A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  The two other trolls had been drinking looted wine, and they were now lording over the bands occupying the castle in his stead. They both grinned and nodded to him when they saw him approach. The sky was now black, but the firelight was strong enough so that Kulith could see the pieces of meat stuck between Ovodag’s teeth.

  “I’m leaving you two to secure our position here while I go report our victory to the great lord and find out what he wants us to do next,” he told them. “Save the wounded who can walk, or seem likely to heal fit. Protect the slaves, the ransoms, and the loot. Make sure that the humans who we free are not attacked and eaten by the thrings when they go off down the road. If they are, cut the offenders up and burn their bodies in retaliation.” He turned around and called out to all of them there, around the sacking fires they had made.

  “I go now to give Lord Sarik this victory,” he said, hefting up the bundled sword. He turned and slowly loped off, still smarting from his injuries. The trolls and goblins in the courtyard roared their approval and saluted him with their jugs and gobs of meat as he went by. It had been a good day for Sarik’s horde, and he wondered if they would ever see another like it. He looked for the disgusting little rat eared captain, the one who he had earlier threatened him, who he now needed to lead him to Sarik.

  He stopped as he came out through the main gate and looked off across the fields and slope before the walls of Fugoe. The sliver of moon: a lopsided crescent the buggers referred to as the fox eye, gave him a little light, but certainly not enough to count all the individual bodies littering the field and old ditch line like black shiny pebbles at the bottom of a slow moving stream. Several hundred he judged, vast, silent and forgotten now with the victory. No more pots of stew for them, no cuts of roasted meat or cups of drink. He moved on, disquieted by the carnage, and looked about for the messenger.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE STONES ON THE HILL, WEST OF FUGOE CASTLE

  Kulith’s limp had gotten worse as he tried to match his speed to the goblin’s hill ponies. They had not offered him one, and even if they had he did not know if he could ride it. Now he cursed the goblins for going so fast, since he was obviously injured. The bundle of the sword had been starting to grow heavier, like it knew and loathed their destination. He realized that he should have eaten and drank something substantial before heading off into the hills.

  They came up onto a tree shrouded hilltop, the goblins falling in around him on their ponies and chuckling at his plight. Kilith cursed them under his breath and wondered if they knew something that he did not yet. The attack on Fugoe Castle had been a great success, as they had outwitted the West Land knights who had thought to massacre them all before its wall. The news that Sarik had hoped to hear in a week or two would come to him tonight. Now the whole downward slope of the mountains, all the way to the Gure River and to Krolo Castle was open to invasion. Kulith felt he had nothing to fear from Sarik, but he also sensed a sort of randomness in the goblins around him, as if something odd was taking place that they knew about. He thought he might be walking into something he would not like.

  “Sarik will have something special for you as a reward,” Rat Ears said down to him. Some of the other goblins laughed at the comment. It wasn’t like them talk to a troll like that, unless there was something happening that let it out, or made it possible.

  Kulith spit and said, “Whatever his gift, I have done what he has asked me to. I have taken a castle in the West Lands while you have ridden around on your ponies and laughed. Were you with us when we attacked their wall? Were you with us when we broke through their gate? Where are you now, while they have taken gold, silver and steel? They eat meat and drink with their pot mates, and have slaves and ransoms to look forward to.”

  “Doing the great lord’s will we are,” Rat Ears replied to him with disdain. It seemed like the goblin thought about hitting him with the switch he held, but then he used it to just slap the flanks of his pony. Perhaps that was a clue to whatever Sarik was doing, whatever it was that was drawing of his attention. But Kulith now had the magic blade to give him as a present, and he knew that would bring him back to his senses the moment he saw it.

  He dug through the folds of the arming coat he had bundled it into, to reassure himself that it was still there. He touched the side of the blade with his fingers by accident, and he pulled them back, but he was unharmed. The metal seemed warm to him, almost hot when he handled it, and a thrill of power came through it, making him feel dizzy. Metal was supposed to cool almost immediately and take on the temperature of the air around it, he knew. It did not produce and keep its own heat like something alive that was alive.

