“Igor?” said the vampire, waving it away.

“I’ll thtick with the horthe pith, if it’th all the thame to you,” said Igor. He looked around in the sudden silence. “Look, I never thaid I didn’t like it,” said Igor. He pushed his mug across the sticky bar. “Thame again?”

Polly took the new tankard and sniffed at it. Then she took a sip. “Not bad,” she said. “At least it tastes like it’s—”

The door pushed open, letting in the sounds of the storm. About two-thirds of a troll eased its way inside, and then managed to get the rest of itself through.

Polly was okay about trolls. She met them up in the woods sometimes, sitting amongst the trees or purposefully lumbering along the tracks on the way to whatever it was trolls did. They weren’t friendly, they were… resigned. The world’s got humans in it, live with it. They’re not worth the indigestion. You can’t kill ’em all. Step around ’em. Stepping on ’em doesn’t work in the long term.

Occasionally a farmer would hire one to do some heavy work. Sometimes they turned up, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes they’d turn up, lumber around a field pulling out tree stumps as if they were carrots, and then wander off without waiting to be paid. A lot of things humans did mystified trolls, and vice versa. Generally, they avoided one another.

But she didn’t often see trolls as… trollish as this one. It looked like a boulder that had spent centuries in the damp pine forests. Lichen covered it. Stringy grey moss hung in curtains from its head and its chin. It had a bird’s nest in one ear. It had a genuine troll club, made from an uprooted sapling. It was almost a joke troll, except that no one would laugh.

The root end of the sapling bumped across the floor as the troll, watched by the recruits and a horrified Corporal Strappi, trudged to the table.

“Gonna En List,” it said. “Gonna do my bit. Gimme shillin’.”