“Disheartening but not surprising,” Blinky called back down. His boomed theatrically, merging with the last echoes of hers. “According to my calculations, it’s only half a mile to the maintenance station. That’s where I met her last.”

“Yeah, remind me why we’re doing this and not you?”

“The shepherd must tend his flock,” Blinky proclaimed, sincerity and sarcasm in his voice at once. It made her smile. “Besides, if there are any two trolls I trust to shoulder the burden of diplomacy, it’s you and Aaarrrggghh.”

Dredda curled her lip playfully to hide how deeply two words had touched her—and still did. Troll. Trust. “Only because our shoulders are bigger than yours.”

“Hurry, you two! We can’t risk staying in one place for long. Sunrise isn’t the only threat.”

Dredda, duly chastised, set her jaw and nodded. Having taken their heartstone, Gunmar would take their lives just as swiftly. The survival of the remnants of Trollmarket depended on them being swifter.

And wiser, Dredda thought, holding her mate’s six-eyed face in her mind as she and Aaarrrggghh passed beyond the ragged edge of moonlight into the abandoned gyre tunnel, following the narrow track. They walked the first few yards in silence, watching their own shadows cast by the moonlight behind them grow into ghouls, stretch into meaninglessness, then bleed into darkness. Dredda’s slitted pupils swelled to black rounds and dimmed the witchy yellow light that spilled into her cheeks. They walked at the bottom of a lake of their own echoing footsteps.

Even the Darklands had light: a slimy, queasy green that pulsed and flickered in bulbous veins in the stones like the beat of an old and faltering heart. But after they rounded a bend in the tunnel and lost the moon, the darkness clotted into a physical thing that slid along her skin and collected in cool, heavy drifts in her lungs, and she shivered.

Aaarrrggghh shuffled beside her. She felt the wind of his doglike shake and caught his scent: moss and wet sand and the musk of bull troll. Crisp green light rose into the tattoo-lines that curved over his hide and illuminated him in moving outline. “Thanks,” she whispered.

“Still better than gyre.”

“To each their own,” Dredda said.

It wasn’t that she was afraid of the dark; the dark and she just had an uneasy relationship. Blackness outside beckoned the baleful blackness inside her, which woke to its kindred. Her first conscious memory, pain and fear in the dark, had never released its hold on her. It squatted in the basement of her brain, a blind and stalking thing that grasped hungrily for the soft pale meat of her and spoke wordless terror on black, tarry breath from a rotten throat through rusty dagger teeth. It called to her in the dark, called sweet and low, for terror is a siren song of which you only need to hear one note.

Dredda snapped her head back and forth viciously. No. Not now.

The quality of the echo in front of them changed as they walked. Dredda cocked her head and pricked her ears, her heavy brows furrowed, to try to place it. So focused was she on whispering echoes (and not the terror) that the flat, basketball-sized stone in her path evaded her notice. Her foot collided with it. Thunderous pain rocketed up her leg and she fell forward with a squawk of surprise, barking her shin on the rock in the bargain. “Sonofabitch!” she alternated English and Trollish curses, gripping her right foot, which throbbed angrily. “What in Gunmar’s demon-fucked fanny was--”

Aaarrrggghh, possessed of keener darksight than she, pointed ahead of them. She squinted. There was something there, just beyond Aaarrrggghh’s glow. Something big; the echo had stopped dead.

She rose, favoring her still-throbbing foot, and reached into the pouch hung from her belt. By touch, she selected a crystal of four facets, each facet cut into a stubby four-pointed star, with the bottom point nearly double the length of the other three. It fit well in her palm. She held it up in her left hand, pinched between her thumb and pinky fingers. The middle three fingers she held together in a Girl-Scout salute. “Gil Aion,” she breathed, and light the color of joyous springtime sun leapt from the stone. It immediately began to warm in her hand. Dredda and Aaarrrggghh squinted against its sudden glare. Dredda’s eyes adjusted first. Her heart sank. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

A jagged tumble of boulders squatted in the tunnel, blocking it completely.

“GummGumms collapsed tunnel,” Aaarrrggghh said. “Didn’t want us to use it.”

“You’re probably right,” Dredda sighed. The fae-stone was getting uncomfortably warm, but she raised her arm above her head to cast the light as high as she could. It brushed the top of the tunnel, but disclosed no gap. None when she swept the light from side to side either. “Damn.” Bright, burning pain lanced her fingers. She hissed a breath in through bared teeth and dropped the stone. As soon as it lost contact with her skin, the light disappeared. It did not fade; it simply winked out, as if it had never been there in the first place.

Darkness hit Dredda’s eyes with dizzying force. It took them longer to adjust to the dark than to the light, but her ears needed no adjusting. The sound of tumbling stone on stone and Aaarrrggghh’s grunts told her that he’d begun shifting the rocks. Apprehension tightened Dredda’s stomach. She pawed blindly around for the fae-stone, found it, pocketed it. “Aaarrrggghh, we can’t clear this. The tunnel’s twenty feet high and just as wide. We don’t know how far back the collapse goes. We could be trying to dig out of another twenty feet of rocks.”

