Party Time

The orc Rangers did not attack. They only watched.

For five turns they sat on the southern hills of Lumbertusk like crows on a fence. Sometimes they shot an arrow at a troll, just to see what happened. What happened was that the troll pulled the arrow out, said "Ow," and threw a rock at them. The rock usually missed. Trolls were not good at throwing. Trolls were not good at aiming, or counting, or remembering which way they had just come from.

But trolls were good at waiting. They were like hills that way.

"Boss," said Grubba on the fifth day. "They still there."

"Ya."

"Why they not come?"

Brog sat on the log pile in his shiny armour and thought about it. He had been thinking about it for five days. It was the longest he had ever thought about anything, except maybe the number two.

"Methunk," he said slowly, "they waiting for something."

"What?"

"Dunno." He bit a log. "But funny tall elf friend say orcs got clever shaman. Clever shaman means they wait for clever thing."

Grubba looked at the hills. Then at Brog. Then at the hills again.

"Boss," he said. "Everybody sad."

Brog looked around. It was true. The trolls of Lumbertusk sat in the mud with their heads down. Nobody was wrestling. Nobody was singing. Hrunk was sitting on his rock, but he wasn't even trying to work out if it was a number. Waiting was easy for trolls, but waiting while somebody shot arrows at you was not much fun.

Morale. That was the word Snitch used. Trolls didn't have much of it. Snitch said it was something to do with a number in their blood, a low number, and Brog had nodded and pretended to understand. But he understood this: when trolls were sad, they fought badly. They forgot why they were fighting. Sometimes they wandered off in the middle of a battle to look at a pretty mushroom.

"Need party," said Brog.

* * *

The scroll had come from a goblin peddler a year ago. He had traded it for twelve logs and a sheep. It was a long roll of yellow paper with black writing on it, and when you read the words out loud, magic happened. That was what the peddler had said. Brog had kept it under his bed ever since, waiting for a special day.

Today was special. Today everybody was sad.

The problem was that nobody in Lumbertusk could read.

"Snitch!" shouted Brog.

The goblin came out of the school cave, wiping chalk off his hands. He looked at the scroll. He went pale. Goblins were already a sort of greenish-grey, so going pale made him look like old cheese.

"Your Majesty," he said, "do you know what this is?"

"Party."

"It's Dark Paradise. It's a spell of the Death realm." He unrolled it further. "It's a powerful one. Somebody made this scroll properly. It raises morale, Your Majesty. A lot. Up to five hundred, it says here."

"Five hundred!" Brog did not know how much five hundred was. It sounded like more than two. "Good!"

"But it also kills a few of the people it touches. Not many. One in ten of the ones it damages. It says so right here."

Brog looked at him.

"Kills trolls?"

"A few."

"For how long?"

Snitch opened his mouth. Then he closed it. He was a goblin, but he had lived in Lumbertusk for six years. He knew about Legendary Regeneration.

"Ten turns, Your Majesty," he said weakly. "Probably."

"Then it's a nap." Brog grinned. "Read it."

* * *

They gathered on the flat ground behind the log pile. All of them. Four thousand trolls, big ones and small ones and very big ones, standing in the mud in the evening light. The sun was going down behind the pine trees. On the southern hills, the orcs watched.

Brog climbed to the top of the log pile. He banged his shiny chest. Bong. Bong. Everybody looked up.

"Okuh," he roared, "everyone ready? Div, dur, dee, doo, dun, Party Time!!"

Nobody knew what div, dur, dee, doo meant. Brog didn't either. It was what his grandfather used to say before a party, and his grandfather had said it was what his grandfather used to say. Maybe once it had meant something. Now it only meant: party.

Snitch read the scroll.

His voice was small and shaky at first. Then the words took hold of it. They were heavy, strange, slippery words, and they made the air thick and sweet and dark, like syrup. Purple light came out of the scroll. It rolled out over the crowd like fog.

The trolls breathed it in.

Something happened to them. Brog felt it too. A warm, giddy, silly feeling, like the first log in the morning, like rolling down a hill, like being tickled by a bear. He began to laugh. He couldn't stop. Below him, four thousand trolls began to laugh too.

Then they began to dance.

Trolls do not dance well. Trolls dance the way avalanches dance. The ground shook. Trees fell over. Hrunk picked up Grubba and threw him into the swamp, and Grubba came out covered in mud and laughing so hard that he fell back in. Somebody found the drums. Somebody else found the beer barrels. A troll called Big Lunk, who was Brog's cousin, climbed a pine tree and sang a song about his mother, very loudly and very badly, until the tree broke.

A few trolls fell down and didn't get up. Dark Paradise did that, Snitch had said. Brog saw them. He didn't worry. They would get up in ten turns. They would be hungry and grumpy, and they would miss the party, which was their own fault for napping.

It was the best party Lumbertusk had ever had.

It was also, as it turned out, exactly what the orcs had been waiting for.

* * *

They came at full dark. Not the Rangers on the hill. Those were only watchers. These came out of the forest on every side, fast and silent, in a ring of iron and torches.

A Raid. Not a Military Attack. Brog would learn the difference later, from Snitch, who drew it in chalk. A Military Attack was when you came to take land. A Raid was when you came to kill, and burn, and run away before anybody could stop you.

