A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  It buffeted Kulith, bouncing him back where he struck the Prayer, and was then twisted and flung around another standing stone. He had only hit the ground before another, greater shock occurred, and this brightness picked him up and hurled him bouncing off across more rock until he rolled to a stop down in the lee of the hill.

  He lay there for some time with the sword, gathering his wits and letting the blade warm him. Then he stood up to see what had happened. He made his way back up the hill, where smoke and white vapors now rose, ready to resume the battle because it was either he or them.

  The great standing rock was now blackened as if by fire. The top that had broken off was nothing but a smoking pile of ash. He saw no evidence of the strange woman he had seen earlier inside it, and Sarik was likewise turned into nothing but a blackened husk. The Prayer was halfway burned through, but not as completely as his master. Kulith moved his hand down to check the thring, and he felt a cold vapor rising up from the body, a thing that was observed when one of the creatures has been destroyed.

  Kulith stood back up and looked farther around. There had been a collection of goblins there, and more than half a dozen powerful thrings just beyond the pile of stones. Small Agrok and his guards had been so close at hand that he was surprised they had not tripped over each other during the fight. He could not see anyone else now, and perhaps that was for the best. Kulith crouched down and went over and cut off what was left of Sarik’s head, just in case, and then he did the same for the Prayer. Then he went around farther, looking for Agrok and his guards. It was during this that he came across the first of the other greater thrings.

  The body was contorted, blasted, and had gone black in places across its surface instead of the wet, whitish skin and bloodless muscle they usually took on after coming back from death. He went around and found the rest of them like that, and cut off their heads also, and put them all into a pile. He could not chance one of them returning to accuse him, and it was a normal thing that the buggers did to destroyed thrings after a battle.

  Perhaps they had all been drawing power from the event in the stones and the destruction of the black one had affected a reverse, or perhaps they had just suffered its fate the same. He saw parts of the goblins now strewn about, and two of their weapons. One of Agrok’s flashy gold armor plates, bent and chipped, was stuck fast into a cleft in the rocks, and he assumed he had only survived the calamity himself by being thrown free of the rocks and down the slope as it had started. Kulith then looked himself over, and noted that some warmth still flowed into him from the magic blade. His armor was burned and bent, had been torn off in places it seemed. He touched at his face. There were scars there, deep ones still attempting to heal over and seal themselves up. Perhaps something else had allowed him to survive.

  He stepped over one of the sprawled thring bodies and walked down to where the thyrs had been camped on the shoulder of the hill under the trees. One of the wagons was still there, knocked aside, and a black pony lay dead before it in the grass. The thyrs and the other ponies were nowhere to be seen, and he was not surprise. He didn’t see any sign of Rat Ears or his goblins either. He didn’t know what it had looked like to those standing outside the rocks, but it must have been incredible. It must have also been vague, as to what had happened just before to bring it about, and how the event had then played.

  He went over to the wagon and looked at its spilled out contents. There was some treasure, but that was not to be trusted if it had once belonged to Sarik. There was some clean water and a little food, and he ate and drank his fill before rebuilding one of the fires. There was light now coming into the eastern sky, over the tops of the trees, up the green and gray slopes. He cut a haunch off the pony and began to cook it over the fire. The smell of roasting meat finally brought back several of the thyrs, who crept slowly up out of the forest below that lay below. Kulith explained it simply to them when they arrived at the fire where he was now carving off pieces of hot meat with his sword.

  “The great Lord Sarik has fallen,” he told them. “Some mishap with the magic he crafted has blasted him and all his followers down.” The statement was even partially true. “Bring wood to build a large pyre, and we will gather up all the bodies and place them upon it. Then we will send for the chiefs of the trolls, the thyrs, and the goblins in the horde to decide what we will do next.”

  A little later he took out the chipped, burnt piece of gold that had belonged to Small Agrok and considered it. The sword had definitely intervened to keep him alive, and least once but probably several times during the incident on the hill. The thyrs were looking about now, figuring out how to best carry forward his commands. They were also witnessing the scene, and trying to understand what had happened. He dropped his arm, exhaled out, and went over to show them where he thought the wood should be piled, and to see if they were trying to hide their suspiscions.

  He knew it would take some time to summon most of the horde’s commanders to the hill. By then he needed to figure out what to say and do, and have roasted up the rest of the pony, because he knew they would all listen to him properly with a chunk of meat in their hand.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE MEETING ON THE HILL

  Kulith and the thyrs raised a large pyre, the wood cradled by a depression on the naked stone right below where he had fought with Sarik and the Prayer. They made a litter, prodded the thring bodies up onto it, and then dumped them onto the stack in a pile. No one took anything from them, as they all knew better than to do that. Objects that passed into the greater thring’s hands could never be completely trusted again. Kulith regretted cutting the heads off of them now, as the thyrs had seen what he had done, and they would draw their own idea about what had happened. Who they would eventually tell those to, he did not know.

