A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  “What will we do now?” Kroson asked him. “Do we start to attack the fortress?”

  “Someone will attack the fortress, but we should forbid it for now,” he replied. He rolled the whole roll of meat and bread in salt and then broke it in half. He handed part of it over to Kroson, and watched his glad reaction. Then they ate it, with Kulith turning to watch Kabi, who was doing something over in a corner with a pack bundle. He would have to find out what the sow was up to now.

  When they had mostly finished eating the food, Kulith started talking again. “What I want to see is how well the buggers can dig here on Big Stone. There have been a lot of fights and murders in the horde, have there not?”

  “There always are,” Kroson said, “but nothing so large that it will cause strife in the camp. There are some grudges for sure, but why hold a grudge against someone who might die tomorrow or the day after? Or for that matter, cut the ranks and punish those who have gotten away with too much when they may be needed to help fight.”

  It was the same kind of thing that the thrings had said, a kind of indifference to the codes of the goblins, to their petty jealousies and hates. But Kulith knew that those hates, perhaps small in comparison to the war, were what sat in the buggers’ minds and hearts and made them endure and feel alive. He thought about Rat Ears again, and wondered what the goblin and his little band were doing right then. He still wanted to kill them all, if he could find them. Even if he had a bag of silver big enough to live on for five years, he would still go around looking for them.

  “Build me a pit twelve feet deep and two hundred feet across,” he said to Kroson. “Shore it on the sides with a wall of wooden beams and planks. It should take about two days, if half the buggers here all work at it. Move the dirt and rubble up near the fortress, so we can use it later if we make sapper trenches. If you are able to do that, we will have a court and handle all the complaints and vendettas that the buggers have. Tell them that if they can build this pit in two days, then they are ready to attack the fortress.”

  He stood up and went over to Kabi, to find out what was going on. Little Toad showed her teeth to him as he went past her, but he just ignored her and hoped that she would not start talking. He caught Kabi’s eyes as she went about her errand and she quickly looked away. He walked over and grabbed her by the hand and made her stop, and she looked at him but would not meet his eyes.

  “Why are you packing your things up?” he asked her.

  She leaned over and he thought she might be drunk on tump, but then she sobbed and glared at him and assumed her usual poise when angry. She hoisted up her bag of things.

  “You do not know what you have done!” she exclaimed. “You have seized the dead penny from the thrings for yourself. Part of that coin always went over to the swamp, and so they will now rise up off their slabs to do something about its loss. Your army is only a few days away from its destruction!”

  “What will they do?” he asked her. “What can they do that has not already been tried?”

  “Imagine three or four thring sorcerers like Vous Vox raining down lightning on your buggers. Imagine thousands of armed thrings and trolls marching over those hills. Will your horde hold them, or will they run? The thrings know all this because it has happened before, and they have endured, but you have forgotten it or never learned of it in the first place.” She looked about, as if searching for a direction to run in.

  “I’ll not stop you from leaving if you wish,” he said, backing away from her. “But know this. Others may find you invaluable, and they will not let you leave. They will not treat you as well as I have, I think, and you will not receive a share of the plunder. Is this position so bad that you cannot endure it?”

  “It is almost over!” she told him, and hiked up her bag of food, clothes, and loot.

  “Don’t go back to the Red Tower,” he told her in warning. “There is no one there to go back to. The Whisper came out of the swamp and overran it. If you must go away, then go to North Stone and take service at Doom Wall with Hovus, or another of the chiefs left there.”

  She wailed out, but then cut it off before the feelings could overwhelm her. The toy castle in the forest had been precious to her, and she had found it a good place to live. She lifted her bag and swung it onto one shoulder and turned around, not looking back. She began walking north and east, winding her way out of the camp toward the latest harbor they had made for all the lake vessels supplying the siege.

  Kulith turned around and saw that many were staring at him, probably wondering if he would go after her and force her to come back, or somehow persuade her to stay. He crossed his arms and began to laugh, letting it build up from a chuckle, then cut it off before it became too loud and sounded affected. It was a bitter laugh, and he walked back over to the fire and picked up a mixed cup of water and tump he had left there, and he drank it off.

  “Was that a wise thing to do?” Kroson asked him a little later.

  “I have sent her away to rebuild the stronghold at Doom Wall,” Kulith told him, lying. “She is pregnant with someone’s whelp, perhaps mine, and I favor her over that chieftain’s daughter.”

  “It will be luck that she does not get picked up by another chief or warrior between here and there,” the goblin stated, “and she might still be of great help to us when we breech the fortress walls.”

  Kulith knew that the goblin was making sense. Kabi had later told him things about the castle that she had not said when the map was made, and he had not added those details to it. She had told him about what was underneath it, and he was guarding this knowledge, in case he needed it to bargain with. So he made up something to say.

  “This is a good outcome for several other reasons. It might help keep the buggers on edge, and it will now let me focus on what we have to do. Whatever the rest of you think, I will be the one that gets us into that castle. And now I can make an alliance with another chief through his daughter, one that will be sure to support me through the rest of this campaign. Do you know what some of the other trolls and my brother are doing right now?”