Aaarrrggghh grunted. “Have to try. Have to meet Cronch.”

“How do you know she’s even down there anymore? Blinky said it’s been at least fifty years. Maybe we should go back and try to dig another spot closer to the maintenance station.”

Aaarrrggghh’s green outline slowly emerged from the murky dark in Dredda’s eyes. He did not respond; the long lights on his arms only kept swinging. Rocks, some bigger than her, rolled past her.

Might as well. Maybe all the racket will draw her if she’s close.

Dredda shrugged and shuffled gingerly toward the leading edge of the rockfall, stepping around any stones large enough to stub her toe and hissing at them for good measure. She wondered briefly if she should keep a watch in case their noise attracted more than the deep troll, but GummGumm soldiers were hardly silent things and both their ears were keen. They shifted stones for a while, Dredda pausing to stretch and roll her aching shoulders. Once Aaarrrggghh had to snatch Dredda out of the path of an errant rockslide. Dredda patted his massive arm in the dark. “Thanks. Fewer stones for us to haul at least.”

Then began a low hum Dredda both heard and felt through the pads of her feet. Her heart lurched.

“Aaarrrggghh? Are… you doing that?”

“Nope.”

It wasn’t a Darklands sound. But it was deep and throaty and alive… and getting closer. Dredda willed her breath steady and rested a hand on the hilt of the wickedly curved shortsword sheathed at her side.

“What is it?”

The sound-vibration began to cycle in and out of intensity as if the earth around them snored in sleep. The sound rattled in the hollows of Dredda’s chest.

“Not it. Her,” Aaarrrggghh said.

“The deep tr--”

The wall of the tunnel to their left began to crumble. Dredda, teeth bared in an instinctive grimace of fear, skittered right like a spooked horse. This time it was her own legs that undid her; she tripped over her own foot and sat down hard.

The broad, heavy length of Aaarrrggghh’s arm clamped around her middle and hauled her up and away from the avalanche of stones, both from the imploding wall and the blockage in the tunnel. Dredda dangled in Aaarrrggghh’s grip and watched the deep troll emerge from the hole she’d made like a whale nosing apart the surface of the ocean.

She rumbled like a fleet of idling tractor trailers; her swirling tattoos glowed under her igneous-black skin like a lava flow, slowly shifting orange-yellow-red and brighter than Aaarrrggghh’s. Most of the glow came from deep in her great wide mouth, which opened and shut ponderously as she chewed the pieces of the tunnel wall through which she’d just burst. Tendrils of Dredda’s hair blew across her face, caught in the wind of the deep troll’s volcanic breath.

They really can puke lava, Dredda thought, her jaw slack and her pupils nearly swallowing her eyes despite the glow. The deep troll chewed like a pig, her entire mouth opening wide and shutting with a snap. Her bottom jaw was bigger and heavier than her top one; the teeth lining it like pikes on a battlefield were bigger, longer and sharper as well. Her bottom incisors were as long as Dredda’s forearm, sheared to a flat-headed edge that could slice a smaller troll in half. But Dredda felt no threat; the gravelly munch of rocks in her mouth and her slowly ebbing rumble were actually pleasing. A string of magma stretched from the deep troll’s red tongue as it traveled across her top teeth, broke, swung back and landed on her trough-shaped chin. Dredda watched it cool from yellow to sullen red. Dredda squirmed in Aaarrrggghh’s grip and he placed her down.

“Cronchuggha, meet Dredda,” Aaarrrggghh rumbled beside her and nudged her with his elbow.

Dredda jerked, heat rising in her cheeks. “Oh! Right!” She unslung the bag, repurposed from a small suitcase, from her shoulder. Stones clinked together inside. Blinky had told her that deep trolls weren’t hostile but neither were they at home so close to the surface, so they expected and were given compensation for their efforts and aid. They liked crystals best, according to Blinky, and Dredda guessed these were the deep-troll equivalent of a sweet, rare fruit with a short season and a small range. She approached Cronch with her head respectfully, instinctively bowed.

Deya’s grace, she’s bigger than Aaarrrggghh by half, she thought, her heart chattering in her chest, and laid the suitcase-bag at Cronch’s boulder-shaped paws.

With uncanny speed, Cronch closed the distance between them. Dredda, on reflex, snapped a hand down to her shortsword. But Cronch did not attack; she merely sucked in a mighty breath. The force of Cronch’s inhale flopped Dredda’s hair over her face. Her exhale blew it back and rocked Dredda back on her heels. She blinked back tears and suppressed a cough; it was like standing next to a towering bonfire hot enough to burn stone instead of wood. Cronch’s nose poked up from her face like a little plow, diamond-shaped and lava-orange. Four nostrils instead of two flared delicately. The sloping lines of her wedge-shaped head were not interrupted by eyes. Cronch rocked back on her haunches and scooped the suitcase toward her with a casual swipe of her hand.

