Avner lowered his arm. "Basil?"
"The one and the same."
The verbeeg stepped into the light at the cave mouth and squinted out into the morning. He looked about as haggard and cold as Avner felt, with a nose blackened by frostbite and hoarfrost hanging from his bushy eyebrows.
"What are you doing here?" Avner demanded.
The verbeeg looked hurt by the question. "Surely, you haven't forgotten our bargain!" he said. "Or are you hoping to claim all those books I stole for your own?"
"You can have 'em," Avner replied. "It's just that I thought you deserted us at the waterfall!"
"That's what the ogres thought, too-or I wouldn't be here now," Basil chuckled. He stuck his head out of the cave mouth and looked around. "Where's everyone else?"
"Down there." Avner pointed into the valley. "I think the hill giants have them, but not for long."
Basil's lip twisted into a sneer of disgust at the mention of hill giants, but he did not voice any opinions. The verbeeg stepped to Avner's side and peered down.
"I've been trying to figure out what to do," Avner said, "but I can't."
"Perhaps that's because there's not much you can do-especially with that arm." Basil shook his head at the situation below, then added, "We can only hope for the best-and be ready to help if it should come to pass."
Avner looked up at the verbeeg. "What do you mean?"
"From what we can see, it appears there will be a battle soon." As he spoke, the verbeeg turned around and began to study the hoisting chains and the heavy iron gate hanging below the cave mouth. "That'll be when our friends try to escape. If they're to succeed, it will be up to us to provide a quick exit."
"How?"
Basil pointed at Avner's rope, still tied into a makeshift ladder.
"We can start by hanging that rope over the side," the verbeeg said.
Avner looked from the rope ladder, which he knew was not much longer than Basil was tall, to the enormous drop into the valley below. "You're mad!" he said. "Even with no knots, the rope will never reach that far."
"Then I suppose well have to make it longer."
"The runecaster sat down next to the rope and opened the satchel where he kept his brushes and quills.
The ogre, now stripped of his clothes and smeared with foul-smelling grease, seemed unable to comprehend what was happening to him. He stood on the other side of Noote's kneeling figure, glaring up at the bellowing hill giants lined all along the Fir Palace's gloomy walls. He paid Morten no attention, as though he did not understand he would be competing against the firbolg, and had not even glanced over at the bodyguard.
Morten hoped the dazed expression on his foe's face meant the brute would meet a quick end. It was going to be difficult enough to weave his way through the forest of bolelike legs ahead, especially when they began kicking and stomping. Save for the alley down the center of the room, which he felt sure would be the quickest avenue to death, he could see no open ground at all, only huge filthy feel with stumpy toes and broken yellow nails.
About halfway down the gauntlet, Tavis still hung over the cooking fire. Fortunately, once the hill giants had lost interest in steaming him, the fomorian cook had let the fire die down to glowing coals, and it seemed entirely possible that the scout would be alive when Morten reached him. Whether he would be strong enough to help free Brianna was another matter, but at least his presence might add to the confusion. The princess herself hung near the ceiling of the far wall, a distant cocoon of rope illuminated by a single torch the giants had placed there so the rabbits would know where they were trying to go-though few expected them to live that long.
"Ready rabbits?" Noote asked.
Without waiting for a reply or offering any other warning, the chief lifted the hands he had placed in front of the two racers. Morten reacted first, sprinting forward without so much as a sideward glance. The giants roared their delight, filling the palace with a deafening rumble louder than any thunderstorm. The sound seemed to buffet the bodyguard like a powerful wind, threatening to sweep him from his feet.
The giants began to stomp, and before Morten knew it, the dirt floor was bucking beneath his feet like a collapsing rampart. The firbolg managed two steps before he bounced so high into the air that he lost his feel for the ground. He came down at an angle, arms flailing wildly, and crashed to the floor on his back.
The hill giants yelled even louder, shaking the walls so hard that the hide coverings flapped as though a terrible wind were tearing at them. As his tormentors moved in for the kill, Morten saw their heads forming a rough circle high above. He rolled sideways, narrowly saving himself as a huge foot crashed to the floor.
The impact bounced the firbolg into the air. He tried to gather his legs and felt as though he were trying to stand while tumbling down a sleep hill. He managed to plant his feet on the ground, but his body's momentum carried him past his balance point and sent him sprawling. He glimpsed the ogre tumbling through the air beside him, then landed face first on the ground.
Something heavy crashed down on his back. Morten dug his fingers into the dirt and tried to pull himself forward, expecting to feel a large heel with all the enormous weight of hill giant behind it.
Instead, the ogre's powerful jaws bore down on the firbolg's burly calf, sending sharp daggers of pain shooting up through his knee. The bodyguard howled in surprise and anger, though even he could not hear the cry above the din of the hill giants. He twisted around to grasp his attacker. The ogre pulled his head away from Morten's leg and spit a hunk of flesh from between his lips, then lowered his mouth to the firbolg's ankle.
Morten brought his foot up as hard as he could, driving the hard knob of his heel into his attacker's face. Unlike those of humans or firbolgs, ogre noses were filled with dozens of small bones, and the kick snapped them all like dry twigs. The ogre went slack; whether he was unconscious or dead did not matter to Morten. The brute was out of the race either way. The firbolg rolled, throwing the ogre's limp body off his back-then saw a giant's immense foot sweeping toward him.
The kick landed square in his ribs. The firbolg felt the air rush from his chest, then he and the ogre went sailing in different directions.
Morten crashed, back first, into the side of a giant's treelike leg. He felt something crack, like an inflexible trunk snapping in a heavy wind. A pained bellow reverberated above, louder even than the tremendous tumult of the other hill giant voices, and the fellow's knee buckled-not in a direction it normally bent, but sideways. The giant reflexively clutched at the joint, barely retaining his balance as he attempted the impossible maneuver with both hands still bound behind his back.
Morten slid to the ground, a terrible ball of dull, throbbing agony forming between his shoulder blades. The firbolg knew the impact had knocked something in his back terribly out of place, but he could not let that bother him now-not when he had such an opportunity to throw the hill giants into a confused panic. The bodyguard rolled onto his stomach and pushed himself to his hands and knees. He spun around until he saw the injured giant's good leg, then, without standing up, he gathered his feet beneath him and drove his shoulder into it as hard as he could. Again the giant bellowed, but this time he also came down.
The effect was something like a tree toppling in an over-thick stand of woods. The fellow crashed into two more giants beside him, and they also fell, unable to catch themselves with their hands tied behind their backs. This pair unbalanced two more, who had to stop kicking long enough to regain their balance.
The opening that resulted wasn't much, but it was enough for the firbolg. He jumped to his feet and clambered away, dodging and weaving as hill giant feet lashed at him from all directions. He suffered several glancing blows that almost knocked him over, and twice he was struck so hard that he actually fell and tumbled through the swarm of legs, somersaulting across insteps and ricocheting off ankles. Each time, he managed to roll back to his feet and continue running. At first, he moved across the lodge toward a side wall, as though searching for a clear alley. Then he suddenly turned toward Brianna and darted into a dense thicket of hill giant legs, where the crowd was packed so thickly that the giants smashed each other's shins more often than their target. Even when a foot did catch Morten, it did not have much momentum, and so the blow was not very painful.