Kulith had expected Sterina herself to come and meet him, or send one of the other greater thrings from the swamp that she commanded. The Vagrim would not have been his choice, and he was displeased to hear that the monster had been sent out to meet them. The Vagrim was unpredictable and stupid, but incredibly strong, fueled by some great magic from out of the Dimm.
“This is the insult I spoke of,” Kulith told the others. “This creature doesn’t have the ability to frighten the princes of Gece, or lead the horde. He will not care or know how to move and fight the little buggers in the next battle, and we all know that the next battle is coming.”
“But he’s is powerful,” Ovodag reminded them all. “He could end up fighting the next battle by himself for us.”
“Let’s go see what he has to offer,” one of the goblin chiefs said. “We need to make up our minds soon. If the buggers don’t get leave, there will be blood running all the way down to the lake shore.”
Kulith was not very happy about the turn of events. “Should I bring along a loaf of bread for him to eat the countess with?” The Vagrim had a terrible reputation for suddenly ghoulishly eating friend and foe.
“If you must,” Ovodag replied with a snarl. He added, “You will make the trolls look bad if you don’t agree to this with us. Remember, you are not in charge of what we do here. This is not a battle out in the West Lands, hero of Fugoe.”
This made Kulith angry, and he saw now who was really in charge. There were several trolls there, and a dozen goblin leaders he could name. But Ovodag was telling them all what they should do right now, including him. It was just like his half brother, and Kulith quickly ran through the same set of emotions he had felt twice before when he had considered killing Ovodag. Kulith had the magic sword balanced now over his back, the sheath crossed by another holding his long, thick breaker sword. He was ready to have someone listen to what he said, even if he had to force them to while standing over a rival’s corpse.
Rat Ears glared over him, and he realized he had forgotten for the moment all about the goblin. There didn’t seem like there would be any open accusation against him for the destruction of Sarik and the Preacher. Rat Ears smiled at him with his dirty rat teeth. Kulith had forgotten how much he had wanted to kill the goblin, but now the remembered. It was turning out to be a bad day.
“I’ll have to go tie her up,” Kulith told them. “There’s no way she will want to go and meet the Vagrim. Give me a few moments.”
He turned and went back, picking up the rope that he had prepared in case he needed it. His goblins broke apart to let him pass through, and then the lame archer and the girl were there in front of him. They stood next to a nameless pile of stones that might have been a field boundary, a goblin memorial, or anything else.
“Come on. We’re going to lunch,” Kulith told her. She shrieked and tried to turn and run, but the goblins quickly grabbed the both of them and held them down while Kulith took off the manacles and put the rope on her, tying her hands into a pair of knots with the length of it left so that he could lead her with it.
He dragged her forward and then stopped to let her get to her feet. The fog on the Dimm had begun to rise up off it again, with the wind blowing up the slope, hissing through the rocks, the weeds and grass, rattling the stalks of grain in the fields and the leaves in the trees. A wet, foggy white mist came up the slope, and soon they were all covered over in its clammy embrace. Everyone more than ten paces away was indistinct, the goblin masses just noises and an outline to both sides. Kulith found Ovodag and the others, and he followed them down the slope to where the Vagrim waited.
“What’s going on? Where are we going?” the countess asked him, greatly distressed by what would happen next. The girl was like that, Kulith thought, like a little toad in the night that you could never get to stop croaking. You could stand over it for an hour and it would stop, but just after you left, it would start going again. There was part of a stair built into the slope that they descended, and Kulith moved over with the others to use it.
“Shut up Little Toad,” he said back to her. They were falling behind, but instead of giving her rope a quick yank, he just increased his pull on it a little.
“What do you want?” she called out to him.
“I have gotten what I want,” he told her. “You kept the castles of the West Lands from attacking us.”
“No!” she cried. “What do you want?” She had said it again with a different emphasis on the words.
“Three hundred pounds of silver. That is what was set as your price,” Kulith told her.