“A Krubera and a changeling,” Cronch spoke in a rolling rock-tumble, “odd couple.”

Trollish was technically Dredda’s first language, but the Darklandian dialect that had first been in her mouth had been a pidgin of Gunmar’s native one and the High Trollish Dictatious had spoken around them. So it was of no use with Cronch; she spoke an archaic form of Trollish that, coupled with the deep-rolling quality of her voice, made it difficult for Dredda to parse. But she was no stranger to language barriers.

“With an odder request,” Dredda spoke slowly in the Trollmarket dialect. “We came to humbly ask if you’d help us find a safe place to resettle….and to help us reopen the tunnels to Siberia.”

Cronch paused with her hand dipped into the open suitcase full of surface stones and crystals. How she could blink with no eyes Dredda didn’t know, but she did anyway.

Dredda raised her hands, then dropped them, realizing the uselessness of the gesture. “I know how it sounds, but we understand what we’re asking. Gunmar has our heartstone now, as you know. He’s destroyed the Killahead Bridge and the Janus Order has scattered the pieces again. We won’t have enough time to gather them and rebuild the bridge before he starts his invasion, and there’s no way we’ll get him anywhere near the bridge even if we do rebuild it. We have to help the Trollhunter find a way to beat him. To kill him.”

Cronch snorted. “And you think going to his homeland will uncover some great secret no one else has ever found in all these centuries.”

“Among other things,” Dredda said.

Cronch resumed shuffling through the suitcase, her head cocked a little to catch the crystals’ soft clink and clatter. She pinched one delicately between her pawlike thumb and forefinger and popped it into her mouth. Crrnch, like a child chewing her morning cereal. Her orange tattoos rippled with a single pulse of pale purple light. “Mmm,” she rumbled, and fished in the suitcase for another morsel.

Dredda kept her mouth shut but stood her ground despite the apprehension rising in her stomach. No stranger was she either to difficult negotiations; had she not (with help) convinced Vendel to allow her presence in Trollmarket, talked Nomura into talking Stricklander into coming back, and converted four Janus Order agents to the Minerva Order?

When negotiating at a disadvantage, Dredda had learned to create opportunities for the other party to become invested. But Cronch seemed much more interested in snacking than talking.

Aaarrrggghh knuckled up beside Dredda. “Trollhunter has Triumbric Stones. But Blinky found fourth stone,” he said in a dialect of Trollish that wasn’t quite Cronch’s but wasn’t quite Trollmarket’s. Dredda turned and cocked an eyebrow at his green-glowing outline. Krubera? It made sense that they’d have their own dialect of Trollish, but she’d never heard him speak it before.

Cronch paused again. The flowing light in her tattoos had dimmed a little. “I knew I smelled the little curious one on you.”

Dredda cleared her throat. “This fourth stone is rumored to be the secret to Gunmar’s tribe’s survival. They were hundreds of miles from a heartstone and the permafrost kept collapsing their tunnels, so they had to find a way to--”

“I know what it is,” Cronch snapped, her voice crackling like a split boulder. “But why do you think it took you this long to discover evidence of it? When Gunmar razed his own tribe he destroyed every mention of it and everyone who ever had mentioned it.”

Hope lifted the weight in Dredda’s gut and the corners of her mouth despite Cronch’s words. She held up a finger. “Ah, you said is. Present tense. That means it still exists.”

“The Ironstar is beyond your reach, little one.”

Dredda felt no threat from Cronch’s tectonic growl. “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” she singsonged. Aaarrrggghh rumbled an uncertain noise beside her.

“You’re especially annoying for a changeling,” Cronch said.

Dredda grinned in the dark. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Cronch sighed and Dredda squinted her eyes against the hot wind. “I’ll help you clear this,” she grumbled, the swirling tattoos on her head swinging toward the tumble of stones that blocked their way, “and for the respect I bear your Elder Vendel, I’ll show you to the heartstone south of here. But I’ll be thrown into broad daylight before I let a changeling, an exiled Krubera, and a tiny six-eyed conspiracy theorist pull me into retunneling all the way to Siberia. Which is what it would take.”

The humor in Dredda dimmed. She glanced at Aaarrrggghh and caught the two green coins of his eyes. He rumbled sadly.

“Vendel was killed,” Dredda said softly. “Blinky is Elder now.”

Cronch chuffed in surprise. “You’re joking.”

“Not about that,” Dredda said.

“Trollhunter said so,” Aaarrrggghh said.

“The human Trollhunter made the six-eyed one Elder of Trollmarket.”