  Kroson nodded. “I have seen and heard things.”

  “You must support whoever wins of course,” Kulith told him. “I don’t think that we can ever manage this without your help, and I’ll remember that every time I divide up the provisions and the loot. Now go get that pit started for me, and bring over some of the other goblin chiefs next time you come, because I need to find out who they want to punish and put down into the bottom of it.”

  As Kroson got up and left, Kulith looked back over at Little Toad. She seemed like a bird ready to sing to him, vexed by being unable to.

  “Little Toad, is something on your mind?” he asked her.

  “You should not have let her go,” she said. “She seemed almost happy.”

  “And then she was sad,” Kulith said, as if narrating her story. “What do you know of bugger happiness? She was just being a troll, and now she is lost to her whims. That happens to us all. Do you think I don’t want to escape every day, to run away and have the great burden and hate of the thrings lifted up off me? And that is just the greatest of the dangers I face.”

  “Are you trying to save her then?” she asked him.

  “That is one way to explain letting her go,” he said, “but I think it is more that she was unable to take the strain of being so close to me. We are going to win here, and if we do not, nothing will be saved.” He drank from his cup again, and then he asked her. “You have heard of the legends, of the old tales of the gods, and of those that came before them?”

  “Of couse,” she said. “I was educated in the court at Rydol, at Zinsy, and at the Abbey of Kariks.” That was a lot of learning, and Kulith did not question it, but wondered instead if it might eventually prove useful to him.

  “Sometimes the old gods and goddesses and the other creatures worked together to make something big happen, or at least to make a good story,” he said.

  “You are asking m
e to do something more than just wash your jerkin for you?” she asked.

  “You will make a tale with me like those,” he said, “and people will tell it for five hundred years. Do not run from it like Kabi did.”

  “I will not,” she said, but she was covering herself over with the blanket scrap that she used for a shawl. Her face had turned red, and she was obviously thinking in the wrong direction about his intentions.

  “Stupid little sow,” he scolded her. “Listen for a moment to what I say. I need you to figure out how to split the dead penny between the warriors of the horde after we get hold of it. They will not trust me or trust each other, but you can perhaps make the marks and get them to agree. Also, I would like you to go look at the castle with me, and advise me of where it looks weakest. Go and think about this while you wash my jerkin, and then tell me how we will do it.”

  He sent two of the White Knife warriors out to go watch Kabi until she shooed them off, or got to somewhere and stayed there. They reluctantly went, fearing something big would happen while they were gone, and they would miss out on the sack of the Stone Pile.

  A couple hours after the sunset, when the darkness had spread across the waters of the Dimm, and there were only a few steaks of orange left in the sky, wrestling with the clouds advancing across the horizon, the thyrs attacked the observation tower on the left wall of the castle, rushing in the last fifty yards after creeping up to it in a thick, black mass. They threw dozens of ladders up against the stones, flanked by woven arrow screens. They threw barrels of oil and brimstone on a section of the tower’s base and then lit it on fire.

  The trolls and goblins in the camp all stopped what they were doing and came forward to the defenses, to watch the thyr attack and see how it fared. Torches lit up along the top of the Stone Pile’s wall, and on the observation tower, as the defenders turned out to fight.

  It was desirable to attack against the observatory because there were no crenellation or merlons on top of it, and the adjoining walls were set at inconvenient angles for defense, making an area before it that could not be watched and covered by arrow fire. But also it was very high, so the howling thyrs were forced to move their ladders immediately over onto the adjacent walls when they still did not reach to the full height. The howling helmeted heads bobbed up and down as ropes with hooks were tossed up and they started to climb them. The thyrs were adept with short bows and they created a great barrage on the walls, to support their ascending warriors.

  “That a great effort,” one of the goblin chieftains commented. “Should we support it?” he asked Kulith and the other chiefs.

  “They did not ask to attack, or for help,” Ovodag said as he watched it, and he crossed his arms defiantly in judgment.

  “This is impossible,” Kulith added, agreeing with his brother. “We are not ready to attack, and this is not the way for us to do it. We will only learn from this what must not be done.”

  Only a few moments later a great ball of pitch and oil was lit on top of the wall, and they watched it break up into many smaller pieces that were carried on forks along the walk and thrown down at the attackers’ ladders and ropes. They covered the wood and warriors in liquid fire, and the flames began to consume all, making thick and thin red lines that climbed up and down the face of the wall.

  “Someone go out and try to find Long Ridge and tell him to stop that attack,” Kulith said to those around him. A couple of the White Knife warriors went away, toward the staging position for the thyrs. Howls and yeps were heard now and the attacker’s shadows moved back and forth in the firelight, and there was a great milling around, of chaos, of hesitation now before the Stone Pile. The thyrs tried to grasp a different strategy, but then they just began to pull back, throwing all their failed siege material against the base of the tower into the fire, and then they put more oil on top of it. It was lit up brightly by the burning fuel, and the casks began to burn, heat and finally explode, splashing the oil high up against the tower wall, and across the grass at the base. The smoke and fire caused confusion and hesitation across the ramparts now as the goblins, trolls and thrings tried to fight, and also do something about it.

