A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  Sir Bryning and his squires went forward to do it, giving over the mounts. They hitched a horse up the the wagon, and then they moved it slowly back across the field to the camp. Wayland eyes fell on one man in the wagon, in particularly bad shape, with a broken arm and both feet cut off just above the ankles.

  “Buggers eat his feet?” he asked one of the other prisoners, a beaten young man in the dirty black coat of a priest.

  “He was our coach driver and both his legs were crushed when the trolls made it crash,” he answered him back. ”The countess and I cared for his injuries, but they turned bad and went black. The head troll then cut them off with his sword.”

  Wayland shook his head and withdrew, letting the others get the people ready for the trip back to Kitzy. The priestly looking fellow was Sarwin, who had been traveling back and forth to the castle, and getting beaten each time for it. Wayland looked about for Temmi, who had held their pack animals with the reserve guard during the battle. With any luck there would be something left that he could ride back down on. If not, he guessed he could just walk there.

  He took one last look over at the gray castle sitting in the distance, at the goblin helmets still shining atop its battlements. His chest stung with pain from the reopened wound. He spit out in disgust, upon the dusty battlefield, and he walked away.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  KULITH

  THE MEADOW BEFORE THE STONE PILE

  When they finally marched out from the Red Tower, they did not leave much behind there for the inhabitants to eat, and they would now be forced to forage for food while cutting the woods. They soon crested out over the hills surrounding the forested valley and Kulith immediately sent out raiding parties in different directions from his small horde to take control of all the villages and small fortified warrens they could see along the rises. He even remembered the Red Tounge, and sent them out to confront a particularly large, dangerous looking bastion that might yield sizeable plunder.

  As they marched along through the waist high grass and the country observed them, most of the structures before them immediately put up white smoke, to signify their surrender. A few decided to fight it out, possibly because they were the holdings of minor thrings, or they feared doing differently. The remaining part of the column dropped down off the grassy hills and saw before them the great southern flat called the Meadows, forming a plain before the far shore of the island, with the town and bastion of the Stone Pile there along the last hills on the south eastern edge.

  It was all bigger than Kulith had thought it would be, with the castle rising and dominating the landscape around, it sitting framed by the surface of the lake behind it. They could also see a part of Ghost Harbor, and to the south-west he could just make out part of one of the islands that formed the Face, while the shore of the swamp beyond it was concealed by a heavy white mist.

  Closer at hand on the descending slope before them there had been a battle, either a rebellion or a forward action of the main horde. The large army had broken up to attack, find food, and to prevent the spread of one of the camp diseases, which had started after they had split from it and gone into the woods.

  There were wooden piles impaling dozens of thrings, all spread out on the downward slopes before them, and more heaps of thrings that had been cut up, the piles pulled free of their bodies to be taken and reused. They saw the particular sword bladed spears that belonged to the thrings of the Stone Pile, and goblin and troll corpses lay about in the grass as well. Some of them seemed to have been drug away, but most remained.

  The fact that no burn pits had been made and the bodies left mostly where they had fallen made it hard to tell what had gone on. It wasn’t what Kulith had taught the horde to do, on the campaign south across the Stones, and he was concerned about it. He detached three companies of goblins to make burn pits and clean up the field, and he had to promise them treasure and meat to get them to do it.

  They came down into the new camp about three hours later, the goblins blowing their horns when they realized who was arriving. Kulith was met by a half dozen of the leading chiefs, and they reported that they now had over eighteen thousand buggers spread out in several camps, and in garrison in the villages, towns and warrens they had taken. They were ready to begin the final attack across the network of fields, warrens, and little ridges that lay before the Stone Pile. Kabi waited to the side, near the map of the fortress, as it was placed out where the portents and their chief vassals could see it. They were amazed that Kulith had already gotten most of the interior information about the castle, and it raised their already considerable morale.

  He was taken to a place between the tents where they had constructed their own map on the ground that showed the fields, settlements, and various features on the south end of Big Stone. Kulith was able to look down and see where Vous Vox had anchored up his fleet at Ghost Harbor, which consisted of a group of oared vessels like the ones that had attacked their supply camp on the Bean, and a few sailed sloops. It also showed what lay beyond the Stone Pile, including a handful of villages and warrens to the south end of the island that the wolf cavalry they had fought might have originated from.

  When he asked them about the battlefield they had found earlier to the west on top of the hills, no one had a clear, good answer. It was either something local, or it had been unauthorized, they said. There were so many groups of buggers coming and going, pledging their arms or loyalty and then disappearing the next day that no one could really say how far their forward conquest extended. They had fought two large battles, as if the thrings were testing their strength and resolve. They had captured most of the villages along the way south, and half a dozen large warrens. Now that their champion had returned to them they immediately wanted to push on while the food and the good weather lasted.

  Kulith acknowledged their struggles and victories so far, and showed the map of the Stone Pile again. It was placed on display near the landscape, and more looked at it. They passed around a silver ewer that was continually refilled with tump and juice, and talked about what they would do the next day. They began cooking up the meat and rice that Ovodag had gotten from across the lake, and passed around baskets of bread from the bakeries in the nearby warrens.

