Knights of the Dawn (Arcanum of the Dolmen Troll Book 1) Read online

  Knights of the Dawn

  Book One of

  Arcanum of the Dolmen Troll

  Authored by R.J. Eveland

  Knight illustration by Kay Sigurgeirson

  Copyright © Timothy Randall James Eveland 2016

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE: THE SANDPIPER

  CHAPTER TWO: THE SOW

  CHAPTER THREE: THE OWL

  CHAPTER FOUR: THE MOUSE

  CHAPTER FIVE: THE CAT

  CHAPTER SIX: THE BOAR

  CHAPTER SEVEN: THE VIPER

  CHAPTER EIGHT: THE COW

  CHAPTER NINE: THE FOX

  CHAPTER TEN: THE FISH

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE WEASEL

  CHAPTER TWELVE: THE ANT

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE LION

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE SPIDER

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE SPARROWHAWK

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE MOLE

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: THE TROLL

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: THE CATERPILLAR

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: THE APE

  CHAPTER TWENTY: THE RAVEN

  END NOTES BY THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  A CHILLY MIDNIGHT gust rattled faraway trees before it swooped into a glen and across a camp of bandits. The gale whirled around tents, a thatched hovel, and twisted around a gargantuan menhir that towered behind a campfire. A cave upon an escarpment at the far end of the glen howled an eldritch dirge as the wind whistled into its depths. The cave’s lamenting was faint under the soft chatter and occasional laughter in the camp.

  Jack the Bandit’s hairy lips puckered over a pipestem. Smoke seeped from his nose and the corners of his mouth as he puffed. Wafting out in clouds that rolled down his chest, his smoke was illumed by the roaring campfire at his toes. He was seated on a log, staring up at a star-speckled firmament. Other bandits were seated on neighboring logs, some eating greasy hunks of meat with their hands.

  A plume of smoke blew from Jack’s lungs to erase the stars above him. “There’s nothing more I’d like to do than sleep.” His voice was languid and raspy. “But I have a feeling those meddling knights are still around. I swear, the lanky one with the sling and the hawk-faced helm was onto us. Even through that steel visor I could see the suspicion in his eyes.” He spoke with the pipestem in his mouth. Smoke streamed from his nostrils. “Those knights showed more skills than any swordsmen I’ve ever encountered before. They may think they can come back and steal our prize.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Bruice assented from across the fire. Bruice was a bandit with a maille coif and boiled leather spaulders. “It’s odd that arrows carved into the menhirs would lead those knights here. Do you really think it was the cave troll that carved them?” Up high, the surface of the menhir was black in the night, but Bruice swore he could still see the arrow carving in the corner of his eye. It was pointing at the distant cave upon the escarpment. “That theory doesn’t make sense to me. We’ve had eyes on the cave this whole time and no one’s reported anything coming in or out.”

  “Even a bandit blinks,” Jack enlightened, knowing well his men could never keep a perfect vigil.

  “I’ve heard trolls have magic,” Leroy said as he threw a husk into the fire. Leroy was a bald bandit with his last and only tooth sticking out over his bottom lip. He spoke with a high-pitched drawl. “This one could be playing a game with us. We’ve been here trying to starve it to death for a month now. I think maybe this whole time it’s been moving with the dawn to fill its cave with food.”

  Gollgriff, a bandit hairier than the hairiest wolf, rose staggeringly, carrot wine dripping from his beard. “Or maybe the troll’s dead already,” he asserted. “Maybe some mooncalf in our camp thought it’d be fun to carve some stupid arrows onto a bunch of menhirs, and it just so happened to lead some meddling knights here.” He was an ursine man with enough fur on his back to coat three real bears. “I say we hone our axes, light some torches and raid that cave tonight. If the troll’s not dead yet, it’ll at least be near dying from hunger. Maybe we can capture it alive and triple our prize.”

  “You fool,” Jack spat, “you’re always thinking with your skeggox. You remember what happened last time we raided the cave? We lost eleven good men to that troll. We made an agreement after that day. Remember? We’re to wait till the next eclipse and offer a sacrifice to the almighty before we attack the troll again. Now that we’ve lost even more men to those meddling knights, I won’t risk losing more. We’ll wait like we planned. And I won’t listen to objections.”

