A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  The other goblin had come back now with a White Hood, and Kulith had one of the sows get him water as he laced out of his heavy fighting armor and set it aside with his padded jacket. He had a lot of bruises, going to black and purple upon his gold-gray flesh, and then there was the hole where the arrow had gone in.

  The White Hood looked over his wound, and then pulled out some tools and a ball of waxed thread. He motioned for the water to be brought close and used a long, needle-like device to look for the metal of the head, and the wood of the shaft. He splashed the wound out, and then took a pair of tongs and plunged them inside. Kulith groaned and gripped the chair so tight that he heard it crack.

  Kulith slept a long time after the arrow head was removed and he had been stitched up. It had gone into an area of his body that things should not go into, and he knew he could still die suddenly or in the future slowly from infection. It like just another black bruise now, stitched across with white thread that made it look like there were maggots in it. He came out of the small side chamber he had taken in the tower block and went downstairs into the feasting hall. Not much had changed, except that there was less food on the tables and the great haunches of ox they had cooked had been eaten and replaced by a couple of roasting pigs. He wondered what the little buggers who had came up the scaling ladders were eating, and he figured he needed to go find out.

  The little sow that the two trolls had taken was back, and she did not look to be roughed up too badly. She was weeping and clearing off the tables with a couple of the other sows. There had been only one body before sitting in a chair from the execution, but now there were three, with one of them done in the chair that Kulith had used the day before. He figured that it would give the little buggers a lot to talk about, as he sat down on a bench instead and looked through the food.

  One of the sows was coaxed over to him and he had her bring hot water that he used to now make tea with milk. Someone had gotten a cauldron full of eggs and boiled it up, and he peeled them one at a time and ate them with salt until he was full. By that time the little sow had been brought around by one of the trolls, perhaps as proof that she had not been overly abused.

  He looked her over as she sat on the bench beside him and waited for what he would have to say. Kulith saw there were two little nubs of bone on either side of her head, growing from small ridges under her abundance of long black hair. It was a difference between the trolls of the marsh, and on Big Stone from those on North Stone, the Shore and out in the Priwak. They were called the Great Ones, and it was implied that the rest of the trolls where degenerated by inbreeding with humans and goblins so that they now looked physically different. There were three notches filed on either side of her jaw, along the bottom under the skin, and while these were sometimes done as punishment, it appeared to have been done long ago to her as a form of status and beautification.

  “You’re a lesser daughter, aren’t you?” he asked her, because he could also tell that she was only part troll like him, both their mothers being unwilling troll wives taken in raids. She was a mutt through her birth, but the mark of the Great Ones was still strong on her, and someone had taken care of her.

  She found her voice, but it wasn’t strong like Little Toad’s, or the daughter of the North Stone chief. Instead it was wispy, like smoke and silk.

  “I am Kabi,” she said, “the lesser daughter of Marus of the Stone Pile.” That was a name that Kulith had heard of.

  “Why would a daughter of Marus give up the Stone Pile’s secrets to a rebel?” he asked her.

  “I don’t want to be taken away by your warriors anymore,” she said. This was a stupid thing to say, to hold in exchange for the information. It was a sow’s lot to get traded from warrior to warrior. He sighed.

  “If you can give me good information about the Stone Pile, I will make sure it is so,” he told her.

  “What they are saying is true, isn’t it?” she asked him. “You want to get rid of all the thrings and have the buggers rule over the Dimm?”

  “Perhaps you hate Vous Vox for something that was done to you,” he replied. “That is something that I can understand.” He pointed over at the dead bodies sitting in chairs. “We’re not freeing anybody, unless it is to free them from their miserable lives. Yes, I found the random madness of the greater thrings unbearable, and I am supporting my claim to the Stone Pile after slaying the Vagrim, and the champion of Vous Vox.”

  “We are destroying their power over us, because we are now more powerful than they are. Perhaps things will be a little better later, but we are right now all at war. How long can someone like you resist getting taken away by a warrior, and then after several births, settle down as a table servant in some hall?”

  “What can I expect to get right now?” she asked him. It was a very bugger thing to say. He nodded, liking the way she had replied, like a real raider out in the West Lands willing to slash and stab at a knight for a hot chunk of meat.

  “In addition to what we have agreed, you will receive two pounds of silver, a food allotment equal to what the rest of the horde is eating, and a half gallon of tump a day when it is available. That is what I am willing to offer you. Perhaps there will be dozens like you lined up waiting in the Meadows, willing to sell away the Stone Pile’s secrets for less.” She hesitated, and then she slowly nodded back.

  “After some thought I have decided to spare all the warriors and servants left in the Red Tower,” he told her. “Most of us will be departing soon, back to the main lines and the horde. You will come with us and provide your knowledge. If you return here later, you may be in some jeopardy for helping us. Perhaps after our victory, all will see it as we do now and not hold grudges.” He took a cup of tump from where it sat in front of the slain goblin chief in his chair and sniffed at it. Just the smell of it made him queasy.