  One of the goblins in back threw something at him and it hit him in the shoulder. It must have been a bone, because it had hurt. Kulith turned around and snarled at the creature.

  “Just seeing if you were still alive,” it said rudely. “You went all quiet there.”

  “It is of no matter,” Kulith replied, “I was testing a wound, to see if it had healed.” The recuperative power of trolls was legendary, and was a part of what allowed them to wade into battle and get hit with blows and arrows that would kill or cripple others. The retribution for any slight done to a troll was also more than a rumor. The creatures were playing some kind of odds game, and thought that Kulith would be unable later to find and get at him for what he had done.

  The sword had seemed more than just warm to Kulith. It had also felt angry when he had touched it. He did not really know how he felt this, but sympathy for magic ran through many of them, and it was perhaps possible. No, angry was not the right word. A human would use a word like fierce, or perhaps righteous to describe what he had sensed. Righteous was what the priests of the human’s trinity religion did when their churches were burned down and their valuables looted. They talked about the righteous fury of the “Father,” the high god of the west, until they were somehow silenced.

  It was obvious to him now what the sword wanted and he would be sure to not do that very thing. He would rather pitch it into the Dimm than return it to the humans. Kulith could understand its need, its insistence, as he had felt similar things from his previous short association with several other magical artifacts. The thrings themselves would have never come about if magic did not exist in the world, and a smart bugger always watched out for it.

  He was angry also, at the goblins that herded him along, and in a more complicated way with Sarik. How easy, and hard it would be for him to punish all of them for what they were doing. Yes, the sword was warm, and he understood why, because he was also a little hot. But the whole matter of holding grudges was something he immediately distance himself from with a cold, cruel pragmatism for the situation. Doing things this way, brooding and planning, had made him a survivor and a success, in an otherwise unfair world.

  As they reached the top of the rise the ground flattened out and the trees fell back before small piles of rock. A trail led over and around the stones toward a weak reddish light hanging above the highest point, where the rocks made a broken set of points. The goblins stopped and dismounted. Rat Ears turned and gestured with his switch, pointing it at the light, and nodded for Kulith to proceed on ahead.

  He walked along the path, through the grass and rocks, and he saw the wagons that Sarik used for his personal baggage and his coach parked under some trees off to the side. There was a pack of thyrs sitting around fires nearby, removing the contents of the wagons, or caring for the black ponies that pulled them. Beyond the wagons and the thyrs, the broken pile loomed, with a single trail going that way that he followed, it turning into steps in places where flags had been laid down. Around the rocks on the hilltop he now saw a group of thrings, ringing them, all standing like the stones themselves.

  A thyr was a goblin with the look of a wolf, and they had in the past split off from the rest of the buggers and created their own identity, but not so long ago that there wasn’t a story to be told about it. A thring was an undead corpse,
raised up by the dark energies of the Dimm, or by the other thrings through necromancy. Most thrings diminished with time, as they were rotting corpses to begin with. A few of them however did not, and instead grew powerful, and their forms became stronger.

  The thrings he saw now were of this second type, picked by the great Lord Sarik to attend him and do his bidding. They could command the lesser thrings around by their will alone, and each had some magic, large or small, that they could use to get their way with. Kulith always feared them, like the goblins feared the trolls, but he used them as he had to as a leader of the horde.

  There was no doubt that something special was happening on the hill bathed in red light, and he didn’t like it, since Sarik should have been fully focused for once on what the horde was doing. The goblins didn’t care as long as they won. Kulith and the other trolls however knew better. He would not have normally approached them until one of the greater thrings came for him, but Sarik himself had summoned him, so he felt it was not required.