Dredda nodded, then remembered who she was talking to. “Former Trollmarket, but yes. He’s done right by us so far. Both of them have, despite their quirks. Because of them.”

“Thank you, changeling. I needed a reminder for why I don’t deal with you surface weirdos much.” Cronch popped another crystal into her mouth and crunched it. A ripple of deep red light flowed through her tattoos this time.

Dredda couldn’t stop one corner of her mouth from turning up. “We appreciate your offer. But that won’t stop Gunmar from taking over, and right now, that should be everyone’s top priority.”

A grinding mountain sound came from Cronch’s chest, and Dredda only knew it for a chuckle after she spoke. “That’s funny, I thought I heard the sound of someone trying to tell me what to do.”

Then Dredda knew something about Cronch, because it was true of her too: the more Dredda attempted to persuade her, the less she would be persuaded. Blinky had warned them that Cronch would not go quietly; any way in and out of Gunmar’s homeland had been doubtless destroyed by his enemies or by Gunmar himself, and would require at least, like she’d said, brand new tunnels. The way would not be smooth, straight, free, or easy. There were secrets there under that dark cold land; secrets that Gunmar desperately needed to protect, for his life or for his doom.

According to Blinky, Dredda reminded herself. According to a single chapter in a single book, written by a scholar nobody’d heard of, acquired by Dictatious days before he’d disappeared. This last was all the proof Blinky’d needed to shoo her and Aaarrrggghh down the rabbit hole—or the Cronch-hole, as it were.

It was enough for Blinky, but Dredda doubted it would be enough for Cronch. She set her jaw. Change tack. “I wouldn’t presume,” Dredda said, already picking up traces of Cronch’s guttural accent. “So we’ll take you up on your offer to clear the gyre tunnels from here as far northwest as you’re willing to go. We know where the southern heartstone is and we’ve already sent word to them that Gunmar is on his way there, because he is. He wants more power and more trolls for his army, and that’s the next closest heartstone.”

She let Cronch consider this.

“If you’ll take us northwest, we’ll settle what’s left of Trollmarket wherever you want to drop us. But some of us are going on to Siberia. It isn’t our first choice either, but we don’t have a lot of choices left now.”

“My territory ends six cubits past the ocean drop-off,” Cronch said carefully, and Dredda got the impression that Cronch had decided that the odd couple in front of her had suddenly gone off the deep end. The deepest end. “How do you expect to tunnel all the way to Siberia from there with your puny little surface hands? Through other deep trolls’ territories who may not be as happy to see you as I am? That would take you just as long as recovering Killahead, with a greater chance of death along the way.”

Tunnelling without a deep troll would be slow but possible… until they hit permafrost. Then they’d lose what little time they had either trying to dig through it or detour under it, and the further north they went, the deeper the ice would plunge. Gunmar had taken most of their strong bulls for his army. They had too few left to split between protecting the remnants of Trollmarket and tunneling to Siberia. Cronch knew this, and Dredda knew she knew. But…

“We’ll make do. I’m sure there’s another deep troll out there who’d be willing to help us.”

Cronch opened her backhoe-shaped mouth and blasted them with a grating, forge-hot laugh. Looking down her throat was like standing on the lip of a boiling volcano. “Little one, if I’m not willing to do it for this much loot--” she dug her hand into the suitcase and raised it, letting the handful of crystals and stones fall through her fingers, “—no other deep troll will. They already think I’m going senile for talking to you whelps as often as I do.”

“Whelps”? How old is she? Dredda stood straight and injected as much resolve into her voice as she could muster. “Siberia is our road.”

“Siberia is our road,” Aaarrrggghh rumbled beside her, and it lifted Dredda’s heart.

“You truly are dumb enough to do it,” Cronch said.

Dredda smiled bitterly. “We are.”

Aaarrrggghh grunted affirmatively.

“This was the little conspiracy theorist’s idea, wasn’t it?” Cronch popped another stone into her mouth.

“It was,” Dredda said, the smile softening. Deya bless him.

Aaarrrggghh grunted affirmatively.

Cronch sighed again, nostrils flaring. “He’s going to get you all killed,” she rumbled matter-of-factly, and Dredda’s heart dropped into her guts. “But I’m apparently the only one around here who can see that. For this,” the stones in the suitcase clinked, “I’ll take you to the north end of my territory and hollow you out a dwelling by the coast. Find me more tasties and I’ll see how far they get you.”

Dredda’s heart lifted, but only halfway. “Uh, we’re a little short on crystals, since we’re, uh, down one Trollmarket. It’ll take some time.”

“You’re the one with deadlines, little one, not me.”

A bright red flare of anger burst in Dredda’s mind. She opened her mouth and snapped it shut before the words could slingshot out. The click of her teeth echoed in the darkness.