  Under this chaos, the thyrs successfully pulled back, with Long Ridge leading them to a point out of bowshot where they stood and howled and made a lot of racket, and watched to see if Vous Vox’s observatory would eventually catch fire and fall to the ground. Instead the fire began to die down and it left a long black mark with the red glow of about a dozen beam points that had been reduced at their projecting ends to embers.

  When that was all that happened, the thyrs became angry. Some fighting broke out among them, but it was quickly quashed or broken apart. After about an hour, Long Ridge himself came up to where they stood and made a mocking bow to Kulith, a gesture which no one else found amusing, only rude.

  Long Ridge was a great strapping thyr, so tall that he must have had troll blood in him from some old liaison or rape. Kulith considered him a very loose ally, as Long Ridge had argued for the desertion of the thyrs earlier in the campaign, only returning when it was evident that there was enough food, and that the fall of the Stone Pile would eventually happen with or without them. Now the wolf men had attacked with no coordination or consent, and there was sure to be a ring of white, burned thyr corpses standing around the base of the castle wall tomorrow morning as its new defenders.

  “I have made up for our absence in the horde by wetting the walls of the Stone Pile first with the blood of thyr heroes,” Long Ridge said.

  Kulith just gave him back a slow nod, then said, “Come see me in the morning and I will tell you what you need to do now.” He wanted to avoid killing the great chief, as he could tell it would be a close thing between them, even armed with the magic sword. And once he killed their hero, the other thyrs would be sour and make a fight with the rest of the buggers, and perhaps spoil the entire siege. Long Ridge bowed to him again, in parting.

  “I expect a major role in whatever trick you now use,” he said. “With just ladders and ropes, we were almost able to get over their wall tonight. It will go faster with us always in the front.” Kulith folded his arms across his chest as he stared back at Long Ridge.

  “Until tomorrow then I let you go, to care for your warriors.”

  Long Ridge looked around at the others, giving one of the chiefs a stink-eyed squint. Then he turned around and moved swiftly down the small rise, heading back to where the rest of the thyrs had made their camp.

  “He’s dangerous to you. Do you not see it?” Little Toad said over to Kulith, in front of all the other bugger chiefs that were there. They didn’t say anything, as if it had not been heard. Most of them were still sharing a frown, showing their concern over the thyr’s unauthorized attack.

  “Of course he is, Little Toad,” Ovodag said, and put his hand down on her head, and he messed up her greasy brown curls. She recoiled from him a step where he could not do it again, and bit down a cry of anger and fear. Kulith didn’t need his greater brother to save him from being embarrassed.

  “That crazy thyr,” he said aloud. “He is dangerous to us all with his recklessness. He is almost as bad as a stone woman who cannot keep her mouth shut.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  WAYLAND

  KROLO CASTLE, THE WEST LANDS

  Wayland’s sat in one of the galleries atop the walls of Krolo Castle that linked two of the towers together without exposing the defenders. He had made it into his office, with a table and a chair, and a functional camp desk created from two casks and a section of wine rack he had purchased down in the town. Though the bottle spaces in the rack were stuck rolled parchments and notes, using a filing system he had developed during the creation of the task.

  He sat at the table, and his pen now went across the page of parchment, making neat, careful letters following a faint, penciled guide line.

  ‘To the great Captain of the Canteen, Tig Morten of Troli, and to others receiving this report:

&nbs
p; Sir, on the sixteenth day of August I reached the village and castle of Fugoe, the former being in ruin, and the latter still garrisoned by hundreds of trolls and goblins. With the help of the Lords of Kassal and Krolo, who supplied troops and their own bodies, and the Knight of Kitzy, who did the same, and with the assistance of Sir Byrning of the Legion of Pendwise, we engaged with a host of goblins, both mounted on wolves and infantry, of about the same number as our expedition, after our flag of negotiation had been fired upon from the castle walls.

  In the aftermath of our victory on the field, we had difficulty establishing dialogue with Fugoe Castle, but this was finally arranged. We traded some provisions and ten horses of acceptable quality for twenty four subjects held hostage, their names and circumstances detailed on the attached list.

  The scribe Sarwin of Grotoy being among them, together with the others by witness told of twenty other captives still held, and of eight other captives who had died, and of sixteen taken away to somewhere else, these lists also attached. The monster we treated with, a Hovis Black Smile, a troll of the Priwak Barrens and bailiff there for the horde’s leader Kulith, stated to me how all the remaining hostages could be later exchanged through the vile traders who enter at times into the Priwak and upon lake Aven and do business with the monsters there, against the laws of God and men. He claimed it was his plan to abandon the castle at some future date, for lack of provision and because the leadership that had sent the goblins out into the West Lands no longer existed.

  By his account the Countess of Rydol has been taken away over the Priwak Barrens and west out onto the islands of Lake Aven, known as the Stones on the Dimm. Her captor is this leader troll Kulith, who from all accounts is also now in possession of the Tuvier Blade which he is using against the thrings to stage some kind of revolt. It is said that he still holds the countess close for a great ransom of three hundred pounds of silver she has promised him, and that he will not release her until his victory, or that it is paid.