A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  “Now go out and kill us something fresh to eat,” Kulith said to his goblins. “And bring in that little lake gator for us to play with and butcher, because I feel nostalgic.” His voice rose louder. “Go get crocks of tump, and casks beer!” He raised his hands and the goblins and trolls shouted out and put the trestles and benches back to where they had been. The goblins broke into a song as they hoisted up Turge, then carried him on outside for further looting before throwing him into one of the burning pits.

  Kulith took the sharpened stake and stabbed a great chunk of meat with it. He carved it loose with the Tuvier Blade, then went back to his chair and sat down on it. He took a bite off the hunk of meat and then chewed it slowly as he studied his own thoughts and feelings.

  “That went rather well for us,” one of the goblin chiefs said, coming up. “Now we can attack the Long Bone while Sterina tries to frame a reply.”

  “She’ll come at us now,” Ovodag considered. He drank tump from his cup, as the others waited for him to say more. “We will have to watch the wells and the stores. Do we want to try to hold the Stones, or do we get off of them and split up the shore and the Priwak?”

  “The dead penny is why we should stick together,” Kulith said to all the others. He was thinking as he had been about it for awhile. “Somewhere, in the Stone Pile or in one of the estates near it is a great treasure. Three of four hundred years worth of revenue, I reckon. The problem with the Dimm is that we cannot ever buy very much with what we earn or steal. While the human towns all have shops and real stall yards, we have nothing but tump, iron, meat and sluts, with maybe a good slave, choice bauble, or well made weapon with any lasting value.”

  “Now the thrings don’t mostly care about any of that that,” he continued. “It’s only the few intelligent, powerful ones at the top who have any use for the revenue and tribute we give them. The rest of the coin just sits around like it always does with the rich, so that they have it and that everyone else does not. Somewhere I tell you, it sits there waiting for us to go and take, and make use of it as is our wants.”

  “What will you do with it then, what dream will you dream differently?” Ovodag called to him. “This hall, the tump and these feasts, getting a choice sow in the hay for a roll now and then. That is the height of what we want for and what we are. The buggers will talk about what happened here in this hall today for a hundred years, and if that is what you wanted, you now have it also. What other dream will you dream once you stand on that mountain of coins?”

  “I bet things will certainly look different to us once we are all on top of it,” Kulith replied. “A thring is set in its nature, but perhaps we can change. I think you will all agree, that the farther our warrens are from the thrings, the more prosperous and self sufficient they are. The thrings make the Dimm live like them, and they are not alive. We always march to sate their mad lusts and schemes. That’s fine for those sunk in the bottom of a bog, or standing rigid with no mind waiting for orders in an old ruin or a mud cave. But a bugger is not a thring, and we should not have to act like we are.”

  One of the goblin chiefs laughed. “That’s the talk now, but can we make the thrings ever listen to us? Their ears are dead deaf to our complaints.”

  “They will not,” a thyr chief said. “That is the dead for you. The human kingdoms all around us are getting better, improving. But we are stuck here on the losing side of an ageless war. We are either stupidly fighting with each other, or in a thring’s horde raiding one of the outside kingdoms. It cannot last like this much longer. The kingdoms beyond us will not allow it to last.”

  “Nothing bugger ever lasts,” Ovodag said. “Only the thrings are eternal. And neither is a bugger a human, but the wall between the living and the dead is not one we should have to constantly climb over. Civilize us though? That is a big thing to say.”

  “I have just killed a big troll, and so now I am saying it,” Kulith replied. “We are only a little free right now, and look at how we have started to talk already.”

  The goblins and trolls looked around at each other and traded nods in agreement or at least seemed to be thinking about what he had said. Ovodag scowled to himself, as he had done his best but somehow Kulith had said things better and they had all listened to him more. Kulith suddenly stood up off his chair.

  “I’m not staying long here. I will now be a constant target for Vous Vox and Sterina. I need to also watch and see how it goes on the Long Bone. Feast yourselves and your champions today and think about what I have said. I need to go and get this flap of skin sewn down, and then I will return to you. We will not talk about this again until after the Long Bone is settled.”

  He threw the stake into one of the fire pits, and then walked over and picked up Sunnil, who had been standing and listening quietly since the end of the fight. “Come. I have done this for you and now you will stitch me up while I listen to what you have to say.”

  They went upstairs into the room containing the big black bed frame that had now been refitted with a straw mattress and some relatively clean blankets. A white hood cleaned his torn flap of scalp and his cuts, and then Sunnil leaned over and stitched the skin back down into place. She finished and nervously moved back away, not wanting to stay too close to the beast and the bed. He might take any liberty with her in a moment, now that she was clean. Only a few hours before one of the goblins had looked her over and called her a tasty little sow.

  “Are you stupid?” he said to her, and she thought he had just read her mind and dismissed the notion. “I won’t ever let you get that close to my eyes again,” he chuckled. She nervously smoothed down the front of her dress and sat on a stool.

  “Why have you brought me here?” she asked.