 Everyone was under a deadline as far as Dredda was concerned. If they knew about deep trolls, Gunmar surely did. Dredda was a little surprised Gunmar hadn’t tried to find Cronch yet

or maybe he has maybe he’s already got to her and she’s planning to tunnel you into the middle of nowhere under the ocean and then kill you all

but even if he had and she’d rebuffed him and survived, there were others, and the thought of an army of tectonically strong magma-belching deep trolls bearing Gunmar’s mark was a blackly terrifying thought.

So too was the chance that Gunmar had already worked his will on Cronch, but Dredda’s instincts told her otherwise. Gunmar’s will was great and terrible, but she could extrapolate from what she’d learned of Cronch so far. At the end of Cronch’s patience, Dredda thought, lay a sun-fury of horrors that could boil Gunmar to bubbling pulp.

Suddenly, an idea leapt to the front of her skull. Sun.

She dug in her pocket and found the fae-stone. “I spent some time with a tribe of Fair Folk a while ago, and their queen gave me this,” she said, holding the crystal out for Cronch to sniff. She did, delicately, like a dog scenting the ground for game. “When the incantation is spoken, it gives off light like the sun, but it doesn’t turn trolls to stone. Wouldn’t do you either, I don’t think, though I know you’re more sensitive to sunlight than even Aaarrrggghh is. The magic in it is stronger than troll magic. It could give you a boost--”

Cronch snorted. “Keep it. I know of the Fae, but I won’t touch that stone. Its light won’t burn our skin, but it’s slow poison if eaten.”

Dredda’s cheeks turned hot. You moron. “Oh. I’m…I’m sorry…”

“But you can feed it to the idiot who claimed the territory west of mine. After an age and a half he still hasn’t learned to keep himself to himself.”  

It was difficult to see; Cronch’s tattoos had faded to a sluggish red and Aaarrrggghh’s were dimming as well, but Dredda swore she heard a smile in Cronch’s rock-roary voice. Cautious hope kindled in Dredda’s chest. She closed her fingers around the fae-stone and pocketed it again.

“We find more crystals,” Aaarrrggghh said. “Minerva Order can help?”

Dredda nodded to the two green lights suspended a few inches above her head. “As much as they can. The Janus Order is running overtime preparing for Gunmar, so we’re in double overtime trying to stop them. But it’ll be a while until he gets to the Lofoten heartstone, and I’ve already got an agent there. I could make a call and have her fly a few pieces of it down here.”

“Minerva Order?” Cronch asked.

“Oh, it’s an organization I founded to help persecuted and abused women of all species,” Dredda chattered, relishing the chance to brag on her magnum opus, “and to counter Gunmar and the Janus Order. It’s not just changelings, but trolls and humans too. We all work together to put women in power and help each other make a safer worl--”

A rough, warm weight dropped onto Dredda’s face, covering it completely, and Cronch’s hand closed over her head like a four-pronged vice made of freshly-cooled magma. Dredda froze, panic skittering up her spine on cold lizard feet.

“Please shut up,” Cronch rumbled, then lifted her hand off Dredda’s head. “Sorry I asked.”

Dredda remained as she was for a moment, her heart rabbit-fast in her chest and the high white whine of terror in her brain. Cronch’s grip hadn’t hurt, but the sheer weight of each finger hanging off her heavy hand had instilled in Dredda a knowledge that had skipped right over consciousness and landed smack into the lake of instinct below thought: Cronch belonged to a breed of titans whose strength was the seed of civilizations and whose rage could buckle the earth. There was no metaphor to soften the staggering reality that Cronch, if piqued, could actually move mountains.

Remind me to launch myself into space if the deep trolls ever team up with Gunmar, Dredda thought to herself as her heart settled down.

“You go back to Blinky,” Aaarrrggghh said. His paw landed gently on Dredda’s back, and after the experience of Cronch’s touch, the weight was less comforting than he had intended. “I stay and help Cronch clear tunnel. We meet you at Oceanside gyre station.”

Cronch’s dim redswirl outline moved; she stood. Dredda heard the suitcase click closed. “No offense, Aarghaumont, but I don’t need your help. Hold this, little one.”

The suitcase whacked her in the belly and knocked the air from her. Hooh, she said, and doubled over, clasping the suitcase around its middle like a baby.

Cronch began to eat.

Feeling very small, Dredda watched her tattoos slowly glow brighter, listened to the gravel-crunch of rocks in her maw, and felt the rumble pass her when Cronch rolled away a stone too big to fit in her mouth.

Suddenly, Dredda had to see. She let the suitcase slip out of her arms. It landed on her already ill-used foot, but the pain didn’t matter.  She reached for the fae-stone in her pocket. “Cronch,” she shouted over the noise, “may I light the fae-stone?”

