Bearers of the Black Staff - Terry Brooks [86]
Prue was awake, as well, hunched close against him. “There are so many of them. What are they doing here?”
Her words were barely audible above the rumble of their cart and the jumbled sounds of the camp. He shook his head in reply, saying nothing. Whatever the Trolls were about, it wasn’t good. This was an army on the move, not a permanent camp. The Trolls were thousands strong, and there were arms and armor stacked everywhere. He saw beasts of burden that looked like nothing he had ever seen before, some of them vaguely resembling horses, many with horns and spikes jutting out of their heads and necks. Some were so burly that they had the look of battering rams, all covered in leather and metal clips. Some had the look of Kodens.
He saw a handful of the Skaith Hounds, as well, kenneled off to one side in a wire pen that rose fully eight feet high and was topped with spikes. The beasts pressed up against the wire, tongues lolling out from between rows of teeth. They whined and growled in steady cadence, and the two that had taken the boy and girl raced off to greet them, their master sauntering off in their wake, waving to someone in the distance.
“We can’t stay here,” Prue whispered. “We are in a lot of danger if we do. You know that, don’t you?”
He did, of course, but he also knew he didn’t have a way of changing the situation. “Just wait,” he whispered back, not knowing what it was he expected her to wait for, short of a miracle.
The wagon with its prisoners rolled into the camp and through the tents, and waves of Trolls crowded around and peered in at them, discovering finally that there was something to see. Dozens more came quickly in response to the shouts of those closest. Panterra and Prue pressed together at the center of the wagon bed, trying to elude hands that poked and prodded at them, to evade the odors of sweat and heated breath washing over them. The Trolls laughed and joked with one another, and one or two brought out knives and gestured at the boy and the girl, taunting them.
Panterra kicked out, trying to drive them back. A powerful hand grabbed his leg and pulled him toward the side of the wagon, away from Prue. “Pan!” he heard her scream as his head banged down on the wooden slats and his head spun anew.
But a second later the Trolls fell back, the men of the escort forcing them away, and Arik Sarn was lowering the gate and reaching in to loosen their leg bonds and help them down. They could barely stand at first, their legs cramped from the binding. The Troll held them up, stronger than he looked, as the blood returned and twinges of pain shot through their lower limbs. Flanked by the men from the escort, the Troll guided them through the crowds and into a large tent at the center of the camp, into fresh darkness and a muffling of the sounds without.
“Stay here,” he told them, steering them over to a pole at the center of a section of the tent that was curtained off from the rest.
As if to make clear that there wasn’t a choice, he sat them down with their backs to the pole and chained them with ankle manacles that kept them in place.
Then he turned without a word and disappeared back the way they had come.
THEY REMAINED WHERE THEY WERE for several hours, and at one point both fell asleep again. The sounds outside their place of confinement provided a steady thrum of noise, and no one came or went from their tent. Pan gave up on trying to free himself from his bonds, the ankle chain a new twist on their imprisonment that he had no way of overcoming. Their best hope now, he decided, was in awaiting the return of Arik Sarn.
When the