The Bowl of Souls: Book 05 - Mother of the Moonrat Read online

  The Bowl of Souls: Book Five

  Mother of the Moonrat

  By: Trevor H. Cooley

  Trevor H. Cooley

  Copyright 2013 by Trevor H. Cooley

  Cover art © Renu Sharma | www.thedarkrayne.com

  Map by: Michael Patty on www.trevorhcooley.com

  The Bowl of Souls Series

  The Moonrat Saga:

  Book One: Eye of the Moonrat

  Book 1.5: Hilt’s Pride

  Book Two: Messenger of the Dark Prophet

  Book Three: Hunt of the Bandham

  Book Four: The War of Stardeon

  Book Five: Mother of the Moonrat

  Upcoming:

  Tarah Woodblade

  Dedication

  As with my first book, I dedicate this book to my wife. Without her I never could have finished the series. She is not only my first true love, she’s first in everything. She is the first one to hear any idea; the first one to read any chapter. She’s my editor and my collaborator. She is the first to tell me if an idea is great or if I should throw it away. She is also my first true reader and biggest fan.

  This is for you, Jeannette. I love you.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to my father, who is the second one to read any of my chapters and my brother, Keith, who read along right with him at the end.

  Also thanks to Michael Patty, John Williams, Ben and Katrina Pickett, Matt Yeates, Jeff Bailey and all the others who helped with development of the Bowl of Souls Game.

  And to Corky Coker, thank you for fourteen years of helping me support my family.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  “One . . . Two . . . Now!” Sir Hilt said. Together the four of them pulled the lodestone amulets from their places in the back wall of the cave.

  Deathclaw watched as the portal vanished. His link with Justan faded until the only thing that remained was a knowledge of the human’s general direction. For some reason that Deathclaw couldn’t fathom, that loss of communication with Justan’s mind made him uneasy.

  “They’re coming again,” Beth said, her brow furrowed in concentration. “The witch is angry and she’s hurting. What we did today wounded her greatly. I think it would be best if we got away before she got her strength back.”

  Deathclaw could hear the screech of trolls and roars of large beasts coming from beyond the cave mouth. The effects of Darlan’s devastating spell were fading away. The molten hill outside had solidified and the ground around the mouth of the cave was nearly cool enough for the creatures to walk on.

  “This way,” Hilt said and led them to the far left side of the cave where the rear wall bulged outward. “Master Latva told me it was over here.”

  The rear exit to the cave was cleverly hidden. It wasn’t visible until they reached the corner and saw the downward sloping tunnel.

  Charz frowned. “Don’t know if I can fit down there.”

  “I scouted it earlier,” Deathclaw said in his best attempt at an assuring tone. He had found the rear passage and explored it earlier that day, making sure no enemies were hiding within. There would be room. “The giant will . . .” Fit through. He wanted to say ‘fit’, but he couldn’t. Instead he said, “Go through. . . Just.”

  The giant looked at him askance. “I’ll go last anyway, just in case.”

  “Good idea,” Beth said with a smirk. “If you get stuck, they might just think you’re a rock and the rest of us can get away.”

  “Just go,” the giant grumbled.

  Hilt went in first with Beth close behind. Deathclaw followed, feeling that heavy feeling that came over him any time he was in an enclosed space. He hadn’t liked it the first time he had gone through either. It was dark and echoed down there. His eyes had adjusted, but raptoids were not meant to be in caves.

  Charz squeezed after him, slowly edging his way down the passage, having to contort awkwardly several times to make it through the natural twists of the rocky walls. The crystal pendant that hung from the iron chain around his neck sparked as it scraped against the rock.

  The passage opened up into a rocky cavern below. When Hilt reached the end of the passage, he took a white orb out from his pack. He tapped it a few times. The orb flickered, then glowed with just enough light to illuminate their surroundings.

  The cavern was wide enough to fit perhaps thirty humans inside and the ceiling was perhaps as high as the giant’s head. Deathclaw estimated the there were only perhaps ten feet or so of rock between them and the grassy ground above.

  “Stupid . . . rock!” Charz grunted as he pushed himself through the final squeeze and stumbled out of the opening. “I could hear ‘em in the cave above. They’ll find the way down to us soon.”

  “Yes, one of the witch’s moonrats is in the cave above,” Beth agreed. “It has other creatures with it, but I can’t quite make out their nature.”

  Hilt was running his hands along the uneven surface of the chamber wall. “There is supposed to be a lever here somewhere that closes off the passageway.”

  Deathclaw cocked his head and scanned the area himself. He found it fascinating all the ways humans found to lock the danger out. Hamford had tried to evade him many times that way. It hadn’t worked, but Deathclaw had gained a respect for human ingenuity.

  “I don’t see anything,” Charz said.

  “Shh!” Deathclaw said in a forced whisper. “They will hear you.”