  “That thring got right to the point,” Kulith said, “but it did also see you standing there. Now the lord of the Stone Pile and Sterina know you are real. Sometime, they may try to steal you away from me. You will not like it, if that happens. It is in your best interest then to quickly arrange for your ransom: to pay me so that I can release you. How will you do this?”

  “I propose that you send word to Krolo or Breval,” she replied. “From there it can be arranged quickly with the council of magis in Rydol, through the Traveler Knights, or by the Count of Grotoy.”

  “So I will then, releasing one of our prisoners to do so. This chance may not last for long, as I will be stripping the area around Fugoe Castle of troops, and bringing them back to North Stone to fight. I will give you the means to write your letter, and make sure Hovus Black Smile passes it on. Now get out of here and tell my brother to send me up some tump, and a couple of real women.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  KULITH

  THE LONG BONE

  As Kulith and the others had predicted, thrings began to appear to attack the wells of North Stone by simply walking up and falling down into them, thus filling them with death and making the water undrinkable. Because this had happened before, most of the major wells had long ago been surrounded by brochs: squat round towers of loose, fitted fieldstone. These dotted the countryside, and each one had to now be watched over. It was a nuisance, and pulled hundreds of goblins away from the army to what amounted to garrison, and it was not a lazy duty but what amounted to a slow, steady siege by the dead. The fires of burn pits now dotted the island, glowing orange and smudging the sky, the smoke roiling in wicked swirls above the dark, twisted trees and broad, pale fields of grass.

  The goblin army had quickly marched out of Doom Wall after the confrontation with Sterina’s herald and Vous Vox’s champion. More goblins had joined along in it, including all of the White Knife who had been thrown off of Long Bone a generation ago. They were now set on going back to it to reclaim their lost lands and then some.

  Kulith was now sure that Sarik had been doing something important in coordination with the other great thrings, and it seemed that they were all now angry and confused. Several thousand rotten thrings had come out of the water and attack
ed them as they crossed by rafts to one of the other, smaller islands. It had been a pitched battle, with the buggers finally destroying them all. From there they had rebuilt the bridges across onto Long Bone and laid siege to one of the great warrens upon it: a hill fort pile, with surrounding concentric ditches full of stakes and burning oil.

  They had made camp in the trees above the rice fields before the warren and watched as the White Knife and five thousand goblins and trolls marched up in battle lines and swarmed it over after some fierce fighting. There were fires by then in the dusk right across the south coastline of North Stone, and Kulith thought the thrings had perhaps attacked there again, before they ran out of bodies. Vous Vox would have to leave some thickness of them before the Stone Pile, or Kulith would walk right up with the army he had and do as he wished. So it all made bugger-sense, and they were now burning all the bodies of their own dead to ensure that no new thrings rose up on their own, or were produced through necromancy.

  The battle in the distance on the hill was finally finished, the White Knife banners going up and flying over the wreckage of the hill fort. Now they would all be looking farther down the coast toward the main stronghold of Snake’s Head, a larger hill warren of piled stone on a wide headland overlooking the main deep channel of water between the Stones and the far off east shoreline of the Dimm.

  They had made a rough camp and bedded down after a great meal of meat, baked mushrooms, tump and bread. Kulith had kept his captives a bit apart with his guards. He sometimes put them in chains when he went out to fight, but more often now they went unfettered. Where were they going to go, he had reckoned to himself? And it had amused him greatly, though he but let out one soft, wicked chuckle, when Sunnil had earlier kneeled down in her dress, more brown than black now from wear, and sat for a moment like a toad perched on the bank of a pool.

  The lake was going dark before him now, with the promise of a night fog rising from the water and land to cover it all over in a white sheet of mist that would make it easy for the thrings to sneak up and attack. The goblins on the outskirts of the camp received a bonus ration of meat, as their screams acted as the alarm to alert the rest of the horde. Kulith had banked down their fire by throwing a large flat stone on the middle of it, and then he sat drinking tump and gently rubbing his head where it had been grazed by the mace during the fight.

  Sometime later in the dark he woke and realized everyone else was asleep except him, as if the world had all gone on to happen somewhere else and left him behind. The pause was of no real benefit or use to him, but he considered emptying his bladder on a nearby tree. He stood up and looked out across the water, toward the other shore where there were noises from birds and the wind, and the water off the rocks. He saw a flicker out of the corner of one eye, as if something had moved quickly, and he felt a tug at his waist.

  A glow diffused the area of the campfire. It was subtle and unnatural, with small motes of brighter gold, like the sun when it first came up over the Priwak in the morning. He turned around and she was there. He saw that all the other parts of his army and his captives were asleep, and that it was just him and the vision that had manifested itself to him. Through trickery, through magic she had gotten the sword away from him just now with the sound and held it up in her hand, the point stabbing upward at the sky.

  It was not poised in a threatening way, but instead like some sort of officious act was being performed. It reminded him of the relief carvings on the Mancan walls, temples, and tombs that lay about in the Dimm. In this light he now realized everyone was not asleep. Little Toad was awake. When he studied her toughly though, he realized that she too was also asleep. It was the sword’s magic he was talking to, and he was not surprised.