  “You won’t listen to objections?” Gollgriff disgorged a mouthful of carrot wine onto Jack’s boots and unlimbered an ax. “Since when were you the leader, Jack? Last thing I recall, it’s my skeggox that says I’m the leader here. And I’ve had enough of waiting.” He raised his weapon to the moon. Starlight licked the crusty iron. For a moment it glittered like burnished steel. “Whoever else is tired of this coward telling us to wait, follow me! It’s time to subdue this troll.”

  Leroy leaped to his feet faster than a rabbit and tossed his arms at the sky. With his single tooth puncturing the night, he howled high and shrill like a dying runt. “It’s time for blood, boys! I’ll grab the barbed net!”

  “Yes … finally, more blood,” a bandit mumbled as he rose to collect his gear. Other bandits emerged from the shadows to hold their torches in the fire. Their faces were xanthous in the light. “It’s about time,” one of them chuckled, leaning a spear on a shoulder.

  “This is unwise!” Jack rose to advise, smoke drifting from his nose. “Drunk and tired in the middle of the night is no time to fight a troll. You’ll botch everything we’ve been so careful to preserve.”

  Gollgriff glowered before he showed a cold shoulder. Bandits streamed away from the fire to follow him towards the cave. It was a column of torches shifting through the night.

  “Jack’s right!” Bruice raised his voice over the fire where stragglers were gathering to show Jack support. “You’re all just courageous from the wine. You’ll rue this foolishness if it doesn’t kill you first.”

  No one from the column of torches turned to reply. They kept steady on away from the menhir and over the grass towards the steep, rocky hillside. Leroy swung his barbed net over his head like a sling, howling madly and skipping. Others were drunkenly capering around him, slobber flying from their guffawing mouths. “Time to get us a troll!”

  A perched owl on a faraway bough up high watched the line of torches slink down the glen. There were eight torches, each one burning at a different brightness. Altogether in the night, it was a giant black caterpillar with glowing spiracles wriggling towards its meal. Only a handful of men were still at the camp where Jack reseated to tamp the embers in his pipe nonchalantly.

  Bruice sat beside him, watching the line of torches wend further away. “Oh well … we tried, at least.” He retrieved a pipe from a pocket and packed its bowl with a salad of dank forb. It was the same sweet stuff Jack was smoking. It left a tanginess in the air.

  “More meat and carrot wine for us.” A drunken bandit made a smug grin as he scooped up Gollgriff’s wineskin. He stuck the nozzle in his mouth and squeezed. “Aha!” He laughed and the orange drink came out of his nose. “And I just realized if they all die there’ll be fewer men to split the prize among. The almighty will see that we grow rich for our patience!”

  “The next eclipse is near,” Jack agreed. “Our sacrifice will assure our victory.” He turned his head to see the line of torches receding. “It’s sad how impatience can kill your dreams. At least we’ll learn from the mistakes of t
hese men. Now let’s sit back and watch.” He laughed and filled his lungs with smoke. “This should be very entertaining.”

  Lightning flashed over the distant woods. A rolling cadence of thunder sent a cascading echo over the glen, beating swiftly like a row of drums.

  Gollgriff’s ugly black boot stepped on a loose rock at the foot of the escarpment. Torches gathered behind him as he strained his neck to look up the scree-covered hillside. It seemed as if each stone had been placed by hand to create a miniature mountain, to hide something greater beneath. The mouth of the cave sitting halfway up, with its slick walls of solid stone, was the only proof this hill wasn’t some massive dolmen. It was a natural hill, but still, Gollgriff had his doubts about that as his torchlight revealed hundreds of human skulls scattered about the stones. The skulls stared back at him with large eyes, some of them still wearing helms. Across the entire hillside, shards of rusty iron and patinaed bronze jutted out from under rocks. Forgotten behind briers and poking out of clefts, hid bits and scraps of broken armor from battles fought long ago.

  Leroy thrust his tooth at the cave up high, still spinning the barbed net above his head. “Come on, y’all. What’re we waiting for? Let’s get ‘er!” He ran ahead of Gollgriff to begin his ascent, halloaing, “Yeeeehhhhaaaaaa!”