  But it was plain to anyone that the slaughter and destruction was far too great for any one troll to have caused. And there were other henchmen who had been in the area that were still unaccounted for: and it was presumed had fled. He tried to find a piece of each of Small Agrok’s guards, to assure that they were all dead, but he could not do so. Rat Ears’ group must have fled or escaped the blast, because there was no evidence of them in the debris. He did not know where they had gone.

  When the stack was completed he lit the pyre and watched it burn up into the early morning sky. He made the thyrs butcher the rest of the dead pony and roast it, and he had them fetch him a bucket of water to drink. Slowly, cautiously the leaders of the war bands approached the hill and the black column of smoke rising from it. They looked at it, witnessed Sarik’s broken wagon, his absence, and then came back to cut slabs of pony meat to eat with some of Sarik’s wine, which they had agreed was untainted and worth the risk. When the principles had all shown up and a representative from Agrok’s command elected, they all sat down to decide what they to do. Kulith spoke first.

  “I asked you here because when I went to leave Sarik last night, there was a great eruption of power that obliterated Agrok and his guard, destroyed the great lord, the Prayer, and stilled all his other thrings.”

  “That seems like a hard thing to do,” one of the goblins chiefs said. “Lord Sarik was very powerful. He wasn’t just some puppet from out of the swamp with a few toys.” There were general grunts of agreement from the others around the circle.

  “They were almost completely destroyed,” Kulith said again, stressing the fact. “There will be no coming back for them.”

  “Should we now accept Sterina as our master?” Ovodag asked his brother.

  “It was not what Sarik wanted,” Kulith told them. “He told me to take the army to Krolo, and attack it next.” The chiefs around the circle scoffed and spit out, or cursed.

  “It’s such a bad idea that I believe he said it,” one of them said.

  “He wanted us to do another thing: to bring all our ransoms and slaves to him for some purpose,” Kulith recounted.

  “To make more thrings, or for blood sacrifice maybe?” on
e of the other troll chiefs wondered. He shook his head. “I’ve heard enough. He knew how we stood on that when we all agreed to follow him on this campaign. We should all take what we’ve got and go home for the winter. It’s not going to get any easier down in the West Lands with the weather and cold coming on.”

  “These are just the words of this troll,” one of the other goblin chiefs said, pointing at the others sitting in the group with a bone while glaring over at Kulith from above his pig snout.

  “I have said what I saw and what I heard,” Kulith told them. “The words after that have all been your own.” He crossed his arms and waited.

  “We take one more castle, but not Krolo, and then we go home,” one offered as a plan.

  “Who is going to lead us then? With Sarik gone, there’s only the Vagrim and Sterina, and they are both down on the lower Stones, or perhaps farther away in the swamp.”

  “Neither,” Kulith said.

  “Taking charge then yourself?” one of the goblins asked. “Ovodag! Put your brother back in his place.”

  “That is just his opinion,” Ovodag said to them. “It was not a command to you, just his words to us. My brother is merely saying why do we have to choose either? The Vagrim is unstable and Sterina will take all our gains so far, and most of what we get in the future.”

  “You mean that without Sarik or another great thring, she will attack us?” Kulith wondered.

  “That’s going to happen anyway, once the thrings sort it all out. We should just get it over with and send her Sarik’s treasure and our tribute. We are after all, sitting east of the Priwak, and she is way over on Toothstone, or at her place on the Pale Shore. The distance is too great for her, and she will have already gotten most of what she could hope to seize by coming and fighting us.”

  “But she can’t even get at us here, not without coming all the way across the Dimm,” one of the goblins said. “We have a great amount of freedom here, right now.”

  “We can’t winter here,” Ovodag told them. “Sure, we can take the crops and bacon that the West Lands stone men have just put up, but eventually we will run out of food. We will either have to go back down to the Dimm or take a dozen villages before the snows.”

  “Even then, as we start to get hungry, and our strength will slowly bleed back away in the winter to Doom Wall,” Kulith said.

  “The lord of the Stone Pile is still there,” the new goblin chief of Small Agrok’s band said. “Vous Vox, the thring that lets Sarik and Sterina pass.”

  “We were saying earlier that we don’t want just some puppet with a few toys,” Hovus Black Smile commented. “Vous Vox is so old that he is just a pile of skin and bones. The greater thrings leave him alone because of his knowledge of sorcery, and because he will not oppose them. He is not a conqueror.”

  “We should ask Kulith what he would do,” Hovus said, “since he has led the attacks so far and been successful. If not for Kulith, Lord Sarik would be raving at us today for not being able to get inside Fugoe Castle. We would be getting massacred by him right now, maybe.” Two or three of the goblins exchanged looks and nodded. The greatest thyr chief had opened his mouth and cocked his ears over to see what Kulith would say next.

  “We should not attack any more castles,” Kulith said to them. The trolls and goblins showed mixed signs of relief and anger. “Instead we should fan out and sack the hamlets, manors, villages and maybe a town or two in the West Lands. There is bound to also be a lot of wagon traffic bringing in the harvest right now, and that means there will be easy food and meat. This will also keep their army spread thin and mostly behind their walls, because they will be waiting for us to eventually mass up somewhere.”