The deep troll did not respond. Dredda followed her tattoos to the ragged hole she’d made in the tunnel wall. When Cronch opened her mouth, the light that poured from it illuminated the hole, the wall around it, and Cronch’s front. She convulsed, and a thick fount of bright yellow lava burst from her mouth into the hole. Even though Dredda stood at a safe distance to Cronch’s left and behind her, a wall of heat blasted her. If she’d had eyebrows in her troll form, they’d have been singed. Undeterred, Dredda even took a step toward Cronch, her neck stretched out like a curious child peeking at her parents.

Dredda waited until Cronch’s mouth had shut. She could wait no longer. “Cronch, may I light the fae-stone? Just for a little while?”

“If you must,” Cronch rumbled, and dipped her head down to the pile of rocks again.

Dredda’s left arm shot up in the air. “Gil Aion,” she intoned, and the crystal hurled its light outward. Dredda yelped and nearly dropped it; the light drilled twin lances of pain deep into her skull. She screwed her eyes shut and threw an arm across them. Gingerly, she blinked her eyes open and lowered her arm.

Cronch, unimpeded by the troublesome presence of eyes, rooted at the base of the rockslide, which had already receded a few feet. Rocks from the top tumbled down in solid rivulets, bouncing off Cronch’s broad, sloped back. The fae-stone hurt Dredda’s hand and the light hurt her eyes but Dredda had no intention of solving either problem, for she was transfixed.

Across her humped back and shoulders and down her stubby tail, Cronch’s skin shone dully like sleek black volcanic glass between the glowing curled tattoos. Tiny flecks of mica-like brilliance in her skin reflected the fairy-light and turned Cronch’s back into a miniature star-strewn sky. At her joints and neck and face, her flesh roughened into the greasy, swirled black of an old lava flow, iridescence lining the swirls on her skin with changeling rainbow light.

She’s beautiful, Dredda thought, awe hushing even her thoughts.

Searing pain lanced down her arm, but even so, she lowered the fae-stone reluctantly. “Ah, fuck,” she hissed in English when she could bear it no longer, and squatted to place the stone at her feet. The light vanished.

Total darkness roared into her eyes. Cronch released another fountain of magma into the hole in the wall, and there was light. Dredda stared through the heat shimmer boiling around her to try to find the mica-flecked starlight and swirling rainbows on Cronch’s skin, but to no avail.

You’d only see that side of her in the light, Dredda thought, and maybe we’re the only ones in all her long life who’ve ever seen it. Who ever will see it.

A chill bounded through Dredda.

Cronch turned back to the blockage and reared up on her hind legs, and Dredda was struck again by her sheer bulk. Taller than Aaarrrggghh by at least two feet, she could reach two thirds of the way up the rockslide. She began to dig, flinging boulders as big as Aaarrrggghh aside with no more effort than Dredda would have batted aside a gnome. Eating as she went, pausing to empty herself into the hole by which she’d entered, she burrowed through the rockslide at blistering speed.

Something near the rockslide made a dull metallic chink-CLUNK. “Oh fuck,” Cronch grumbled in Trollish.

“What is it?” Dredda asked, stuffing the now-cool fae-stone back into her pocket.

“Get down,” Cronch said, and her orange-swirl outline loped backwards with eerie speed.

“What?”

Cronch launched into full-speed gallop toward the rockslide, which now looked like a giant had taken a great scooping bite out of it. Right before Cronch slammed into the tumble of rocks, Aaarrrggghh threw himself over Dredda and the suitcase.

BONNNNGGGG! The sound of Cronch’s head colliding with metal sent reverberations up through the ground and rattled Dredda’s teeth in their sockets. Something huge, dislodged by Cronch’s hit, rolled ponderously down the tunnel away from them. Rocks fell in showers around them. Cronch’s thundering footsteps followed the thing down the tunnel. Dredda squirmed beneath Aaarrrggghh, but he would not let her up.

“What’s--”

The tunnel burst into flame behind a punishing shockwave of scorching copper-and-ozone tasting wind. The flesh on Dredda’s arm, the only part of her exposed, tightened painfully. Tongues of blue fire shot past them, and Dredda screamed Cronch’s name. The blast subsided. Dredda scrabbled out from under Aaarrrggghh, yanking out the fae-stone before she’d gained her feet.

“Gil Aion,” she barked, and light poured into the tunnel. It fell on Cronch, plodding back toward them, her great head swinging from side to side. Soot streaks darkened the tattoos on her face and chest and arms and snuffed out the stars on her back. Beyond that, Dredda could not see any wounds on her. She trundled past Dredda like a drowsy rhinoceros. “Cronch, what was that?” Dredda squeaked.

“Bomb,” Cronch said simply, then tipped over on her side. Dredda watched her roll in a puddle of rockdust and pebbles like a dog, cleaning off the soot of the explosion, her mind whirling. The fae-stone grew hot and she dropped it into her pocket.

“Gunmar,” Aaarrrggghh growled behind her.

