He stopped as a sound rolled out across the countryside. It had a hoarse, primal quality, the sound of an animal who is in pain but also intends to pass it on as soon as possible. The men looked around nervously.
Verence came thundering through the gates.
Shawn recognized him only by the embroidery on his nightshirt and his fluffy slippers. He held a long sword over his head in both hands and was running straight for the door of the keep, trailing a scream behind him.
The sword struck the wood. Shawn heard the whole door shudder.
'He's gone mad!' shouted Darren. 'Let's grab the poor creature before he gets shot!'
A couple of them scurried across to the struggling King, who was standing horizontally on the door in an effort to get the sword out.
'Now, see here, your maj- Aargh!'
'Ach, tak a faceful o'heid!'
Darren staggered back, clutching at his face.
Little shapes swarmed across the courtyard after the King, like some kind of plague.
'Gibbins!'
'Fackle!'
'Nac mac Feegle!'
There was another scream as Jason, trying to restrain his monarch's enthusiasm, found that while the touch of a monarch may indeed cure certain scalp conditions, the scalp of a king itself is capable of spreading someone's nose into an interesting flat shape.
Arrows thudded into the ground around them.
Shawn grabbed Big Jim. 'They're all going to get shot, drink or not!' he shouted above the din. 'You come with me!'
'What we gonna do?'
'Clean the privies!'
The troll scuttled after him as he edged his way around the keep, to where the Gong Tower loomed against the night in all its odoriferous splendour. It was the bane of Shawn's life. All the keep's garderobes discharged into it. One of his jobs was to clean it out and take the contents to the pits in the gardens where Verence's efforts at composting were gradually turning them into, well, Lancre.[13] But now that the castle was a lot busier than it used to be his weekly efforts with shovel and wheelbarrow weren't the peaceful and solitary interludes they had been. Of course he'd let the job sort of... pile up these last few weeks, but did they expect him to do everything?
He waved Big Jim towards the door at the bottom of the tower. Fortunately, trolls have not much interest in organic odours, although they can easily distinguish types of limestone by smell.
'I want you to open it when I say,' he said, tearing a strip off his shirt and wrapping it round an arrow. He searched his pockets for a match. 'And when you've opened the door,' he went on, as the cloth caught, 'I want you to run away very, very fast, right? Okay... open the door!'
Big Jim pulled at the handle. There was a very faint whoosh as the door swung back.
'Run!' Shawn shouted. He drew back the bowstring and fired through the doorway.
The flaming arrow vanished into the noisome darkness. There was a pause of a few heartbeats. Then the tower exploded.
It happened quite slowly. The green-blue light mushroomed up from storey to storey in an almost leisurely way, blowing out stones at every level to give the tower a nice sparkling effect. The roofing leads opened up like a daisy. A faint flame speared the clouds. Then time, sound and motion came back with a thump.
After a few seconds the main doors burst open and the soldiers ran out. The first one was smacked between the eyes by a ballistic king.
Shawn had just started to run back to the fight when someone landed on his shoulders, bearing him to the ground.
'Well, well, one of the toy soldiers,' sneered Corporal Svitz, leaping up and drawing his sword.
As he raised it Shawn rolled over and struck upwards with the Lancrastian Peace-time Army Knife. He might have had time to select the Device for Dissecting Paradoxes, or the Appliance for Detecting Small Grains of Hope, or the Spiral Thing for Ascertaining the Reality of Being, but as it happened it was the instrument for Ending Arguments Very Quickly that won the day.
Presently, there came a short shower of soft rain.