  “I am interested now in finding out how you persist here with the thring known as the Whisper so close by. It is an extremely hardy thring that I have not managed to exterminate yet. Why hasn’t it come over these walls long ago and turned you all into its minions?”

  “It made a bargain with the old lord of the Red Tower,” she told him. “It received goods and bodies from us at set times during the year. By its nature, some of the older parts are jealous of more new ones being made. And it was of course biding its time, as many of the thrings do, until it could assume greater power.”

  Kulith nodded to her as he thought about the typical, disturbing system surrounding the Whisper in the woods. He took the cup of tump and mixed it into more water, and then added sugar pulp mashed out from sweet cane. He tested it and was able to sip it down without gagging. He poured them each a cup and called out to the goblins sitting around the hall.

  “Have a board or something else brought in that we can make marks on. We are going to create a map of the Stone Pile to use later during the siege.” These words were so exciting that they immediately rushed around looking for such an object while others rooted around for a suitable form of ink. A large cowhide was brought in and flipped over on top of a cleared table to present the smooth, tanned back. Kulith argued with the others and they settled for a mixture of goblin blood, soot, fish bone and egg white for ink.

  By that time the little sow had finished a second cup of the sugary tump mixture he had made for her. He broke up a chair to use as a measure, and another table top was cleared to use as a rough. He began to sketch out the citadel and walls of the Stone Pile as she described it to him, piece by piece. When he had gotten a part right, he would slowly transfer it over from the wood table to the back of the cowhide.

  When he was done, there were still things missing, like the thickness of some of the gates, the depth of the defensive ditches, and how the water flowed through it from one sanctum to the next. Vous Vox’s tower and quarter of the citadel were a complete blank, except for the outside walls and some doors. From what the young sow described, the center fortress was a series of three great halls with apartment bloc
ks to the sides. It was roughly three stories tall, with stone or wooden staircases allowing for passage between the floors.

  The fourth hall, a complete additional side of the citadel was used exclusively by Vous Vox, with a great tower jutted out of it to take up part of the central court area. This contained his labyrinth, a collection of factoria, some thring vaults, and whatever else the lich had gotten a notion for. None of these structures were completely regular in shape, and so the walls rolled back and forth, and had pieces of one phase of construction built into or onto another, sometimes irregularly. That had helped give it its name.

  Around the outside of this was the outer curtain wall with odd towers here and there as they had been added on or built in sections. At one point Vous Vox had torn out part of the wall and constructed an astronomy tower there, with no defensive thought at all, and its great round bulk presented a known weak point. After they had transferred this over to the cow hide, all put in scale, Kulith puzzled over it for an hour or more, as he then questioned her on aspects ranging from the doors and defensive traps to the garrison, and the other buildings that lay between the two sets of walls. By the time he was done she had finished off a third cup of tump and was leaning back in her chair with a rosy glow across her cheeks.

  “I have to admit, this is well done,” one of the troll chieftains said, and he looked over at Kulith and inclined his head. He set down the quill he had been using and looked across at the other buggers that were there.

  “This is how we will take the Stone Pile,” Kulith said, now addressing those who had been watching the work. “Not by a head on collision with its walls, but by channeling our great and powerful arms at its weakest spots. We will strike these swiftly, with a hundred blows all at once!”

  The sow hiccupped and leaned back a little lower on her bench. One by one, the goblins and trolls walked by the map, and some of them threw a couple of coins or a piece of jewelry up on the table in front of Kabi. When they were all past and had started to drink and eat again, Kulith had the tanned cow hide tacked to a table top and taken into another room where it could be guarded over.

  “Have a bath prepared,” Kulith told the other sows, as he collected up the baubles and coins from the table top for her. Shortly then afterwards, one of the goblins remarked that he had seen one of the bodies seated in the chairs twitch. After a few rough jokes the corpses were all picked up by the buggers and carried out in a roaring, drunken parade. They threw them off their chairs one at a time into a burn pit, and then the seats were broken up and scattered over the top to stoke up the fire.

  A sow came back and reported that the bath had been made ready. Kulith picked up Kabi and helped lead her down one of the corridors to a bedroom. It had belonged to someone of state, perhaps even to the troll lord of the Red Tower. Had she been here before as a younger wife? He did not know.

  Most of the furniture and belongings had been stripped out, but a copper and wood tub sat to one side of the bed frame, it fastened by cleats to the floor. There was steam coming up off it, a bar of soap, a comb, and some pieces of drying cloth there.

  He took the champion’s sword and jammed it through the flame of the door to lock it shut. He led Kabi over to the tub and helped her get out of her clothes as she giggled wildly. She sat down in the tub and looked up at him, getting used to the heat and wetness of it. He knew the look in her eyes, and he had promised her that she wouldn’t get dragged off anymore by the other trolls.

  The next day was overcast, with high dark clouds arguing that the summer was finally over in the Dimm, to soon be replaced by frequent, prolonged periods of cold rain. Kulith looked off the wall of the Red Tower at the hills and trees beyond and thought he saw the white body of a thring standing out there, watching the castle from the trees on the bank. He was not surprised, and wondered if he would ever be able to return here and destroy the Whisper, or if that task would fall to some other beastly hero.

