of all existing species.” His haughty tone collapsed into a remorseful sigh. “We can also be the rudest. Do accept my apology. We regret that we do not have a second translator for your noble man-at-arms.”
“They’re apologizing, Tub,” I said. “Because you can’t understand them.”
“Tell them apology accepted. No! Tell them I’m sorry about trying to shoot them. Tell them that first. That’s important.”
“They can understand you just fine, Tub.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Then, louder, to them: “Sorry! I mean it! Please don’t kill me!”
“Kill? You?” Blinky looked baffled. “Such savagery is not the providence of the elite! Heed this: if you are to irk me, boy, irk cautiously. You are fortunate that my patience is renowned—I can out-wait anyone, anywhere, anytime. Why, my waiting contest with Prothnurd the Persistent is legend. Three years I sat oppos
ite old Prothnurd, happy as you’d like, and I would’ve sat for three more had the old boy not died. So I wish you well in your irking. My hirsute colleague, though—patience is not her strong suit.”
“Her?” I looked doubtfully up at ARRRGH!!!.
“Her?” Tub parroted. “It’s a her? I mean, she’s a her?”
“But of course,” Blinky said. “Most of the great troll warriors are female. To be a warrior worthy of song, brute strength alone will not suffice. Not nearly! You must possess cunning as well as compassion, and neither quality is the male’s forte. Traditionally, we males are more proficient at whipping up imposing smells and choreographing the ceremonial disembowelment waltzes. Besides, isn’t the color of her coat a dead giveaway? It’s ink black.”
“Ink black,” I said, nodding.
“Exactly,” Blinky said. “How you could mistake that for the coal black of males is entirely beyond my understanding.”
Jack glanced at the clock on the wall. It was spattered with peanut butter. He gripped the mask in his hands as if dying to put it back on. He was, at least, human, and I turned to him in desperation.
“Uncle Jack,” I said. “Where have you been?”
“With us,” Blinky said. “For forty-five years, your uncle has been our equal, deserving of the respect and praise so often tossed at our collective feet. There are kneeling rituals I can suggest to you if you’d like. Beautiful, sightly rituals! Ah, if only we had the time. For now, forgive your uncle’s taciturnity. If you’ll permit me an opinion, I believe he might be overwhelmed at being in the house of his older brother. Your father’s scent is everywhere here, you understand.”
“You want me to get Dad?” I asked. “I can wake him up.”
Jack’s eyes blazed.
“You cannot, actually.” Blinky’s voice was apologetic. “He will not wake until first light.”
“Why? What did you do to him?”
Blinky fluttered various tentacles. “Posh! Details are unimportant—”
“Tell me.”
“I predict you will find it unappetizing. But as you wish. We have introduced into his digestive system a schmoof. A schmoof is, oh, how shall I put this? I shall just come out with it. It is a fetus. We have a few on generous loan from the Schmooffingers. Seeking a womblike warmth, the young schmoof crawls in through the mouth and down the esophagus and burrows into the stomach lining, where its enzymes release a powerful sedative effect upon its host. Schmooffingers are renowned for their sleeping. They have sixty-six different words for snoring. To catalogue every possible permutation of slumber is their raison d’être. To that end, they sleep for eleven hours a day. The twelfth hour—well, it’s best not to be around then, I’ll leave it at that. Now, do not fret. Being extremely sensitive to sunlight, the schmoof will crawl back up the esophagus at dawn, la-dee-dah, and find its way home through a drain, at which point your father will wake up feeling refreshed and—”
“You put a troll fetus into my dad’s mouth?”
“Jim!” Tub shouted. “What the hell?!”
“Schmoof,” ARRRGH!!! grunted. “Is friend. Good for ache of head.”
She gestured at what looked like a large boulder halfway embedded in her skull.
“We have aspirin for that!” I cried. “Aspirin! Not fetuses!”
“Oh dear,” Blinky said. “I suspected that this was a bad topic with which to begin a friendship.”
“Enough.”
Jack’s young face was twisted into a snarl. The single word, only his second, seemed to have taken a deal of energy. His chest rose and fell beneath his armor of junk. He glared at Tub and I, then glanced at the trolls before jabbing an impatient thumb toward my bedroom.
Blinky’s tentacles spread out in a way that somehow communicated apology. He then explained to me, in sentences that were, for him, remarkably concise, that we all had to go, right now, and then he told me why. I was more afraid of Uncle Jack than these two walking nightmares and found myself nodding agreement to whatever came out of Blinky’s strange mouth.
“What’s it saying, Jim?” Tub pressed. “What’s going on?”
Even before I replied, I could not believe my response.
“We’re going hunting.”
The floorboards beneath my bed telescoped downward, a whirlpool of wood, the boards cracking and popping as they locked themselves into a new alignment: a spiral staircase of treacherous, uneven steps. The stinky sock Tub had mocked earlier went tumbling down the stairs until it was swallowed by darkness. A few rogue marbles followed suit and we did not hear them land.