  The greater thrings took notice of his approach, but immediately went back to doing nothing, as if their attention was elsewhere; drawn off to something he was not aware of. As he walked between two of them and into the rocks and the wane red light he saw Agrok, often called Small Agrok standing there. This addition was to differentiate him from the chief of the Black Sky goblins, who had the same name. He was still one of Sarik’s chief goblin underlings, from a long line of successful band leaders, and he controlled one of the smaller Stones. With him stood a half dozen of his warriors, and they all seemed nervous to Kulith.

  Another greater thring was ahead, just past them with Sarik, where the rocks made a dell, almost like a hall without a roof. It was the thring that they called the Prayer, because he always dressed in the faded robes of a West Lands priest. He was talked about as a great sorcerer, of almost equal power to Sterina or Vous Vox. The creature was known to be totally bent toward magical inquiry, and shied away from much of the random callousness that the others thrings took part in.

  They had turned one of the great stones there all black, like a tall block of coal, and the wane red light was coming up from within it. Kulith realized after a moment that he was looking into a depth within the stone, like it had been given transparency, and now showed a darkness looming beyond larger than the whole of the sky and the hilltop that they stood on. He knelt down and waited for Sairk and the Prayer to quit talking and take notice of him.

  Sarik eventually turned and came over to him. He appeared to be a man of middle years, with black hair, black eyes, and full, pouting lips that concealed his canine fangs. He dressed in a fashion Kulith did not know and could not place, in black leggings and shirt, with a jacket of embroidered green silk and a gold chain of office. The legend was that Sarik had been a noble Golok who had fled into the swamp between the lakes, and had been changed there into something else, giving him his pale white skin.

  “There you are Kulith. You bring me good news from Fugoe?” His voice was raspy but strong, like the wind blowing through the cracks in the rocks.

  “The castle has been taken great lord, and the West Lands now lay open beyond it for conquest.”

  “See, I told you this troll knew his work!” he called back over to the Prayer. “I think Sterina will join us now, after this victory. She cannot afford to wait any longer in the shade of her palace when there is so much to be gained.” He turned back to Kulith. “Attack Krolo next. I hate Krolo most of all.”

  “Krolo is almost in the middle of the West Lands, and it is the strongest place there,” Kulith reminded him. “It’s not a frontier post full of hotheads, criminals, of old men with spears. It was built by the Knights of Pendwise in the old days,” he added. “Ten thousand thrings could climb all over it and not a one of them get inside. They could pile atop it and cover it over with their darkness, and still it would hold out.”

  “Don’t tell me what you cannot do!” Sarik snarled. “Figure out how to do it, and move down onto the west arm of the Gure and lay siege to it.” He looked around suddenly, distracted by something. He turned his head to stare back into the blackness of the rock. He appeared to be looking at something there that only he could see. “I want every liar, every last little traitor to me dead. And to that end, I want you to bring all the captives taken at Fugoe here tomorrow. I do not treat now with the land of the living. I will only extend outward the land of the dead.”

  “She is coming!” the Prayer shouted from behind them, his voice hollow like a cave.

  “Get back!” Sarik commanded to the rest of them, as he went forward and looked into the transparency of the blackened rock.

  Kulith withdrew a few paces with the bundled sword and knelt down with Agrok and the other goblins. He watched Sarik, the Prayer and the black rock as he waited there thinking.

  It was not only that Krolo was an old fortress designed by the Pendwise Knights to repel thrings and goblins; it was also about the way that the soldiers in the West Lands marshaled and concentrated their power. If Krolo was attacked, the hold fast and garrisons they had bypassed would easily mass and attack them in a pitched battle. And then there were the river valley towns just to the east, with their militias, and the Count of Grotoy to the north who had had more soldiers and ways to fight than all the war bands in the Dimm would ever have. There would be a great revenge taken for attacking Krolo, which was several steps up from the sacking of Fugoe.