  Gollgriff hollered, “Quiet!” With a quieter voice, he said, “Don’t tell the thing we’re coming. You’ll give it time to prepare.”

  Several bandits laughed at that as they followed Leroy up, guessing the troll would’ve already heard them coming by now. They rushed to Leroy’s torchlight, carefully navigating the slippery stones.

  “But I thought you said it was already dead, Gollgriff?” A chubby bandit with lazy eyes and a deep, stupid voice budged past with his torch to begin his trek. More bandits followed his torchlight. “All we have to do is throw the carcass in a wagon, then we’re off to claim our prize.”

  Gollgriff began to wish he had made a plan in case his assumptions about the troll were incorrect. “Wait for me! Let me lead.” He stretched his great legs to climb quickly, wrestling with loose rocks to follow the rising torches.

  The men at the camp all turned their heads when Bruice pointed. The foot of the distant escarpment was aglow. The faraway torchlight weaved skyward. Lights seemed to be floating in nothingness as the night grew thicker beneath them. When the torchlight began to lick the mouth of the cave, the men watching from the camp could swear some magic portal was opening, a hole in the firmament. The torches gradually entered it. One by one, the flames disappeared, but their glow sent a sheen pouring out. It draped the escarpment for a time, casting the giant shadows of fools. It all lingeringly grew dimmer until the magic portal became a glowing dot surrounded by blackness.

  It played a trick on Jack’s eyes and he reached out to touch it. A fat moth landed on his forefinger. He whispered a greeting before it fluttered away, its flapping wings a blur in the light of the campfire. The first scream came and went before anyone could raise a brow. Jack watched the moth flutter up towards the menhir and out of the light when the second scream echoed over the glen. It was the scream of a dying man, a scream filled with utmost horror. Another scream came, clearly from a different man. It was deeper, more terrifying. The light in the floating portal danced and thrashed as the screams descended over the camp.

  Leaning back with his legs crossed, Bruice used a twig from the fire to light his pipe. “Sounds like the fight’s begun. I knew that troll wasn’t dead.”

  Over the dying screams, loud crashes sounded, as if a giant hand was smashing skulls against rocks. The bangs and thuds were quiet and faint at the camp, but for Jack they were clear as fate. He remembered those sounds from when he watched the troll kill his brother a while back. His brother had been thrown across the cave to splatter against a wall. It was a sight Jack remembered every time he heard a sound similar to that splat. Now he was hearing that exact same sound, he knew. It even had the bloodcurdling cry of death that went with it.

  A camper quipped over the growing uproar, “It sounds like the night my parents conceived me.”

  No one around the fire laughed as the screams and clashes were frightening enough to make a demon shudder. Still, Jack had pride. He sighed and crossed his legs like Bruice. He would’ve gloated about how he was right and Gollgriff was wrong but simply preening silently with a smug smile was good enough. From the tone of those squelching screams, it couldn’t have been more obvious that Gollgriff had been wrong.

  Ting! Clink! Clank! Tap! Clap! A shrill drumroll sounded from a helmet rolling down the escarpment. It had been hurled out of the cave like a chicken bone, covered in blood with a head still in it. It made its clanking song until it finally reached the soft grass of the glen below. It settled with the other ancient bones, forever part of the family.

  “I hope a few of them survive, at least.” Bruice kicked off his boots to stick his stinky toes in the heat. “There’re only seven of us now. Our numbers are near to a tenth of what they were before we found this miscreated shit-fuck. Now that I think of it, I’d gladly split the prize a bit more if I knew it’d mean extra axes at my side. Seven men? That’s too few!”

  Jack replied, “Us seven have been prudent enough to stay alive this long. We should be able to survive till the next eclipse. After our sacrifice to the almighty, seven men should be more than enough to bag up that troll.”

  “I hope you’re right about that,” Bruice harrumphed and put his pipestem on his lip. “I hope you’re right because now that fucking thing has enough meat to last six bloody winters.”