Then, suddenly, she was no longer confused. Anger lanced her heart. “He knew we’d try to clear the tunnel,” Dredda said softly, letting her eyes adjust to the new dark. “He knew we’d try, and he set a bomb. Of course he would. Gods, I’m an idiot.”

“At least it wasn’t laced with Creeper’s Sun this time,” Cronch rumbled.

Dredda snapped her head up. “Wait, ‘this time’?”

“You’re either fresh out of whatever unfortunate creature births changelings or you’ve been living under deeper rocks than me.” Cronch rose and shook like the world’s biggest and baldest dog.

“I know Gunmar’s tried to invade before, but… I didn’t know he set bombs with Creeper’s Sun in them!”

“That’s why I moved here in the first place. He was picking us off one by one, and I got tired of dealing with it.”

Dredda stood in the middle of the tunnel, gaping at Cronch’s red-lined form like a landed fish. Adrenaline from the explosion slowly leaked out of her, and logic leaked back in. “You… you just saved our lives,” she breathed. “You…that… could have been… if that’d been…you could have died.”

Cronch snorted. “You think I’d have sacrificed myself for a couple of cracked pebbles like you? Hardly. I could tell this wasn’t a Creeper’s Sun bomb. Didn’t smell like it.”

“Oh,” Dredda said.

“The good news is that this blockage is clear. The bad news is that the bomb triggered another collapse down the way. I’ll clear that one and scout the rest of this tunnel for more surprises. You can follow behind me at a safe distance. It won’t take me long to get to the Oceanside gyre station. We’ll take my tunnels north, then west from there.”

“GummGumms could be patrolling gyre tunnels,” Aaarrrggghh said. “Not safe for us.”

“I thought you said they were headed to the Temuco heartstone,” Cronch rumbled.

“They are,” Aaarrrggghh said. “But I know Gunmar. He wants everything.”

Dredda latched onto the one thought that sunk to the floor of her mind in a flurry of them. “Aaarrrggghh’s right. He’ll have left a battalion in Trollmarket in case we tried anything like this. The bomb is proof of that. We’re safer topside, even with the stalkling and Janus Order agents. Especially now that the bomb’s been triggered. They probably heard it.”

As if on cue, the first ghostly echo of pounding feet reached them from behind Cronch.

Cronch’s tectonic growl juddered the ground beneath them. “Have I mentioned you’re the most annoying changeling I’ve ever met?”

“You have,” Dredda smiled, despite the urgent jolts of adrenaline turning her muscles to tripwires. “And I still take it as a compliment.”

“Go,” Cronch said. “I’ll deal with these ironskinned fools. Get to the Oceanside gyre station as fast as you can. I’ll meet you there after I paint what’s left of Trollmarket with GummGumm dust.”

“I don’t know if we’ll be able to find enough crystals to pay you for that,” Dredda said.

“No, little one,” Cronch snarled, her voice volcanic and dangerous, and for the second time, Dredda was afraid. “This is personal now.” She swept her great head sideways along the ground and scooped up a mouthful of rocks.

Aaarrrggghh grunted beside her. “Time to go.”

Dredda backed slowly, fight and flight at war in her. The cacophonous iron-armor clatter of the charging GummGumms filled the tunnel before their evil green glow lit the walls. Cronch gulped mouthful after mouthful of rocks, her tattoos glowing bright yellow-white. She slammed her heavy fists into the ground, and the impacts shook drifts of dust down from the tunnel ceiling. She opened her mouth and roared, thick ropes of lava-spittle flying from her teeth. The sound rattled Dredda’s brain in her skull and she clapped her hands over her ears, but it was useless.

Roaring their own battle cries, the GummGumms rounded the last bend in the tunnel in a clanging green-and-iron wall, undeterred by Cronch’s earthshattering voice. Cronch pounded the earth again and let loose a flood of magma from her guts. The GummGumms’ battle roars immediately turned to shrieks of agony as whitehot molten rock sizzled on their armor and cooked them alive.

Dredda’s heart surged with victory and battlelust. Unaware of the bloodthirsty grin splitting her face, she yanked her shortsword out of her belt and sprinted toward the melee. The bulky form of a GummGumm sailed over Cronch’s head, backlit by the yellow lava glow, greatsword held aloft at the top of a brutal downward chop, meant to cleave Cronch in half.

A creature of terror lived down in the dark of Dredda’s mind, but so too did a creature of rage. This one vaulted up from the depths of her, its fury electrifying Dredda’s muscles and its banshee shriek ripping from her throat. She, trained as diligently as the armored hulk bearing down on her, darted up the hill of Cronch’s humped back and launched herself at the soldier like a pouncing lioness.

The soldier’s momentum more than Dredda’s drove her shortsword down and into the gap between helm and breastplate. The impact sent a buzzing numbness up Dredda’s arms. A tortured, bubbling squeal issued from behind the soldier’s pointed helmet. Dredda screeched wild wordless triumph as she watched the green glow fade from the soldier’s eyes. They finished the soldier’s flying parabola together and landed in a heap of armor, limbs, and shattered stones.