  “We must also look for the rich folk: for the soft Gece nobles who we can take and trade back later in the winter for food and plunder, and use as hostages if they come at our camps and warrens. We will stay fed and protected this way until a greater thring meets our terms, or we figure out what to do next.”

  “That’s a good plan,” Ovodag said. “Did any of you see the dead piled up before the walls of the Fugoe from the attack? Maybe you were not interested, or you were too busy with sporting and looting. I couldn’t count them all I tell you, but we lost close to eight hundred, and the thrings barely helped out at all.”

  “And what do we do with the thrings who are left here?” another goblin leader asked. Kulith assumed there had been a great attrition at the moment Sarik and the others had died. Perhaps half of the undead had abruptly been stilled, and many of the others did not now have a thring controlling their actions, keeping them from mindlessly attacking and eating the living.

  “There are two or three ones around Fugoe right now left with the ability to command and keep the lesser in check,” Ovodag said. “Let’s go see what they want.”

  “He is right,” Kulith agreed. “The rest of you go and divide your warriors into raiding parties. We will send out most of our strength quickly, in several waves to reap across the land, preferably starting with the fresh warriors who don’t have much to show from Fugoe. We’ll pick some distant targets and send out the mounted ponies and wolves, further into the West Lands than we have ever done before. With luck, we will cripple their response to Fugoe’s sacking for months.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ERICH GROTOY

  GILSFLOR POOLS, SOUTH GROTOY

  A dozen wagons and three coaches stood out before the front of the great palace hall. The gravel drive was chopped and turned up by a squad of mounted lancers as they raced by, and the house servants, porters and peasants paused with the loading up of the baggage until they passed and went on down across the ornamental lawn to jump over the low hedge at its end.

  Beyond the three story limestone and brick great hall with its peaked, black slate roof sat wood and wattle outbuildings, on the lower sides of the hill, just peeking out from behind tall spruce trees and manicured shrubs. There the people were also loading up wagon and carts, hastily dousing hearths, and scattering feed for the animals they could not take away with them.

  A lozenge shaped wooden palisade with a ditch in front ran around the base of the long hill that the palace sat on, it widening out to hold a small town at its opposite end, a quarter mile away where the Gure River curved around it and dropped down to form the three descending rock pools that the place was named for. The south side of the hill looked out over fields and meadows, those bordering in the distance the broken forest and pastures of the West Lands. It was possible in the late morning light to stand at any of the south windows in the great hall or rooms of the palace and see the columns of smoke rising up into the sky where the goblins and trolls had made a ruin of some large building in the distance, just as it had been possible to see fires out in the dark the night before.

  The news they had received was dire, and no modest fort embankment manned by the town and small household guard could possibly hold back the masses of goblins and trolls that had taken Fugoe Castle and then spread out like locusts farther afield to rob and pillage. There was now a general evacuation going on across the land, and the monsters would move unchecked until the Grand Prince’s squadrons or the West Land’s levy could be marshaled in force to move around and stabilize the frontier.

  Erich Fork Beard, Count of Grotoy strode out through the doorway of the great hall with his steward, and paused for a moment to watch as everything they could save went into the beds of the wagons. He turned and watched as a dozen of his lancers rode back up from the town and reined in their gray horses as they reached the drive. They came into a line and dismounted. Another lancer held the reins while the leader came over to stand in front him and give a smart salute.

  “Repot what they say Haskim,” Erich Grotoy said.

  “They are unsure of where the main part of the fiend’s army is. Riders just came through from Krolo and they reported that the town and castle have not been attacked. They think the buggers are hiding in the daylight, and will start to raid again at dusk.”<
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  “That is unusual. Didn’t this devil swear he would attack and level Krolo?

  “That was the rumor a month ago, and no one took it seriously. But he was last reported to be only two day’s march from it below Fugoe. And we know how dead set these creatures are to whatever ambition they have.”

  ”Something has changed for them,” Erich Grotoy spoke, as he thought it. He was distracted then as his wife Annika rushed out of the palace door to plead with him. They had agreed not to do it, but she had put aside some furniture to be saved and transported north in the wagons. Erich shook his head.

  “My dear, we must leave all the heavy things. Take only provisions, the road gear, the trunks, the silver, the strongboxes, the three paintings from the corridor, and the one hanging on the south wall. If you have told them to do otherwise, I’ll have it all thrown out of the wagons.”

  “And what about Pela’s chair?” she countered him back. “What about the portraits on the stair and the small picture over the hearth?” She slapped her palms against the front of her riding skirt, seeming to whisk away dust, but Erich Grotoy knew from their long marriage that it was to express her anger with him. Her aristocratically long face, framed by a gale of wheaten hair had stopped to study him, her two dark green eyes unflinching as they bored holes through his military jupon, colored over with the yellow and blue undy of Grotoy. Erich sighed and let the argument pass, as he had anticipated larger resistance.

  “Well of course we will take her chair and the portraits. But that is all. This is just a precaution of course: no one believes the news is as bad as what we see at this distance. The beasts of the Priwak have not ventured this far in living memory.”