Jack bounded downward. He was almost out of view before realizing we hadn’t moved.
“Let’s go,” he snapped.
Tub and I stared at each other, then at the bed being held over our heads by ARRRGH!!! as if it weighed no more than a sheet. She nodded us on, her horns ripping through my posters and helpfully rearranging my models.
I descended with baby steps. Soon my eyes adjusted to the dim orange glow radiating from underground electrical grids. But this remained a staircase without a railing, and I moved with a caution that frustrated Jack. He sighed and took steps by threes and fours. It made me feel lousy—this thirteen-year-old kid was making me look bad—but what else was I going to do? I inhaled the briny funk of troll, tried to ignore the slither and thump of their weird appendages, and focused on maintaining my slow and steady pace. Tub, meanwhile, kept two handfuls of my shirt.
Ten minutes were spent passing through freezing air. Then we dipped into a lower stratum that was warmer, then hot, then sweltering. Light now came from oil lamps, the same as I’d seen on my previous adventure, and at last I could see the walls around me. The staircase ran out of steps and my foot landed badly. Tub’s full weight slammed me from behind and we started to topple, but warm, rippling tentacles curled beneath our armpits and brought us back to standing position. Look thankful, I thought as I shivered in disgust.
Jack chose one of three stone archways and charged into the lamplit tunnel. I didn’t cherish the idea of being left alone with two trolls, no matter how nice they were being, so I took off at a sprint. Nearly a full, harrowing minute was spent alone in the shadowed tunnel before I caught up.
“Uncle Jack, wait,” I called. “You have to explain all this. At least some of it? Or just a tiny little bit of it? I don’t know why you brought us. You said you want us to hunt. Look, that’s fine, that’s great, Grandpa took me mushroom hunting once. I was pretty good at it, found like twenty of those things. I don’t mind helping, really. But Tub and I are pretty freaked, so maybe you could just—”
Jack turned around. Though I was two years older (or forty-three years younger, depending on how you looked at it), he and I were the same height.
“Grandpa?” he asked.
“Yeah. Grandpa. One time we—”
Jack’s eyes were shining.
Several seconds passed before I realized that the man I called “Grandpa” was Jack’s dad. This made me feel rotten because I knew what he’d ask next.
“Is he…?” Jack let the question trail off.
I swallowed.
“He died five years ago.”
Jack blinked hard for a few seconds, then nodded. This left his face pointing downward, and he seemed to notice his wire-covered right arm for the first time. He turned it this way and that, examining the makeshift armor as if it were a colony of leeches that had attached itself to his arm.
“I’ve missed,” he whispered, “so much.”
“Come up with me,” I urged. “Dad will be so happy. He never really stopped looking for you.”
Jack examined me as if looking for proof that we were related.
“You’re a Sturges,” he said.
“I guess.”
“You know what the name means? Did Jimbo—your dad, I mean—did he ever tell you?”
“No.”
“And Dad—I mean, your grandpa—he never told you, either?”
“Sorry.”
br /> Jack pressed his lips together in disappointment.
“Comes from the ancient word styrgar. Means spearhead or battle spear. It’s the name of a warrior.”
“Great,” I said.
Jack leaned in with a snarl.
“No,” he said. “It is not great. It is the worst kind of burden. Before we’re through, you’ll wish you had been born with a different name. You’ll wish you could wake up a different person. Because warriors? They go to war. And war is not fun. War is bloody. Things that were alive end up dead and sometimes you’re the one who has to burn what’s left over. And when they go, Jim, they don’t go quietly. They make sounds. For the rest of your life, when you try to sleep, those are the sounds that will keep you awake.”
Back a few bends in the tunnel, I heard the crushing footfall, serpentine slither, and tennis-shoe stumble of the absent characters.
“Hey, look,” I said. “You’ve convinced me. I don’t want in your club or whatever.”
“Got no choice,” he grunted. “Every few generations, the Sturges clan produces a warrior of consequence, a paladin. It might be you, Jim. It might not. Either way, we have to find out. I can’t do this by myself anymore. Something’s happening. And we’re going to need every paladin we can round up.”
“There’s more? Why can’t you get them instead? Where are they?”
Jack shrugged. “Sure, there’s more. From other families. Probably. Somewhere. If they didn’t die out. But the lines have been lost. For now it’s just you and me.” He gave my skinny body another dubious perusal. “You and me and the battle of our lives.”
Tub came around the bend with a ghastly pasted-on grin. Behind him loped and slunk the two mismatched trolls, leaving in their wake tumbleweeds of hair and a trail of sludge. Jack turned on his boot heel and recommenced his stomping.
Tub grabbed me by the shoulder. He kept his voice cheery.
“Gee, Jim. Thanks for leaving me all alone with the troll patrol.”
“Sorry, Tub.”
He pushed me in the direction of Jack and lowered his voice.