  He went back to the hall and looked into the preparations for their movement back toward the Meadows, where the rest of the horde was now camped more than half way down Big Stone. Kabi came in, looking clean and refreshed, while the order and habitability of the fortress had in contrast deteriorating rapidly into a dirty, broken, plundered shell.

  He went over the order of marching with the chiefs and band leaders that were there. He then spoke about the assignments to begin the cutting and transport of wood from the forest to the siege camp. The Red Tounge’s chief seemed angry when he was told to guard the road between the two spots. It would be open to wolf and pony rider attacks, and there might not be anything nearby to kill, steal or eat. When they had began eating what was left there to eat, the chief of the Red Tounges stood up and challenged him.

  “Some say you are not as lucky as you used to be,” the chief stated, glaring over at Kulith.

  “They always call it luck,” he replied back to him in a dry, weary deadpan. “I hunted and destroyed the Whisper in his woods a little while ago. Before that, I rallied our troops in the woods when the wolf riders from the Stone Pile came down on us. Before that was our victory on the Wet Way.”

  “If I am using luck,” he continued, “then it is pretty good luck, and it still seems to be with me.” He pointed at the goblin. “If you had watched our baggage with some warriors while the rest attacked the wall, our supplies would not have been destroyed by the wolf riders. And as for gates in castle walls, they are more often as not found closed. We did not get the gate we wanted, but we did open a gate. Just post a proper guard next time, and we will both be lucky.”

  The Red Tounge chief grabbed for his sword, as if had been greatly insulted, but Kulith had beaten him and drawn both of his in one fast movement. They glared across at each other, and the warriors behind the Red Tounge chief watched intently, to see if they would have to fight with Kulith and the others for their lord. But the pig faced goblin chief slowly took his hand back away from his weapon and instead crossed his arms over the front of his armor.

  “There may be some truth in that, but you need to tell us what to do. We figure that if Golden Sword is not worried about it, then we should not be worried about it either. You lead the attacks you say, but a defense play like that is a part of the attack. You are a Priwak troll: a raider. There may be things to do in a fight, in the next fight, that you do not know about.”

  It made Kulith angry, as he had just shown his ability to move them out of Red Tower in good order and increase the cutting of the forest. The Red Tounge chief had just shown why he was the chief, and had made a well thought out counter argument that posed him as a little stupid. Kulith began to sheath his swords, wondering if this was the start of the way things would be done from now on.

  He had tried to drink some strong tump earlier, and he still could not do it. The many loud noises in the hall had given him a headache, and the dead bodies, though removed, had left their stink.

  “It will all not go our way every day in battle,” he told everyone in the hall. “But we have now secured the wood that we need to attack the Stone Pile, and we are now headed out of these woods. I will not try to buy back your loyalty or tie up your pride. The wolf riders did something daring and unusual the other day, and it mostly worked. We use schemes and strategies in battles, and so also do the captains of Vous Vox.”

  The pig-faced goblin chief looked back and forth among his warriors and they nodded to each other and made little grunts or growls. He looked back at Kulith.

  “Perhaps that was all it was,” he said. “We will not let them get away with that trick again. I spoke before thinking it through like that.” Kulith nodded and dropped his swords one at a time the rest of the way into their sheaths by letting go of the handles.

  “If we argue over every little setback,” he said, “then this is going to be a very long campaign.”

  They gave him nods and grunts of agreement, and backed away to quickly refocus on cutting off pieces of meat from a roasted sheep, and getting other food
from out of the bowls and trenchers on the tables. Kulith sat back down on the bench and looked around the hall, noting the way the rest of the other chiefs and trolls had reacted to the argument.

  He now doubted that the Red Tounge would fight alongside him again once they left the woods and rejoined the main horde, but changing alliances was a part of the landscape. The little sow he had washed and gently raped earlier was standing next to him now, a plate of food in her hands. She was smiling at him happily, something he had never directly shared as an emotion, but only ever experienced himself briefly, in private. A smile was always accompanied by guile, as a cover for some baser intent.

  He took the plate from her and put it down on the table, and then made room for her next to him to sit on the bench. They ate, and made small conversation. Afterwards he stood up and took hold of her by her long, clean black hair and made her walk with him down the hall to another one of the bedrooms in the Red Tower. She laughed a hot, wild laugh and looked back at him in lust once, and he decided that the start of the march could wait at least a few more hours.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  WAYLAND

  THE WEST LANDS

  The land they traveled through was mostly covered over by the Khaast Forest, it made up of pines, elms, oaks and maples, the road usually just a narrow break between their trunks and wanderings. The passage of the host from Rydol was evident on the land as they rode, wherever a mark could be made and left. There were great muddy ruts, half filled in now with sand and gravel by roadside peasant gangs. There were fields and areas that had been camped on, and grazed down to just stubble and roots.