  “Word has come back from the Priwak that a human army marched up from Krolo and fought with the garrison at Fugoe,” one of the goblin chiefs told Kulith. “After the battle an agreement was struck with Hovus Black Smile for the release of the captives taken in the raids. There was talk about the Countess of Rydol, and how her safety and return would shape their future actions toward us. When they learned she was not there, they withdrew back the way they had came, as Wenslig did before.”

  “Did you try to ransom her?” Kulith asked. It could have just as easily gone the other way, and the human army could have taken Fugoe and been destroying right now their undermanned warrens on the Shore. Then they would test their way across the bridges to North Stone, and assault Doom Wall.

  “Yes, but both events reached us too late to do anything about them,” the chief said. “She remains here, under guard in your tent by your warriors.”

  They later watched from a small hilltop as a small castle in the distance was attacked, the battle going on for more than two hours, a wave of white bodies at one point testing the bugger line and being driven to ground by goblins and trolls armed with spears and the wooden impalement poles. It was great and impressive, and the white wave pulled back eventually and let them have their way with the fortress under siege. Kulith realized then that the thing he had created now had a separate life of its own.

  He was eventually approached by some of his White Knife warriors, and they showed him where his tent had been set up in the camp. They walked back down to it and he saw that the archer now looked the worse for wear, as if he had been beaten, and Little Toad showed some fresh scrapes and a large, dark bruise across one of her cheeks.

  “Your sow looked around after you were gone, then boasted to us
that she was pregnant,” one of the warriors explained. “She took some of the plunder and Little Toad’s jewelry, and then caught a cart ride up north to the Scale. She reckoned her father could now claim North Stone in the name of your son.” The Scale sat off the south shore of North Stone, within sight of the Long Bone. There were two troll lords on it, and Afira was the daughter of one of them.

  Kulith chuckled to himself as he thought of this cunning attempt to play a very human type of sleight on him. By most of the men’s laws, his son would have a claim to all his conquests. To buggers and thrings though, that kind of law didn’t matter, or only mattered if you could enforce it with an army. Whoever was strong enough to keep the Stone Pile and the rest of his legacy would do so. What he would leave he would leave to all of the buggers, and it would be like a wind that they wouldn’t even feel at first when they were standing in it. After some time, perhaps they would finally start to notice that it was there.

  “Afira, you stupid sow,” he said, as he checked over the contents of his tent. She hadn’t been able to get into the main strongbox, only because the White Knife had carried it away and hidden it from her. Besides repaying his help on Long Bone with their service, they still wanted to collect the silver pennies he gave out every week. Even then, not all of the White Knife guard had waited for his return. A group had set out to take part in one of the attacks, and the survivors had not yet come back. Kulith had been able to extract a small amount of treasure from the Red Tower, and he dropped this down into the strongbox alongside the rest.

  “I’m going to go and look for a new sow to take care of my tent,” he told the warriors. He went across from the camp way, to where Kabi was watching him. She had circumspectly followed, to see the situation. A couple of other trolls warriors had followed her, and were watching from a distance, to see how things played out.

  “Now that you are here, you can stay with my band and cook for us until the siege is over, or you are paid,” he said. She looked back and forth, glancing down the camp way, then around through the tents and enclosures. Her fangs showed slightly and she creased her lower lip.

  “This is all you have: this collection of tents?” she asked him. It was all most of them had ever had: a spot next to a fire, food from a shared pot, a tent if they were lucky. He was a horde troll, and had even been kicked out of Doom Wall once for bad behavior. She had spent her life in two of the most sophisticated and comfortable structures that existed in the Dimm, and she now missed them. He had always mistrusted the security of walls, and this feeling had only grown stronger since he was always finding ways to thwart and get over them.

  “Don’t be a stupid sow,” he said. “I fought and killed the Vagrim, and then the champion of the Stone Pile, who had been sent against me next. I am living in these tents right now it is true, but my house is right over there.” He pointed at the great castle sitting over in the distance on its low rise, the weak looking astronomy tower that Vous Vox had built visible along the edge of the wall. She looked over at the Stone Pile and then she picked up her things to follow him on into his tent. The other trolls who had been watching them began to move off, to go their ways.

  “You are in luck today,” he remarked across to her. “I have a Little Toad for you to meet.” He had nostalgia now for the pair of nights he had spent with her in the Red Tower, down in the forest. What if he had just stayed there and seized it for himself? The war machine he had started would suffer, but he doubted that it would stop. The Red Tower had held its horrors, like the collection of dead buggers sitting in the chairs, but he had also experienced what it was like to be the chief of a warren. He doubted if he would ever feel like that again, unless he held the Stone Pile, as he had just boasted to Kabi.

