A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  “Strange fortress,” he commented.

  “That’s because the noble family here is from Starkand,” Temmi told them. “They did one of the counts great service years ago, and were seized of this whole place. You won’t see another hall like that south of the Varrek Steppe.”

  There was a duel taking place down the street in the open near a stone well, but as they dismounted and looked at it, they could see that it was being done with blunted weapons to the applause and cheers of the onlookers.

  Wayland pushed open the gate and they put their horses inside the yard where a trough waited. He then opened the door of the station and looked inside. The stations could be whatever was needed at the location, when it was needed. This one was a series of three rooms, all open with hearths along their southern walls. There were chairs and tables, and a loft above for sleeping.

  There was no one there but a boy holding a couple of brass keys on a piece of string. He sat on a stool, his gangly arms splayed out across the duty desk and the ledger. When he saw Wayland he stopped kicking the desk with one of his feet and straightened up. When he saw the gilded Traveler Knight badge on Wayland’s jacket, he panicked, jumped down and tried to make a run for it.

  Wayland reached out and grabbed him by one of his arms and spun him halfway back around to face him.

  “Where’s the garrison, young knight?” he asked him.

  “They’ve all gone to help the Countess of Rydol, or are out working on the road,” he stammered back. Wayland got a good look at him. He was a half Golok peasant boy, with the golden eyes and skin they were so famous for. Behind Wayland Sascha, Temmi, and the other men came in and threw down their things.

  The road they had taken through the mountains to Godele had been passable, but there had been several spots that did need work. It was possible that half the travelers were out on the road working on it somewhere, but Wayland also knew from Honot Tower that Lord Wenslig had already abandoned his military efforts in the West Lands, and that most of the soldiers had by now returned to wherever they had been marshaled from.

  “What does the boy say?” Temmi asked him.

  “He says the station master and all the men are gone to fight with Lord Wenslig in the West Lands.”

  “I wonder what’s up then,” Sascha said, looking around at the others.

  The street door behind them opened and one of the men they had seen fighting in the mock duel entered, and behind him crowded in two guards, of the kind that the castle they had seen would send to watch the market. The man looked them over and then seemed disappointed.

  “I had thought that the station master had returned. Who are you all?”

  “We’re Traveler Knights from Troli, going through on an important mission out in the West Lands,” Wayland told him.

  “But you’re the knights, are you not?” he asked.

  “We are the Grand Prince’s road knights,” Temmi affirmed. “But as he just said, we are engaged in business already of our own.”

  “Besides all that, you need to come with me and talk with my father Lord Remony,” the man persisted. “There is something here for you to do that has waited too long already.”

  There was nothing he could do about it Wayland thought, unless they wanted to try and force their way through the man and the guards. If he was the son of the lord and was in the right, it would go badly against them, and their character was already suspect after the street fight at Troli. He couldn’t afford to have something said about his service yet, before he had even attempted whatever miracle he would have to perform out in the West Lands. The other men looked annoyed, and Sascha who was a lord himself seemed downright angry.

  “You must promise us a good meal for this,” he told the man.

  “Of course there will be a meal,” he replied back. Wayland turned to the desk and with a piece of sharpened lead wrote a few lines into the duty book.

  “You there,” he called out to the forgotten boy. “Resume your post here until you are properly relieved.”

  They picked up their gear and followed the man and his guards back out onto the street. Torches were lit in front of the inn and the taverns by then, and the merchants were all putting away their tables and dismantling the stalls. The hall on the hill was pale white now like a ghost against the deepening twilight overhead. They put their horses out in a yard below it and stored away their riding gear. Wayland set Horwit as guard, with Samur to go relieve him about half way through the meal.

  They climbed up the fort’s stair and entered the impressive white and yellow hall, to look back and forth at the hangings and old banners draped there. The great chamber spanned half the length of the building, with the rest set off for the solar and other apartments. Unlike Lord Coln’s martial hall, the interior of it was paneled in varnished wood rubbed golden with wax.

  “I am Orland, Remony’s younger son,” the man with them said, as he made space along a lower table for Wayland’s men. “My brother is off right now in the mountains looking for a band of raiding monsters.” He motioned for Sascha, Temmi and Wayland to follow him up to the main table and he gave them the bench on the low end of it.

  They sat down as the other people adjusted around, and then they all rose when Lord Remony came out with his family. He was a tall, gold haired Starkand with a long face, his features so fine that he seemed too young to be the lord. Wayland glanced between the lord and his son and thought that they could have easily switched places. It made him briefly consider if he was being played in some way by them.

  But that came only after they had all sat down and started to eat. Half way through a great pie of venison cooked with peas, Lord Remony made his business with them plain. A servant fixed them up with tankards of ale and they introduced themselves to the rest of the people there.

  “I am Wayland of the Isles, an officer of the Captain of Troli,” he said. “I have been sent with these others on a mission regarding the ransom and return of the Countess of Rydol.” They all looked at each other in surprise, and even icy Lord Remony blinked and cleared his throat.