  “No,” Beth said. “I am muting their sense of hearing.”

  “Will the witch not notice?” Deathclaw asked. The moonrats were her eyes and ears after all.

  “She’s more than a bit distracted right now, and I’m trying to do this subtly,” she said, her teeth clenched in concentration. Sweat beaded on her forehead. “It’s not easy to do.”

  “Wait-wait,” Hilt said. The warrior shoved his hand into a dark crevice in the wall. “I think I found it!”

  “They’re coming.” Beth said and a screech echoed down the passage. She sighed and shook her head. “Still haven’t figured out how to deaden their sense of smell.”

  “There!” Hilt jerked his arm back. A rumbling sound of rock scraping against rock came from somewhere within the wall, followed by a heavy thud. A cloud of dust came out of the passage. “Did we stop them?”
<
br />   “No,” Deathclaw hissed. Something was still coming. He could hear it. It must have started down the passage before Hilt had found the lever. Its approach was slow. “It is . . .” Big. He wanted to say ‘big’. “Large.”

  “It’s a troll,” Charz said. He slammed his fist into his palm. “I can smell it.”

  Hilt drew his swords and Deathclaw caught the odor the giant spoke of. It was pungent and . . . hungry. But it was jumbled, almost as if there were-.

  “Two!” Beth said and rummaged around in her pack for something.

  Deathclaw considered drawing his own sword, but hesitated because of the narrow confines of their surroundings. He had not fought a troll before, but Fist had shared his memories of fighting them through the bond. He knew that they would be tall and thin and trail a flammable slime behind them. And they would heal very fast.

  The first troll lumbered out of the passage. It didn’t look like the trolls in the ogre’s memories. It wasn’t thin at all. In fact, it was almost as muscular as Fist was. It opened its cavernous mouth and let out a hideous screech.

  Charz’s ended its screech by swinging his heavy fist into its mouth. Teeth and slime flew. It stumbled back but did not seem to feel the pain. It bit down on the giant’s fist and lashed out with its claws, scoring his rocky skin.

  Deathclaw left the giant to grapple with it and slid up next to the opening, his back against the wall. The next troll came out of the passage and headed right for Sir Hilt. The human was in battle stance, waiting for it. Deathclaw slashed the back of the troll’s legs, tearing muscle and tendons, and it stumbled right into the named warrior’s attack.

  Hilt swung his swords in a downward slash and Deathclaw saw twin cuts open in the troll’s back, starting from either side of its neck, and running all the way down its spine, cutting through ribs and muscle, ending at its hips. The troll’s arms and shoulders peeled away from its spine and it collapsed to the ground in front of Hilt, its torso nearly sliced in three pieces.

  Deathclaw hissed in amazement. The attack was impossible. Hilt’s blades hadn’t even passed all the way through its body. There must have been magic involved.

  Charz had taken his troll to the ground and straddled it. Ignoring its clawing hands, he pounded its head with swings of his chiseled fists. Finally there was a crunch and its face crumpled in.

  “Huh,” said the giant, standing up. Long slashing wounds covered his torso. “Those were stronger than regular trolls, but they went down pretty fast.”

  Deathclaw frowned and pointed to the troll’s head. “Look!”

  Its face was swelling outward as its skull quickly reformed underneath. The troll let out a screech and Charz silenced it with a stomp of his foot, crushing its skull again. “That’s a nuisance.”

  The troll at Hilt’s feet was healing quickly too, its arms were being pulled back towards its body as the slices in its torso closed.

  “This isn’t good,” Hilt said. There was a thick thunk as he stabbed the tip of one sword down through the back of the troll’s head. The other wounds continued to heal, but he left the sword in its brain, assuring that it wouldn’t get back up. “Blast it, they’ll chase right after us if we try to leave.”

  “Yeah and now the witch knows where we are,” Charz said bitterly.

  “I don’t think so. They don’t have moonrat eyes inside them,” Beth said. “The mother of the moonrats may have noticed that these two disappeared, but she doesn’t know what’s happened to them.” She pulled a small wooden tube from her pack. As Beth removed a leather cap from the end, there was a short flash of sparks. “We can’t let those things come after us, though. Toss me a stick or something that I can start on fire.”

  “Don’t use fire down here, woman!” Charz said, stomping the creature’s head again. His torso was covered in troll slime. “It’s a closed space. You could end up lighting yourself up.”

  “He’s right,” Hilt said. “Remember last time you lit a trail of troll slime?”

  “There was a lot more slime back then,” she said with a roll of her eyes. She gestured at the two convulsing monsters on the floor. “We have to do something. They are healing far too quickly.”

  “It will not work anyway,” Deathclaw said in realization. They weren’t just trolls. Justan had told him about these things. They had been changed in some way by the wizard’s power. “These are not . . . regular trolls. We need . . .”