  Kulith checked the wind and saw that it was blowing back toward them from the walls and towers of the Stone Pile. The height of the stonework was more apparent to him, now that he had gotten closer to it. Kabi had not overestimated them. Their height was over forty feet, and all the ladders they had used so far would only reach up a little over half way. He could also see that on top of them next to the bugger and thring guards there were all kinds of defensive measures such as pots of oil and piles of rocks to hurl down at attackers. There were some other things there that he did not recognize, but he was sure he would find out about them eventually.

  They were not attacking the fortress today, only fighting a great battle before it, perhaps the last one before they laid in the siege. Vous Vox had stored away a group of vampires to lead his host, and in the final moments of his defense brought them out to make things harder. They were very fast, each used some magic, and their bites and wounds were sickening unless root tea was drunk first.

  This remedy and preparation had caused the same kinds of problems Kulith had faced in the forest: a sudden wave of forced sobriety was making all the buggers be on edge, and now fighting in the camps was commonplace, almost constant. Right before he had left his tent Kabi had complained to him about not being able to dispose of her tump ration because no one wished to buy it.

  With the world of the buggers so upside down, Kulith now walked back and forth along the line of warriors, nodding over to the goblin chief he had talked with at the Red Tower as he passed him by. When he came back along the line he stopped next to him.

  “What do you think they will do?” he asked the creature, who in the light he could see was some kind of cross between a goat and a pig. He had large, luminous yellow eyes that looked about from under his half helm in worry, watching the thrings and the enemy goblins form up on the slope opposite them.

  “They don’t seem to be trying very hard. For a thring lord with a thousand years of experience, he’s not showing us very many new tricks.” He pointed off into the distance, to the right where a small knob of hill was covered over just then with about a hundred wolf riders. “Calvary on our left though, but with those numbers, what are they going to try and accomplish?”

  “His pony cavalry is unaccounted for, unless we have destroyed them all,” Kulith said. “They might show up eventually as a second wave.” Several of the goblins nearby licked their lips, probably thinking of fresh pony meat.

  “It’s an archer defense is what it is,” the goblin chief thought aloud. “If Vous Vox is not going to spring them on us here, he would show them plain to us right now somewhere on the field. He’s hidden them, and given himself away, he has.” He was right.

  “Pass it down the line then: get ready for archers to show themselves and try to hit us hard. Be prepared to run into them, and to watch for their tricks.” Kulith looked down the line of warriors. One of the White Knife had been walking with him, and he sent him back along to the flanks, to talk to the chiefs there about what they had said: about the cavalry and archers hiding somewhere. Those were exactly the kinds of things every chieftain tried to do to the other in a fight.

  He held for a few minutes, and then signaled down the line with his sword for the horde to start moving up the incline. The goblins moved sluggishly forward, lashed verbally by each chief and their inner warrior cadres. The trolls were more disciplined, and where they were in a group, or mixed in with the goblins they all went forward immediately. They had only gone about two hundred feet through the grass when they began to call out across the line and stop. In another moment, Kulith knew why.

  He could smell and see the slickness of the grass ahead where it had been doused with oil. He had them all halt and he walked along the fringe, then turned back and shouted at them. “Hold fast and put up your shields. We need to find a way around this.”

  As the goblins and trolls milled about and brought more shields up to the front, a great volley of arrows came down out of the sky onto them, punching, slapping, shattering off heavy iron, sinking into the wooden shields, and more softly passing through fabric into their exposed flesh. There were sudden groans and shouts of injury and pain, and curses at the great thring’s hidden bowmen.

  “They have brought them all o
ut!” The goblin chieftain called over to Kulith from where he stood with his warriors now behind a wall of shields. Kulith turned back and looked at his lines, and wondered when the enemy would light the oil in the grass. The chief had been right. Thrings were mostly no good with bows, though some of the vampires could use them dangerously well. Vous Vox would have had to bring all his goblin archers out from the Stone Pile and mass them in close ranks somewhere to fire the sort of volley they had just taken. Now that they had their range they could light the oil and fire into them for a good long time hoping to break them up, whittle them down and eventually chase them off the field with the cavalry.

  “They have made a good plan,” Kulith remarked. “We are in danger.” A second volley came down then and they saw it, and all braced for it. It slapped them hard with at least a thousand iron and steel points. There were some burning arrows with this volley and they hit the oil spread across the grass and kindled it up in places, but in others it did not catch well, and left pathways through to the troops they saw standing beyond. Kulith saw this and he turned back to his army after the arrows had slacked.

  “There are pathways left through the fire!” he shouted back to the rest of the buggers. “We advance now: all forward to meet the enemy line!” He swung the Tuvier Blade over his head, and it flickered with golden light in expectation of the battle and killing that lay ahead. They rushed in across the areas that had not caught fire, and groups of trolls behind the first ranks threw spears out at them to break up their charge. Kulith batted one away with his shield and then fixed it again before him to slam into the first ranks of goblins that he found there before him. They yielded in a mess, and he then laid about him with the Tuvier Blade and took off two heads. He received blows back, but most seemed to strike the shield edge, or glance off his heavy coat of rings and plates.