“No!” she cried, and she let out a sob like the mew of a cat. She was quiet for a moment, then there was slack on the rope, and he looked back to see that she had come up closer to him. She had the good sense to know that something worse than captivity was about to happen to her.
“Anything! I will give you anything you ask for, if you save me and get me out of here.”
“Perhaps I want the moon,” Kulith said back. “Or perhaps I want nothing at all.”
“That is stupid! Everyone wants something!” she wailed, angry and desperate.
“Perhaps that is the smart thing to do,” he said. “Look at where we are right now. Do you think anything you would want for could last long here or not just be taken away from you?”
“Anything!” she shouted again, and made a choked, sobbing noise.
They came out of the fog a little, and before them was one of the goblin warrens set on the slope. It had been banked up and filled in, and sat fronting one of the shoreline roads. There were even some lower tenements and warren halls outside of it, and a great, thick tower pile in the middle with a sloppy looking gatehouse. The area before it had been excavated into the slope, so that an expanse of flat, rough stone lay there like a courtyard.
Kulith came down the last steps and out onto the flagstones. He looked across through the mist past the buggers at the great white bulk of the Vagrim, it wearing a baggy trouser of brocaded blue silk over its bandy, fat legs, with diamonds patterns woven across them, in the style of Bezet. It had a heavy black vest over its chest, made from chainmail and troll leather, Kulith had heard. The vest was covered in places with riveted plates of steel and some gold and bronze decorations. The Vagrim had once been human, but that time was long past. It was now a silver-haired, fishy white giant with a mouth full of fangs, a foot taller than any troll he had ever seen.
“Anything!” she shouted out to him, and this time he did cinch up the rope and jerk her down the last couple of steps. He turned back to her as she splayed out her legs and twisted, to keep from falling.
“A chair,” Kulith said suddenly, as he stopped and looked at her, then past her back up the slope at something else. She didn’t say anything back, and they only heard the hollow sigh of the mist wind and the flapping of her torn dress for an extended moment. Then he turned back away and said, “Perhaps a chair.”
She stared at his back in disbelief, and he pulled her forward roughly by the rope so that she fell down on her knees, catching herself with her hands. Her dirt colored hair fell down over her face, dripped water, and she looked more pathetic and vulnerable than usual.
Kulith tied her up to an iron ring in a stone and came forward the rest of the way to where the other trolls, the Vagrim, and the goblin chiefs were waiting. He didn’t expect them to all sit down with him this time and chew on chunks of pony meat while trying to figure out what to do. That was not the way the buggers dealt with the greater thrings.
He looked further off down across the slope and saw the Vagrim’s minions were the ones formed up below into the three groups, as was the usual. About a thousand thrings waited at the center: a mass of shambling bodies from graves, and also fleet, well-muscled ghouls armed with weapons. Buggers were in the other two formations, standing off from the undead, and eachother, because their chiefs had probably argued over some point. Their presence helped explain why the shore warrens had all barred their gate
s. Klith walked forward across the stones and addressed the Vagrim.
“The girl you see behind me is the Countess of Rydol, the princess of that great city. Keeping her hostage prevents all of the West Lands from attacking the other half of the horde still camped around Fugoe Castle.” It grunted as it looked over at her, the dead fish-eyes squinting.
“What happened to Sarik?” it asked him with its hollow voice.
“Sarik had a big black stone with a lady inside. The stone called to Sarik. It called to all the other thrings also. They went to look at the stone. Then it cracked and part of it burst, destroying them all. It was a bad black stone.”
“Where is this stone?” it asked him, interested.
“We buried it, so that others are not lured to it.”
“That does not make much sense to me. Why would it happen that way?” It seemed to Kulith like the Vagrim was more interested in the stone than whatever had happened to Sarik. There had been a rumor earlier that Sarik had been attempting some sort of great magic for all the thrings. Perhaps it was more than a rumor.
“There is no other answer than the one I have given you,” Kulith stated. The creature shook its head, but about what he wasn’t sure. It looked beyond him now at the wet girl tied to the iron ring.