  A few bandits around the fire couldn’t hear Bruice’s words over the reverberating screams of cessation. Altogether, the screams were a choir of demons ululating a coronach to their dark master. Lightning collapsed in bursts, forebodingly atop the scree-covered hill. It struck the hilt of an ancient iron sword that jutted from betwixt two boulders. For a moment, the entire hill was a silhouette, a looming, black monster with one illumed eye. Another hunk of human disgorged from the cave, an arm sheathed in thick, unoiled maille. Shish! Shoosh! Shush! Swish! It wriggled and slithered as it rolled down the rocks, sighing, leaving a backtrail of red slime. Somersaulting thunder resounded just as the sky darkened again. The stars were lamenting angels, hovering in the heavens to acquiesce the fate of the men inside the cave.

  A roar came over the glen. It was a roar very unlike the human screams or the raging thunder. It wasn’t human at all. It was an abysmal boom filled with a lonely pain—a heartfelt cry.

  A whole man was tossed from the cave. He cracked his ribs against a rock and yelped before he began his tumble down the escarpment. His limbs flailed madly in their attempt to grapple the loose scree. The rusty burs of an ancient plate cut a gash across his back. The top of his skull fractured against a stone just before a brier scratched a dozen ribbons across his face. He hit the cool grass below with a thump. All the light in the cave extinguished. An unwieldy pall of silence blanketed the camp when the screams ceased.

  The bloody and bruised man below the cave opened his eyes woozily to descry the distant menhir that bifurcated the heavens, the flickering campfire at its foot. The sight of home was enough to make him smile even as he coughed up a puddle of blood. With his fingers digging like claws, he began his slow crawl away from the escarpment, dragging a broken leg through the grass.

  The campfire was warm enough to quell the chill of midnight’s breath. “The torches in the cave are out,” Bruice observed. “A quick slaughter, it seems.”

  A carrot cracked in a bandit’s mouth. He had a moldy brown patch over one eye and a scar across the other. As he chewed, he said, “You should’ve tried harder, Jack. You let them all go.”

  “Their drunken courage let them go,” Jack refuted without much care in his voice. “Gollgriff would’ve fought me if I had tried to dissuade him more.”

  Wineskins were pressed against mouths and lifted high. Carrots cracked. A bird was being eaten with greasy fingers. Seven
dirty faces lingered in the yellow glow. Over the crackles of the fire, another sound began to stir. It sounded like the rustling of grass and the groans of a crippled man.

  Bruice pointed to a face that appeared in the firelight. It was low to the ground, a sallow face with a big mouth—a bloody big mouth with one shiny tooth. “Holy shit, it’s Leroy!”

  Leroy used his aching elbows to pull himself closer to the warmth. Seven worried faces rose around him.

  Jack’s was raped by puzzlement. “Your leg’s twisted, man. What the fuck?”

  “The troll …” Leroy heaved the words from his mouth. They were strangled by the blood in his throat. “The troll. It, it …”

  “Damn you, Leroy!” Jack kicked a fat ember back into the fire. Wispy tendrils of light cavorted towards the stars. “Why did you have to come die in front of us? You could’ve died over there alone with the stars and the moon above you.”

  Blinking, guilt-stricken, lips twitching, Leroy opened his mouth to say something. His tooth pointed further out of his face than his nose did. “The troll, it—Crack!” Leroy’s head lashed back as his tooth flipped through the air. With the whites of his eyes glowing in fear, his fingers rose to scrounge into his mouth. He tried to find his tooth, but his fingers found something else. With rivulets of blood trickling down his wrist, he held up a smooth, bloody pebble.

  “Mother fuck, Leroy!” Bruice spat. “A sling got your last tooth!”

  Jack brandished his ax and peered off towards the distant woods. “Those knights are back! I knew they’d come.”

  A bandit stepped on Leroy’s broken leg in his haste to snatch a bow. Leroy yelped, then wriggled like a worm to find a weapon of his own. A pebble caught a bandit clean on the jaw. His mandible fractured as he fell on his arse, unconscious in the fire. He wasn’t unconscious for long.

  A roaring, flailing man rose from the fire as a pebble skittered betwixt Jack’s legs. One bandit was so drunk, he snatched a wineskin and dove behind a log to suck away like a whelp on a teat, telling himself everything would be alright if he passed out. Bruice loosed an arrow at the woods, not sure if he was aiming in the right direction. The oncoming pebbles were arcing through the air as they flew. One caught Bruice on the kneecap. He collapsed onto his other knee and cursed aloud. He loosed another arrow before he rolled to share the lee of a log with the drunken one.