Troll Mountain: The Complete Novel Read Online Free PDF

running for its life.
    The troll stood at the edge of the stream, surprised to find its escape route cut off.
    The deep voices came again from the thorny forest behind him: “ Here! Tracks! Heading toward the bridge! ”
    “ Where are you, Düm! We’re coming to get you! ”
    Raf glimpsed flashes of fire in the forest behind the troll: his pursuers were wielding flaming torches.
    The fleeing troll looked this way and that, agitated and desperate, before realizing that there was no choice but to attempt to cross the muddy stream by way of the Broken Bridge’s leftover pillars.
    Raf watched as the big creature measured his first leap onto the nearest stone pillar: this appeared to require all of the troll’s concentration.
    The troll jumped …
    … and landed on the first pillar, swaying precariously but managing to regain its balance.
    It was at that moment that his pursuers—four other trolls—rushed out of the forest bearing torches in their enormous hands. If it was at all possible, these trolls were taller and weightier than the first one: they were almost seven feet tall, with broader shoulders and longer arms. But they still had the same stubby legs.
    The four pursuers spotted the first troll wobbling desperately on the pillar, high above the mud of the streambed, arms held out for balance.
    They howled with laughter.
    “Look at him! Stupid Düm!” one guffawed.
    “Don’t fall in, Düm!” another cackled. “That foul gunk beneath you is gripping mud!”
    Then a third pursuer threw something at the fleeing troll. It bounced off his back, spraying liquid, before falling into the bog.
    Raf saw it land in the gripping mud with a soft gloop : it was a goblet of some sort. Within seconds, the mud sucked it under.
    “Ooh-ahh, Düm! Don’t lose your balance!”
    Raf frowned. The four pursuers seemed to be, well, drunk.
    And indeed, just then, another of them took a lusty swig of foamy liquid from his own goblet before hurling it at the fleeing troll and striking him on the back of the head with it.
    “Na-ha! You got him in the head!”
    “Well, we know that won’t hurt him!”
    The fleeing troll—Düm, Raf guessed—risked another leap to the next pillar and made it, again struggling mightily to retain his balance where Raf would have found it quite easy.
    The pursuing trolls started throwing other objects at Düm: branches, stones. They bounced off his thick gray hide.
    And then one of the pursuers threw a larger rock.
    It hit Düm squarely on the side of the head, causing him to lose his balance, and he tumbled from the pillar, falling for fifteen feet, cartwheeling in mid-air, before he landed feet-first in the gripping mud, embedding his legs all the way up to the hip in the viscous goo.
    The look of pure fear that flashed across Düm’s face when he saw his predicament struck Raf to the core of his being.
    It was a look common to all creatures—man, deer, hound and, evidently, trolls—the look of profound terror that follows the realization that one is moments away from death and there is absolutely no escape.
    The four other trolls exploded with laughter when they saw him drop into the mud. Two more rocks were thrown.
    One called, “Maybe you should have thought about this before you spoke to Graia. Stupid Düm. See you in the afterworld, you foolish dragger.”
    A final rock thunked against Düm’s head and the four trolls lumbered off, crashing through the thorn bushes, heading back toward the mountains, leaving the troll named Düm to die.
    *
    Raf had watched it all with a kind of grim fascination and he was staring at the swaying thorn bushes on the other side of the stream when he heard the troll in the mud whimper forlornly.
    Raf slid out from under his leaf-covered blanket and moved to the brink of the stream.
    “Raf—!” Ko hissed.
    Raf just held up his hand.
    He looked down into the bog and saw the troll hopelessly lodged in it, panting as it struggled in vain against the gripping mud.