“She is not of much,” the Vagrim said. “In fact she looks like a little bugger.” And then it laughed at its own joke, like a hollow, broken drum. The monster walked across the stones, right by Kulith and leaned down to peer closely at her, which set her off immediately to crying.
“Not very impressive, I agree,” Kulith said. He moved over beside them so that the creature had something else to look at. “We have set the ransom for her at three hundred pounds of silver. We have sworn to slay her if Fugoe Castle is attacked.”
The Vagrim looked back at him and seemed dismayed, the yellow eyes squinting, the bloodless lips opening to show two rows of sharp, white fangs. The smell of rotted flesh blew back at Kulith, and he curled his nose in disgust.
“Is that all? It wouldn’t take more than four of five big churches to shake out their boxes to get all that,” the Vagrim said, in disgust.
“Her value is not in the West Lands eventually meeting her ransom,” Kulith explained. It’s in us keeping her so that we will not be attacked.” He realized that he had just repeated himself, which was bad luck for sure. Was that all he had to say, and was this the creature’s only answer back to him?
“About that,” the Vagrim said. “I want you to tell the rest of the buggers to come back here now and help me kick Sterina’s goblins out of the Stone Pile. Who else is there to rule you with Sarik gone?” Kulith saw from its words that something bad had occurred already between the Vagrim and Sterina, and it had probably not gone in its favor.
“What has passed between Sterina and you?” Kulith asked, directly.
“We argued about who would now rule the Stones, and then she set her children upon me. They stabbed me full of spears, burned me with oil, and then wrapped me up in chains. Her trolls rowed me out and sank me in a deep part of the lake. It didn’t work though. There’s no getting rid of the Vagrim. My mother is the lake.” The creature shook the water out of its stringy silver hair to show him, and then pressed one of its white hands to its fat chest. Kulith saw lake water squirt out through long rents in the vest, from wounds in the fishy white skin that lay underneath.
“If you could not do it yourself, why should we do it for you?” Kulith said to it. “Do you know how hard it will be to get rid of Sterina, of how many little buggers and trolls will die fighting against her? You ask for too much and have grasped too big, by my reckoning.”
The creature glared at him and made a wet growl. It wasn’t his imagination as that the monster grew larger in size before him while he stared at it, as whatever magic it had was called up and worked. Perhaps its next demand would be to kill the countess, in order to force Sarik’s old army back down onto the Dimm. That was plain enough to Kulith, and it wasn’t going to listen to him at all afterwards. The other trolls and goblins had forced him into this situation, but that was the way of life and death among them. They saw this meeting and choice as just a formality needed to pass from the past to the future.
Oh, but what a poor choice they had made. They had complained many times about it to him, but now they were meekly accepting it. The great army Sarik had commanded was splintering already, with each chief trying to get back onto the surface of the Dimm before winter set in, and eventually most of them would be fighting each other.
Even if this civil war did not happen, Kulith’s tenuous leadership of the horde appeared to now be over. The Vagrim was behaving in a more stupid manner than he had imagined it would, but then thrings did not compromise their views and bend. It was desperately setting them up now to its impossible cause, towards a disastrous future for the living.
He had been watching it all the while as he talked back to it. Without much surprise, it now impulsively swung out at him in a backhanded slap to knock him down. He reacted by stepping away in time, and the hand just brushed him, but even still, it staggered him another step back. He put a hand on the hilt of the magic sword and glared back over the monster.
“Give the girl to me now!” it warned him.
“Pay the ransom, and she is yours,” Kulith replied.
It appeared that he had now driven himself into an impasse with the creature: those were the choices he had made and stuck to. The Vagrim looked down at him, with his one hand poised on the hilt of the Tuvier Blade, and then it rested its own hands on its hips and laughed. Then it broke off the laugh and rushed forward.
“I have it right here!” it snarled, and swung at him with a great white fist.