  “Then you are going north, down to Rydol?” he asked.

  “As sure as the sun will rise and set tomorrow,” Wayland replied.

  “There are some men who were caught stealing on the road,” Lord Remony told him. “I have them in my cells here, and because some of them are foreigners, they need to be taken down to Rydol, and then perhaps on over to Sarsving Castle. They are all the ones known as objectors in Alonze.”

  The table got quiet, and one of the women made the protective sign of the Three over her chest. The Observers, as they called themselves, were a heresy in Alonze, and there had been confrontations between them, the reformers, and the orthodoxy. They were tolerated in Gece, but Wayland had to wonder about that. There were groups of objectors in all the major towns along the Gure and the Ressel, and though civil unrest there was reported to mostly concern food, land, and working rights, the sides always seemed to consist of one religious faction fighting another.

  Lord Remony beckoned to a servant, and the man brought over a basket that was dumped out on an open area of the table. There were wooden block stamps and corn husks, scraps of parchment, and rags that had been printed on using them. The symbols and words were simple distillations of the objector’s beliefs, and were given out when services were held, or when trying to get new converts. The nobility of Gece followed the orthodoxy, and so there was another round of gasps at the table, with several of them now making the sign of the seal.

  “These prisoners will slow us down,” Wayland said across to Lord Remony. “I don’t think we can take them. This is a thing for the local station, or for you to do yourself. Should the countess have to wait another week because a few foreign serfs ran off?”

  “I would engage the men who were here, but they have made themselves scarce,” Remony said, as he picked at his pie with a silver skewer. “Several of them are from the Ressel Valley and may agree with what the objectors were do
ing on the road.”

  It looked like there had been some great difference of opinion here that he would never get to the bottom of. Well, it would be hard for Wayland to say no and not also seem sympathetic to them, which he did not want to do. Tolwind and the Marmad Dutchy were almost completely orthodox, but then they had never been subject to the heavier hand of the church as it existed in the three great states. He was fine with being called a killer or a cheat to his face, but he didn’t want anyone whispering heretic within fifty feet of him. He would never recover from such an accusation.

  “I suggest you put these men to work,” Wayland said. “They could clear off the top of one of these mountains for you. Why not make them cut wood?”

  “Then we would have to suffer them here. They would steal again eventually, and they would try to convert others to their cause.”

  “We will take them away from here and put them into the hands of the Captain of Rydol,” Wayland told him, giving in. Lord Remony sighed and looked over at his wife, and they exchanged a look of satisfaction between them.

  “You have done right by me,” Remony said. “If only the other men on the road were as helpful as you and your company.”

  Wayland had realized that as a Traveler Knight he would be forced to make a leg to all the lords he had previously passed by without a second glance. Everyone knew that if a noble offended a trader the word would get around and they might find themselves unable to conduct business. Now he was a part of the aristocratic machine in Gece, and they threw Alonic heretics into jail.

  “How did you receive your wound sir?” one of Lord Remony’s daughters asked Sascha. She was a young, but her face’s angles already hinted at Remony’s tight, ageless features. She had straight, golden hair and her cheeks were both full of color and lightly freckled. They had introduced themselves earlier, but the imp had evidently not caught their names, or decided to just use the honorific.

  “It was a duel, a disagreement over goats,” Sascha told her.

  “Men fight over all kinds of things. Sometimes it is more important that they fight, than whatever was the cause,” Wayland said. “If it could have been avoided, it would have been.”

  “You will have a scar for sure from that one. I have a dueling scar also,” she said.

  “This is not a man that you should make casual conversation with,” Lord Remony told her, as her mother cleared her throat.

  “Have you thought of sending her to wait at a court out in the West Lands, or perhaps Grotoy? She might learn a few things there,” Sascha said.

  That made all the knives and forks stop, and there was a gasp from one of the women sitting over on the left. Women were killed, raped, and carried off in the West Lands. Sascha had made a great insult, and only just recovered himself from it on purpose. He could certainly play the knave if he wished to.

  “Grotoy! What a splendid idea!” she exclaimed, and all the utensils began to slowly move back and forth again.

  Remony put up his hand. “Don’t give a young girl such ideas. She doesn’t know much of what she is hearing here, or saying for that matter.”

  Wayland paused as the two lords stared across at each other. He thought Remony might pick up one of the carved wooden stamps and throw it across at Sascha, but they both returned to eating after the one long, sharp look.

  “She seems like a fine little lady,” Sascha said after a pause, and nothing more that could have made it worse.

  They finished the meal and were given as use the chambers of the men who were currently away hunting the goblins. They bedded in and were grateful for even one night on straw stuffed mattresses after sleeping in the woods atop pine needles boughs or stony heaps of moss.

  “Hold your tongue once in a while,” Wayland said to Sascha. “You are not yet healed from the last duel and you are already looking for the next.”

  “That little chipmunk gave me a great insult, comparing her scrape to the fight of my life,” he countered, and neither said anything more about it.