Something grabbed Dredda by the wide band of leather around her chest and yanked her roughly upward. “Time to go,” Aaarrrggghh’s rumble sounded like rocks wrapped in cotton at the edge of her fury. A flash of regret flitted through her like a pair of passing headlights; the battle hymn in her blood wasn’t over. She twisted and reached like a child back toward Cronch, but one glance told her the deep troll could do perfectly well without her.

GummGumms fell before Cronch’s magma fount and the great swipes of her paws like hay before a thresher, bottlenecked as they were by the tunnel. The bottom half of one flew past their heads and shattered on the tunnel wall behind them.

“Go now,” Aaarrrggghh grunted, and began to gallop back the way they’d come, carrying Dredda under one arm.

Dredda squirmed out of Aaarrrggghh’s grip and kept pace beside and a little behind him. Away from Cronch’s light, the tunnel again fell into total darkness, so she depended on Aaarrrggghh’s green-limned form to guide her. They ran at the bottom of a lake of their own echoing footsteps and heaving breaths.

Red battlelust spun just below her belly and lightened to a euphoric little fae-sun that made her hop and twist in midair like a leaping buck. She had to bite down on the urge to let fly a jubilant whoop, lest any GummGumms left were to follow them. But she doubted Cronch would leave any.

The thought brought a gleefully vicious grin to her face that she didn’t know Aaarrrggghh saw. Later Aaarrrggghh would remember how he himself had worn that same grin, and shudder.

They rounded a curve in the tunnel, and an alien-ship cylinder of moonlight poured into the tunnel ahead of them. Dredda’s heart flipped in her chest; she put on a burst of speed and pulled ahead of Aaarrrggghh.

“Blinky,” she crowed at the top of the hole, skidding to a stop in the center of the circle of moonlight, out of breath and grinning. “Blinks, we found her!”

Troll faces popped up over the rim of the hole, murmuring.

“Well done!” Blinky appeared beside the moon.

Aaarrrggghh cantered up beside Dredda and held out one cupped palm, low to the ground. Dredda stepped into it and Aaarrrggghh tossed her upward. She landed beside Blinky a bare second before the suitcase did; Aaarrrggghh must have picked it up and taken it with them to save it from getting destroyed in the battle. Dredda looped it around her shoulder. “We need to refill this,” she panted, her tongue lolling like a dog.  Aaarrrggghh hoisted himself out of the hole behind her.

“What did she say?” Blinky asked them.

The earth shuddered beneath them once, twice. A small section of the rim gave way and the troll standing on it stumbled backward, arms pinwheeling.

“Cronch says yes,” Aaarrrggghh said.

Dredda beamed at Blinky, her heart fast and light. “We should probably run. There could be GummGumms behind us.”

“Why this is cause for smiling I’m sure I don’t know, but… onward, everyone!”

Later

High tide lapped at Dredda’s ankles as she, at Blinky’s side, sloshed into the gyre station entrance. The suitcase, full again, and another smaller bag filled with crystals and heartstone fragments from Norway nudged her hips comfortably as she walked. Aaarrrggghh knuckled along at Blinky’s left hand, illuminating the wild ocean-smelling dark that enveloped them with dim but lovely green.

Deep in the tunnel, past the ocean’s reach and past empty gyre stop, they heard and felt Cronch’s oddly comforting rumble before they saw her swirling orange-yellow glow. She sat with her short back legs stuck out comically on either side of her column-thick front ones and Dredda fought so hard to contain a laugh that she tasted blood from her lip.

“Well met, Cronchuggha,” Blinky proclaimed in High Trollish.

She cocked her great head. “As long as you have my tasties we are.” Her voice grinding like two continental plates butting heads filled Dredda with simple happiness. She was glad to see her.

“In fact, we do,” Blinky said, and nodded to Dredda.

She stepped forward, unlooping both bags from her shoulders, and deposited them at Cronch’s feet much the same as she had done the first time, warm admiration replacing the awed fear. She kept her head respectfully, instinctively bowed. “Free refill,” she said, “and Lofoten heartstone, as promised.”

Cronch closed a thick fist around the two bags and dragged them toward her. “Changeling. You left something in the tunnel.”

Dredda, backing, paused.

Cronch opened her mouth, her thick pebbled tongue unrolling like a carpet. At the end of it, wavering in the orange heat shimmer pouring from her mouth, was Dredda’s shortsword. The blade glowed dull red.

“Ah, uh… thank you. I’d rather not, um… touch it right now.”

Cronch let it fall off her tongue. It clattered on the stone. “Thanks for the backup,” she rumbled. “But next time you use me as a launching pad I’ll bite your head off.”

“Sorry about that,” Dredda said, and laughed.