Kulith drew out the sword as he jumped back through the air. The fist struck him like a stone and he heard his bones crack in his chest as he was blown back across the flagstones to the end of the court where he landed and slid to a stop. He held onto Sir Theodor’s sword, and as it fell with him and rung against the stones, it turned hot in his hand, filling him up with its righteous fire.
As the Vagrim laughed, turned, and took a step back toward the countess, Kulith heard several popping sounds in his chest as broken bones realigned and began to heal. He tried to get up and fell back down, with a shock of rippling pain. The Vagrim had paused over the girl, perhaps trying to figure out how to best to devour her. Kulith knew it he had little time to act, and so he lurched up again and got to his feet. He drew the breaker sword out also, so that he now held a blade in each hand.
“You still haven’t made an impression on me Vagrim,” he called over to it. “And you still owe me for the girl. She has already offered me her price, and now I am more than tempted to accept.”
It turned and looked back at him. “You defy me still?” The monster stood back up, shook out its pale hair and roared. “I am mighty!”
“Prove it,” Kulith taunted it.
The creature was not used to anyone getting up after being hit by its fist. It was important to have let it make that first blow against him, but how it hurt now! The Vagrim turned from the girl and launched itself back toward Kulith, running across the wet flagstones, his arms out and hands grasping ahead to grab and tear the troll to pieces.
Kulith sprang away from the charge, and the sword didn’t disappoint him. It lit up, making the mist and wet stones glow for a moment with its golden light. It burned with heat, and with the desire for the death of the monster that now stood before it.
He had moved with a burst of speed that seemed unnatural, and passed so quickly out of the creature’s path that he had to reach out to swing and cut back at the Vagrim as it passed him. He crossed the breaker behind the magic sword as he struck, because he didn’t want the flaming sword to kick back and cut him in half.
The creature went by him and then twisted back, trying to reach out and still hit him. A great white forearm threw him back, and them they parted away. The creature stopped and turned around. It
lifted up its arm, now flapping it around like it was on fire. The magic sword had cut and peeled off a great slab of meat, laid open, showing the blackened gristle and bone beneath.
Kulith had been painfully launched into the air by the glancing swipe, but he had landed well this time, and the breaker sword had indeed kept the magic blade from coming back at him and splitting his head open. The monster looked up at its arm, turning it around in a slow circle, staring at it, the misty rain running off its body. Thrings felt pain differently than the living. Kulith assumed from its reaction that it was agonized in an equal way to what he had felt during his fight with Sir Theodor. The creature was a doll raised up by sorcery, and so the Tuvier Blade was its bane.
Kulith had not lost either of his weapons, and now the magic one began to again heal him, to promise him strength. His face and arms burned as the wounds there began to close, his shoulders both popped and snapped as they righted from the powerful strike he had taken. Kulith jumped to the side as the Vagrim lifted one of the flagstones up and threw it over at him.
It hissed by his head as it missed him and crashed into something beyond. Kulith launched himself forward to close with the creature, moving unnaturally fast again. He was suddenly right on the Vagrim, as the monster seemed to swell up in size to twice his height, into a great white giant. It reached out to try and take hold of him, but Kulith ducked the hand and arm and let the sword breaker deflect it upward, and then he followed with the magic sword. The blade seemed to ring like a bell as he drove it up into the Vagrim’s pasty white gut, then Kulith wheeled away, ripping it free.
One of the Vagrim’s arms came across and grabbed him, lifting him up so that his feet danced in the air. The hands took hold, as the giant prepared to pull him apart, but then it felt the wound he had given it and tottered, racked with this great, new pain. Its torso was glowing: on fire, and it could not keep control for a moment. It fumbled and dropped him, but clung on with one iron-strong hand to a part of his armor. It leaned forward with its head and opened its fetid mouth to take a bite out of him with its sharp teeth, perhaps intending to get his whole head. Kulith had lost the sword breaker somewhere, and grabbed the knight’s blade now with both his hands, and drove it up like a spear into the creature’s approaching chest, where it stuck fast.
A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight Page 9