  In the morning they were given a hot meal and a bag full of apples. Their mounts and pack animals were put out in a line for them, and they were given enough provisions to get the prisoners down the hill to Rydol. There were eight men, and Lord Remony must have hunted up and used every manacle he possessed to get them all into chains. Rope was used to tie them together in a line, with their legs left free to do the walking. While Wayland’s group only counted seven able men and Sascha, he figured that with the irons on them they could manage it. He would miss staying in the inns though, and having to always be out rough. Perhaps that could be avoided by using the stations and barns they found, and the whole thing prove not too dreadful.

  “Let’s get going,” he shouted down at the men. “Don’t give me any reason to shoot you with an arrow or pitch you into a lake.”

  They all moved northward, leaving the top of the escarpment down a track that was shored up to the cliffs with rock walls on the down slope. It only took one long turn to put the mountain fastness of Godele out of sight, and a few more to bring them down into the swampy areas that existed in the valleys alongside whatever part of the Gure they were now following. Dark clouds came in the next day, and it started to rain.

  Wayland had glanced at the charges against the men, and caught the names of two or three. They had robbed wagons on two occasions, and had been accused of stealing chickens and meal from a farm near Burzlo. The items were only worth a few silver pennies, but it was the fact that they were objectors, and had probably ran off from a manor somewhere in Alonze. And no one knew what else they might have done and gotten away with. He figured that if Gece mobilized, it could probably make use of them in some way.

  They didn’t want to be where they were, and they definitely didn’t want to be taken down to Rydol, but that was the way it was. One the second day he cut the rope to split them up into two groups of four because they were going too slow. The villages and little farms they passed were accommodating, letting them draw water, and the dirty looks the prisoners got might have convinced them that they were safer with Wayland’s knights then running around free in shackles.

  The stream turned into a series of cataracts full of boulders, and the road left it to travel up over the tops of several ridges, then alongside a great mountain with a snowy white horn. The men picked up their pace, and Wayland bypassed the next traveler station they came to in order to make more distance that day. They went off the road into a campsite under some trees before dark, and were protected there from the rain that started later that night.

  The next day two of the men had picked up walking sticks, and the knights had looked at them warily. Wayland frowned but didn’t say anything. They continued on the road until the trees let out onto some broken ground, with several farms and a church visible out in the distance.

  He noticed the men staring out across the rocks and grass at the village, and how they exchanged looks. Temmi saw it too and turned his horse to come alongside Wayland and frown over at him. Wayland turned back to one of the archers.

  “We’ll slow down along here. Throw them each a piece of bread. Horwit and Samur were saying they have wet bowstrings and they’ll now drop back to change them.”

  He waited until the men had got their bread, and then he looked over at his men. “Go fix your bows while they’re eating.”

  There was nothing wrong with their bows. They dropped back and each took out an arrow and then just fiddeled with the notches and the risers on their bows. One of the archers shifted, to perhaps get a better shot off. His horse nickered.

  Most of the men snapped their ropes they were in and turned back to attack the archers, Temmi, and Wayland. Sascha was hunted by one of the men with a stick, and as he swung it up at him Sascha leaned back out of the way. He jumped his horse forward and knocked the man down with its withers. Then two of the men were on Wayland, one hitting his with a stick while the other grabbed for the keys, or for his sword.

  He put his dagger into t
he second man’s neck and opened it up as an arrow flew close by him and went into the shoulder of the one holding the club. Wayland turned around, his bloody knife up in the air, as most of the prisoners left standing tried to scramble away. The archers shot them all down as they ran across the grass with a flurry of hissing arrows. Two were left standing on the road with their hands up, one in blubbering fear and the other in wide-eyed shock. Temmi rode forward and leaned out, stabbing the one who had tried to club Sascha through the heart with his sword, as he tried to get back up.

  Wayland wiped his dagger off on the flank of his horse and sheathed it. His head hurt where he had been hit, but his heavy wool riding hat had either deflected or taken most of the strike. He blinked to clear his eyesight and danced his horse around, then rode over to look at the men who had been shot down.

  “Get your arrows and get those manacles, and then we’ll throw the bodies off the road.” He pointed over at the two prisoners who had put up their hands. ”I’ll release you from your shackles, because you have shown yourselves to be dependable, or at least smart enough to make your own way without causing any more trouble. I’ll let you go at the next station.”

  He looked back at Sascha. “As Tig Morten did for us at Troli, I will now do for these two men. I’ll have the station send the shackles back up into the hills with a note explaining what happened. Godele has gotten more than enough justice from the Traveler Knights today.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SUNNIL

  THE HALL AT DOOM WALL

  Kulith had Sunnil taken out of her cell that morning and brought to one of the upstairs rooms at the back of the mansion. The goblins and trolls had thrown all the things they could not use into these rooms, including several old trunks of women’s clothing. Sarik had kept several beautiful toys he had created at the hall, and there had been a brief argument over keeping their heads as decorations before the bodies had been carried out and destroyed. A thring was a thring the trolls said, and so down into the burn pits they had gone.