  Pepper! Deathclaw hissed and clenched his fists until his claws pierced the skin of his palms. He wanted to say ‘pepper’! But he had no lips to say it with and there was no other word he could use instead. Without lips, he couldn’t speak words with a P, M, F, B, or V in them which made the human language a constant frustration. Communication with Justan was so much easier.

  “You know something important,” Beth said. She came up to Deathclaw and pulled him close, placing her head on his chest.

  He flinched. Why was she doing this to him again? Then he heard her voice in his mind. Tell me what you know. What are they and what do we need to do?

  You can hear me? he asked in surprise.

  I can if I listen very hard. Your bond makes you open, but for now this communication will only work if I am this close, she responded.

  Pepper, he said. We need pepper. He gathered all the information Justan had taught him about these trolls and pushed it through to her mind. They have been changed by the wizard Vrill. They are resistant to fire, but pepper will make them unable to heal.

  Beth’s eyes widened and she stepped back. “Deathclaw says that these trolls are special and their slime is not flammable. They will only die if cooked through, but he says that the academy recently found that trolls have a reaction to pepper that makes them unable to regenerate.”

  “He said all that?” Hilt asked, twisting his sword in the troll’s skull as it tried to get up.

  “He is an excellent communicator,” Beth replied and Hilt raised an eyebrow in disbelief.

  “Well I don’t have any pepper. Do you?” Charz said and frowned. He stomped the troll’s head again and there was a loud crack. “Stupid thing.”

  “No pepper really, but . . .” Hilt shrugged and pointed. “Beth, in my pack there is that dried beef we brought from the dwarves caverns. I remember it being quite spicy.”

  Charz snorted. “We gonna stuff dried beef into their wounds?”

  “Can’t think of a better idea,” Hilt said and forced his sword back down into its skull. The troll was healing so quickly it kept pushing the blade out.

  “I could kill it. At night,” Deathclaw said, fingering his sword hilt. He rarely had the opportunity to use Star’s powers in the night when they were most powerful.

  Hilt gave him a questioning look but said nothing as Beth returned to him, a long piece of dried beef in her hands.

  “I’d call this peppery,” Beth said. The beef was practically bristling with peppercorns. Even though Deathclaw didn’t like the thought of eating meat that wasn’t raw, the smell of it made his mouth water.

  Hilt tore the beef in half, wrenched his sword to crack the troll’s head open and shoved the meat inside. He then removed the sword and took a step back to see what happened. The troll continued to jitter on the ground and at first the wound began to close as fast as before, but this time it stopped just short of closing completely.

  Hilt shook his head. “Well I’ll be. Pepper of all things. Wait until I tell the Roo-Tan about this.”

  Hilt tossed the other half of the beef to Charz and the giant stomped his troll’s head again, then bent and pried the broken pieces of skull apart to shove the meat inside. “Stupid thing’s trying to heal around my fingers!” he grumbled, then stood back up, his task complete. His troll too couldn’t heal completely and lay convulsing on the cave floor.

  They stared at the two quivering monsters for a moment before Beth finally said, “What do we do now?”

  “That’s weird. First time I’ve ever seen you hesitating,” Charz said. The sarc
asm in his voice was thick. “Don’t you have any impressions, Beth? Any spirit magic visions telling you what we should do?”

  “I’ve told you before, I don’t control when that happens. They just come to me,” she responded, giving the giant a tight glare. “I can tell you that the mother of the moonrats has this place surrounded. I can feel her eyes all around the hill. There are a dozen of them just pacing back and forth as if waiting for something. That moonrat is still in the cave out front with . . .” She squinted in concentration. “I think, more trolls. But it’s hard to tell. Their signature is so strange.”

  “She can’t get to us through the passage,” Hilt said. “But that moonrat knows two trolls came in this way and didn’t come out.”

  Beth shook her head slightly, “I don’t know how much that moonrat really knows. There is hardly any individual mind left in them. They are just conduits for the witch’s will and like I was saying before, the question is with her in so much pain, did she notice the disappearance of two trolls?”

  “Either way we must be careful,” Hilt said, his eyes filled with concern. “If her creatures find the exit to this cavern . . .”

  “I went through it earlier,” Deathclaw said. “It is well hidden.”

  “Fine,” said Charz. The giant sat down and leaned back against the cave wall with his hands behind his head. The wounds the troll had given him were nearly closed already. “We’ll wait ‘em out, then. Take off when they leave.”

  “But what if they do find the rear entrance? She’ll have us pinned in here,” Hilt pointed out. “The witch will keep sending creatures until she knows we’re dead.”

  Deathclaw watched their faces. Each one of them looked so unsure; so doubtful. The seconds stretched out and finally he sighed.

  “I will go and lead the creatures away,” he volunteered. He felt uncomfortable in the cave anyway, all that rock over his head. The human way of locking out the danger didn’t work for him. He would rather choose the raptoid way and run from the wizard’s beasts under the open sky.