He opened his four-fingered, thumbless hands and dropped from maybe thirty feet up—it was tough to judge from that distance, binoculars or no. I couldn’t see him land. The inconveniently placed center cement barricade hid my view. But I could feel the impact on the ground under my feet from half a mile away. I heard it, too, and saw the bridge shudder. I handed back the binoculars. It hadn’t landed on any of the wolves, I told myself. The pack sense would have told me if someone had died.

“What’s a troll?” Tony asked as he took the binoculars, then made an impatient sound. “I know what it is in the stories—‘Three Billy Goats Gruff’ and all of that. But how do you stop it? Our guns didn’t seem to do much more than tick it off while we were trying to get the civilians to safety.”

“They’re tough,” I told Tony. “Usually more brawn than brains, though they can talk, or most of them can. A troll’s skin is supposed to be very thick; the book I read about it compared it to a suit of armor, for whatever that’s worth. It must be tougher than most medieval armor if your guns didn’t hurt him.”

I tried to remember everything I could. “He’ll be equally comfortable on land or the river—you should warn your guys in the boats.” There were a number of boats gathering on either side of the bridge, more now than there had been five minutes ago. I judged that most of them were gawkers, but I thought I saw a couple of official boats, too.

“Any idea how we can kill it?”

“Back in the day, people used to hunt them with lances,” I told him apologetically.

Tony gave me an unamused laugh. “Mercy, we’re all that stands between the citizens and that thing when it comes down off the bridge. I don’t have any mounted knights down here.”

“J.C. has a horse,” the guy with the bloody sleeve said.

“Yeah,” said another guy absently. Like Tony and a few others, he had a pair of binoculars. He was staring through them as he spoke. “But his lance is too small.”

“You’d know about small lances,” said still another guy. This one apparently was J.C. because he continued, “But my horse is afraid of sheep and small children. I don’t think I could get him within a mile of a troll—and no one’s lance is that big.”

“How many people do you have injured?” I asked Tony quietly as the other police officers worked off stress and fear by exchanging rude and inappropriate comments.