  “What do you want?” he asked it directly. The vision before him did not reply and just held the pose, the spirit of some impossibly perfect red-haired woman in armor made out of gold plaques that reminded him of Sarik’s thrings. It wasn’t Sterina or her magic. Sterina had been described to him as having very long black hair with one single lock of it dyed red, like the Mancan whores of old. This was a clean and fresh figure full of life, and Sterina could never have imposed herself over the Tuvier Blade’s angry righteousness.

  “What do you want with me?” he asked it, now getting a little annoyed. “Haven’t I done well by you so far?”

  She turned the blade down to rest the point on the ground and looked over at him, and he now regretted his demand and her stare. Looking into her eyes was like riding over a road paved with every regret, selfish act and fear he had ever experienced. He quailed for a moment and then he resolved to face her, filling up with the same kind of justified anger that the sword used to destroy and burn.

  He thought that he had good reasons for much of what he had done, to push back against the injustices done to him, and evil put onto him. His selfish acts were often as not just a reflection of what he had seen around him all his life. It beckoned him to speak again, with an incline of its head.

  “Tell me what you will is,” he said, “and I will judge its merit.”

  “The old one,” she spoke to him. “The old one with bones of iron must fall next.” There was no mistaking who she meant, and it was already something he had planned on doing.

  “I agree,” he said, his eyes now streaming tears from her brilliance.

  She was gone with a flicker of the golden light. He reached down and found that the Tuvier Blade was now in its sheath. A vision, a drunken hallucination, Kulith did not know which. But he had seen something, and now Little Toad was awake, having perhaps caught a little piece of it. She looked around like a lost child and started to cry. It woke up the archer and he painfully stood up and came over to her.

  “My lady, what ails you?” he looked at Kulith accusingly, but Kulith had power over them and so he just spread his hands and sneered back. He walked out from them to another position on the shore and looked toward the water, and watched the mist slowly build up and creep onto shore.

  Four days later he was standing near the south end of Long Bone, facing the Snake’s Head. The warren was impressive, an equal to the defensive walls of the old Mancan fort at Doom Wall. The Snake’s Head was a rise constructed of piled stone with channels and streets sunk down into it, creating redoubts and trenches that they could not see. There were warrens every half mile or so, going up the hill and each with a gate, connected by a slightly twisting channel, like the body of a snake until a final high, slightly inclined fortress wall of mortared sandstone rose twenty feet. There were thousands of little buggers arrayed in a long massed formation on the slope before it, with three or four companies of archers standing behind, and two companies of trolls with lances, sword poles, and great swords.

  Kulith had not faced an adversary so formidable since the battle on the Shore. More of the White Knife had come, emboldened by their success so far, and the rest of the Long Bone had risen up and were now interested in destroying the ruling hierarchy and replacing it with themselves. The goblins war chiefs were discussing how to attack from the little rise they were standing on, by a tall stone mehir, off the main road they had followed down the peninsula. Kulith may have been their patron, but he was right now showing everyone else that it was their battle.

  Sarik’s army was tired of fighting, just as Kulith had told Sterina’s doll. Now he was dealing with the difficulties of keeping it in the field. He had ordered some of the warrens on the west shore to open up peaceful trade with the Golok March, and two or three lake boats full of tump and meat were making their way every day across to land on the shore of Long Bone and unload. If one of the greater thrings ever figured out how valuable they were to the horde and attacked them, he was sure he would lose half his army.

  Ovodag had followed him, as had most of the other trolls that had fought in the West Lands. But he could tell that his brother was starting to chafe under his heavy leadership. Ovodag didn’t understand some of the tactics, or the intricacies of what Kulith was doing
to get the buggers on five different Stones behind him to fight for the Stone Pile. He had not been picked by Sarik to lead, and he had not paid attention with Kulith and learned what to do instead.

  They were all uneasy, as they always were when they had to fight other trolls. The trolls formed an elite guard among the monsters and any conflict among them or a decrease in their numbers caused problems. And it was always bad to show the goblins that they could pack up and kill a troll.

  “There’s no way to just have them leave, is there?” Ovodag asked Kulith. He wanted to talk to the rulers of Long Bone, and get concessions. “If they all fight, there will soon be a lot of dead little buggers lying around everywhere. The thrings will be out of the water quick then, trying to fight us and pull the bodies away for Vous Vox.” He was right about that, and since the undead could just walk along the bottom of the lake and attack unexpectedly without the need for boats, there was a real danger that they might end up fighting today in two directions. But Kulith just shrugged.

  “It’s not my decision to fight. It is the decision of the leaders of the White Knife and the other chiefs of the horde. ” But he had watched them, and the way the chiefs had looked and talked, he knew it would happen anyway. Ovodag had been drinking a horn of tump, and he spit some of it out so that he could quickly speak.

  “You should stop saying that. I don’t think the White Knife has made a real decision in a week. You are just telling them, and telling us what we are all thinking, and how we should act on those thoughts. Who is really, making all these decisions?”