  The darkness of the stone did not diminish, but the reddish glow beyond the surface of it brightened and filled in all of the space. A woman outlined in scarlet light swam forward into the clearness and reached out to touch the surface of the stone from its other side. She was unnaturally beautiful, Kulith thought. But he could also sense death on her, like he could from the thrings. He wondered if she hid this state and would reveal it to them at any moment like the quick opening burst of steam as a pot lid is lifted. He braced for this as Sarik reached out and tried to touch her fingers with his own through the stone, but they of course were stopped.

  Sarik was mesmerized; the Prayer seemed to also be enthralled. Kulith felt a power building and spreading out like a miasma of sickness in a stone warren. The troll was gripped by the sudden urge to laugh. Surely he thought, everyone here knows this is a lie? His hand slipped further into the bundle of cloth he carried and his palm came into sudden contact with the blade of the sword.

  It was like a third eye had just opened up in his forehead that he didn’t know he had. The beautiful woman was now indeed a slender skeleton of silver and red, from a dark place farther away than death. Sarik and the Prayer had also changed to appear more cadaverous, their skin a layer of silver scales stretched out over too sharp bones. The creature in the black rock turned and looked past the adoring eyes at him. Sarik turned too, as the silver and red wraith said something to him now that Kulith felt more than he heard.

  “What have you done? What have you brought here?!” Sarik shouted accusingly at Kulith, as he stood up and turned back around around.

  “A gift,” Kulith stammered weakly, but he was already reaching instinctively for the grip of the weapon as he also stood up. Every small slight, every punch and kick he had ever taken was now magnified in its significance. When his teeth had been filed down, when he had been thrown out of Doom Wall on North Stone: every slight and bullying he had received, that there had been no justice for seemed magnified, important over all else. It was a human thing, the righteous anger he felt now, the hot thirst for vengeance and justice over reason and practicality. All the callousness and the evil in the world piled up, covered him, and it disgusted him through and through.

  And he now had the way to get even with it, against the madness that Sarik and the Prayer were spouting now, against the troll and goblin tyranny of the Dimm. With a sliver of detachment, Kulith saw how the sword was using him, but he didn’t care. He hated bloody, narrow minded Sarik and was tired of his cruelty.

  Sarik jumped forward and unsheathed the old
sword he wore at his side. Instead of attacking with it, he flicked the tip of the blade toward Kulith and a red arrow of fire appeared and shot out toward him. The magic sword jumped up in Kulith’s hand to intercept the bolt of magic and then it roared to life, with a golden, swirling fountain of flame emerging from the base of the blade where it joined into the hilt. The golden light lashed about for a moment, illuminating the stones, before dissipating wildly off into air.

  Sarik thrust forward and cut at him with his blade, and it froze his flesh though it never seemed to touch him, as he slapped it aside. They jumped around in the rocks, trading blows, almost circling about before Kulith came face to face with the Prayer.

  The thring magician grabbed onto Kulith’s wrist and tried to pry the golden sword out of his hand. Kulith roared and threw the Prayer back against one of the other rocks, where he broke with a crack and was unable to rise. Sarik tried to skewer him through with the old sword, but Kulith caught it and batted it back before it got close. Sarik did something with his free hand and the light dimmed for a moment around Kulith, but then he was back, slashing with the gold sword, it throwing off a shower of golden sparks. He pushed Sarik back against the black stone, then knocked Sarik’s blade out of guard with two quick cross strikes as the silver and red bone woman in the black stone behind them screamed. Kulith thrust the golden sword through Sarik and pinned him to the rock with a cracking pop, as the magic they had made was interfered with, and disrupted.

  There was an immediate, harder cracking noise and the rock behind Sarik broke, and Sarik was taken off to the side with the top half, as it slid away. Sarik tried to stand, but the sword still burned through him and it now tore a great rent in his side, exposing his blackened meat and white bones. The rock toppled back and settled on its corners, and when it did so, a release of power occurred: a great crack like the breaking of ice across the enter breath of a frozen river. There was a flash of lightning, going up into, or down from the unknown darkness of heaven.