The orcs did not want Lumbertusk. They wanted dead trolls.

And they had chosen the one night when the trolls were too happy to fight.

The first arrows fell into the dancing crowd. Trolls looked up, puzzled. One of them pulled an arrow out of his shoulder and laughed at it. Then the orc Fighters hit them from the south, and the laughter turned into screaming.

"Orcs!" bellowed Brog. "ORCS!"

Nobody heard him. The drums were still going. The purple fog of Dark Paradise still hung over everything. Half the trolls thought the orcs were part of the party. One of them tried to dance with an orc. The orc cut his arm off.

Brog jumped down from the log pile. He landed on two orcs. They did not get up. He grabbed a log, a big one, and swung it. Three more orcs flew into the darkness. His shiny armour rang like a bell every time something hit it. Arrows bounced off. Spears bounced off. He felt nothing. Funny tall elf friend's armour was very good.

But he was one troll, and there were many orcs. And these orcs were fierce. Brog had fought orcs before, and they were always hard, but these had a red light in their eyes, like coals. They hit twice as hard as orcs should. They didn't stop when you broke their arms. They screamed and kept coming.

All around him, trolls were falling.

He saw Hrunk go down with three spears in him. He saw Grubba dragged into the swamp by six orcs. He saw Big Lunk, still drunk and still singing, swing his fists at the shadows until an orc with an axe came up behind him and swung once, twice, three times.

Big Lunk fell. He lay on the ground with his eyes open. He stopped singing.

Brog roared. It was a sound nobody in Lumbertusk had ever heard him make. It came from somewhere very deep, under the belly, under the logs, under the number two. It shook the trees.

The orcs paused.

Then a horn blew in the forest, long and low, and they turned and ran. As fast as they had come, they were gone. Torches vanished between the trees. The drums stopped. The purple fog thinned and blew away.

Silence.

* * *

Brog walked across the field in the moonlight.

There were bodies everywhere. Troll bodies, mostly. A few orcs, but not many. The orcs had done what they came to do. They had killed and run. Brog counted. He couldn't count very far, but he counted anyway. Two, and another two, and another two. Lots of twos. Lots and lots of twos.

"It's okuh," he said to nobody. His voice was hoarse. "It's okuh. Ten turns. They come back. They always come back."

He knelt by Big Lunk. His cousin's eyes were still open. Brog closed them gently with one huge finger.

"Ten turns," he whispered. "Then you finish your song, ya?"

Snitch came creeping out of the school cave. He had hidden there through the whole raid. He was shaking. He looked at the field. He looked at Brog.

"Your Majesty," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. The scroll..."

"Not your fault," said Brog. "My party. My fault."

He stood up. His armour was covered in orc blood. In the moonlight it looked black.

That was when he heard the chanting.

It came from the southern hills. From the place where the orc Rangers had watched for five days. It was a deep voice, rough and old, singing something that was not a song. The words were heavy and cold. They crawled across the ground like beetles.

Brog looked up.

On the top of the hill, against the moon, stood a single orc. He was not big. He had a staff of bone and a necklace of teeth, and he held his arms out wide over the field of dead trolls.

"Behold!" the orc shouted, and his voice carried all the way down into the valley. "Our Necromancy turns the slain Trolls of King Brog against those still living!"

On the field, something moved.

A hand. A troll hand, grey and stiff, rising out of the mud. Then an arm. Then a whole troll, sitting up slowly, the way you sit up after a long sleep. It was Hrunk. He still had the three spears in him. His eyes were open, and there was nothing in them. Nothing at all.

All across the field, the dead were getting up.

Not all of them. Not even most. But dozens. Then hundreds. They stood in the moonlight with their dead eyes and their broken bodies, and they did not look at Brog. They did not look at anything. They turned, all together, like a flock of birds, and began to walk south.

Towards the orcs.

"No," said Brog. "No, no, no. Hrunk! Hrunk, come back! You're napping! You're supposed to be napping!"

Hrunk did not turn.

And there, in the middle of the dead, walking with the same stiff, empty steps, was Big Lunk. His eyes were open again. Brog had closed them, and now they were open.

"Lunk," whispered Brog.

Big Lunk walked past him. Close enough to touch. He did not turn his head. He did not sing. He walked up the southern hill to where the orc shaman stood, and he stood beside him, and he waited.

The orc shaman looked down at Brog across the field. Even from so far away, Brog could see his tusks. He thought the orc was smiling. Maybe he wasn't. It was hard to tell with orcs.

Then the shaman turned and walked into the forest. And the dead trolls followed him.

Brog stood alone in the empty field.

He did not roar this time. He did not cry. Trolls did not cry, mostly. They didn't have the right kind of eyes for it. He just stood there for a long time, and then he bent down and picked up a log. Not to eat. Just to hold.

"Snitch," he said.

"Yes, Your Majesty?"

"That orc. With the bones."

"Yes?"

"I want to know his name."

Snitch looked at the hill where the shaman had stood. He knew the name. Every goblin in the south knew it.

"Kruktchek," he said. "High Shaman of the Gutlands."

Brog nodded slowly. He said the name once, quietly, as if he were tasting it.

Then he broke the log in half with his bare hands, and threw the pieces away, and went into his hall and did not come out until morning.