The Light Fantastic

‘I’m Kwartz,’ it said. ‘That’s Krysoprase over there, and Breccia, and Jasper, and my wife Beryl—she’s la bit meta-morphic, but who isn’t these days? Jasper, get off his foot.’

Rincewind took the hand gingerly, bracing himself for the crunch of crushed bone. It didn’t come. The troll’s hand was rough and a bit lichenous around the fingernails.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Rincewind. ‘I never really met trolls before.’

‘We’re a dying race,’ said Kwartz sadly, as the party set off under the stars. ‘Young Jasper’s the only pebble in our tribe. We suffer from philosophy, you know.’

‘Yes?’ said Rincewind, trying to keep up. The troll band moved very quickly, but also very quietly, big round shapes moving like wraiths through the night. Only the occasional flat squeak of a night creature who hadn’t heard them approaching marked their passage.

‘Oh, yes. Martyrs to it. It comes to all of us in the end. One evening, they say, you start to wake up and then you think "Why bother?" and you just don’t. See those boulders over there?’

Rincewind saw some huge shapes lying in the grass.

‘The one on the end’s my aunt. I don’t know what’s she’s thinking about, but she hasn’t moved for two hundred years.’

‘Gosh, I’m sorry.’

‘Oh, it’s no problem with us around to look after them,’ aid Kwartz. ‘Not many humans around here, you see. I know it’s not your fault, but you don’t seem to be able to spot the difference between a thinking troll and an ordinary rock. My great-uncle was actually quarried, you know.’

‘That’s terrible!’

‘Yes, one minute he was a troll, the next he was an ornamental fireplace.’

They paused in front of a familiar-looking cliff. The scuffed remains of a fire smouldered in the darkness.

‘It looks like there’s been a fight,’ said Beryl.

‘They’re all gone!’ said Rincewind. He ran to the end of the clearing. ‘The horses, too! Even the Luggage!’

‘One of them’s leaked,’ said Kwartz, kneeling down. ‘That red watery stuff you have in your insides. Look.’

‘Blood!’

‘Is that what it’s called? I’ve never really seen the point of it.’

Rincewind scuttled about in the manner of one totally at his wits’ end, peering behind bushes in case anyone was hiding there. That was why he tripped over a small green bottle.

‘Cohen’s linament!’ he moaned. ‘He never goes anywhere without it!’

‘Well,’ said Kwartz, ‘you humans have something you can do, I mean like when we slow right down and catch philosophy, only you just fall to bits —’

‘Dying, it’s called!’ screamed Rincewind.

‘That’s it. They haven’t done that, because they’re not here.’

‘Unless they were eaten!’ suggested Jasper excitedly.

‘Hmm,’ said Kwartz, and, ‘Wolves?’ said Rincewind.

‘We flattened all the wolves around here years ago,’ said the troll. ‘Old Grandad did, anyway.’

‘He didn’t like them?’

‘No, he just didn’t used to look where he was going. Hmm.’ The trolls looked at the ground again.

‘There’s a trail,’ he said. ‘Quite a lot of horses.’ He ooked up at the nearby hills, where sheer cliffs and dangerous crags loomed over the moonlit forests.

‘Old Grandad lives up there,’ he said quietly.

There was something about the way he said it that made Rincewind decide that he didn’t ever want to meet Old Grandad.

‘Dangerous, is he?’ he ventured.

‘He’s very old and big and mean. We haven’t seen him about for years,’ said Kwartz.

‘Centuries,’ corrected Beryl.

‘He’ll squash them all flat!’ added Jasper, jumping up and down on Rincewind’s toes.

‘It just happens sometimes that a really old and big troll will go off by himself into the hills, and—um—the rock takes over, if you follow me.’

‘No?’

Kwartz sighed. ‘People sometimes act like animals, don’t they? And sometimes a troll will start thinking like a rock, and rocks don’t like people much.’

Breccia, a skinny troll with a sandstone finish, rapped on Kwartz’s shoulder.

‘Are we going to follow them, then?’ he said. ‘The legend says we should help this Rincewind squashy.’

Kwartz stood up, thought for a moment, then picked Rincewind up by the scruff of his neck and with a big gritty movement placed him on his shoulders.

‘We go,’ he said firmly. ‘If we meet Old Grandad I’ll try to explain...’

Two miles away a string of horses trotted through the night. Three of them carried captives, expertly gagged and bound. A fourth pulled a rough travois on which the Luggage lay trussed and netted and silent.

Herrena softly called the column to a halt and beckoned one of her men to her.

‘Are you quite sure?’ she said. ‘I can’t hear anything.’

‘I saw troll shapes,’ he said flatly.

She looked around. The trees had thinned out here, there was a lot of scree, and ahead of them the track led towards a bald, rocky hill that looked especially unpleasant by red starlight.

She was worried about that track. It was extremely old, but something had made it, and trolls took a lot of killing.

She sighed. Suddenly it looked as though that secretarial career was not such a bad option, at that.