A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  He had been tired before he decided, but now he felt fresh again enough to fight hard. He had picked up another sword, a crude thing, and held it in his other hand. He looked across and timed his strikes at the spear line and shields advancing down toward them. He was one of several hundred other buggers in the next wave that hit it at almost the same time.

  A spear caught the side of his helmet and deflected off. Another poked into his armor, and he felt a bit of the point go in. Then he swung the Tuvier Blade, and it came around and cut across them all, shearing off their spear ends. Two other buggers jumped through the gap and hammered down the shields of the ghouls, who had not firmly locked them, then began to go to work with axe and sword, hitting them in the heads. Another troll came up beside them, and with his great sword he reaped the ends of the spears that struck at his coat. His second blow came back and cut off the heads of two thrings. They ghouls grunted and shouted out in their hollow voices. Kulith began to hit them in the heads, one after another with his swords, the Tuvier Blade as often as not causing them to burst into flame when a wound was made.

  They did not push them back. They swarmed them and did not let them retreat, or form up properly. The Black Reeds hit them through the heads with their shortened thrings lances, and the others cut off the ends of their weapons so that they were just left holding onto sticks. More buggers came up the slope, moving around them. Kulith thought these were from out of the town and camp, where the reserve must have been victorious against the enemy. They went across the ground in a great movement, like they had in the West Lands, and the other buggers who had never seen it before saw and felt it too, and they howled or snarled as they ran with the rest and struck down the thrings.

  Kulith continued to bat aside the spears and hit the ghouls in their helmeted, white heads as he could reach them. Some drew swords, but their movements now seemed slow. The other buggers surged by him, keeping up, going past, stabbing, striking, driving their piles through the corpses. In a few moments, he was left alone amid a great mass of pierced and chopped up bodies, and the reserve had disappeared. He dispatched some that were still staggering around, and then he got himself free, moving to where the grass was again under his feet.

  The buggers were ahead, trying now to push back through the gaps in the piles of bodies that had been created earlier. They were moving in small groups, hitting the thrings and cutting them down before they could form another wall, a line, or any kind of ordered defense. He moved behind them, between the bodies, looking for something he would have to deal with personally.

  Then ahead he saw a vampire’s cloak, amid a group of thrings. It was compelling them to band together, to lock their shield and rebuild a defensive wall. They started to catch and knock the buggers who went at them down, then bring their spears around in unison, like the rowers in a boat, to meet and stab at the next. As Kulith moved toward them, many more thrings came around the piles, beginning to form a wall across the space, both out to the left and to the right.

  He felt he had reached the ghoul’s final defense, perhaps their whole army’s command, and wondered how much more fight each side had left in it. The sky overhead was darkening now for real, the clouds taking on the purple and gold hints at their edges that just proceeded twilight. The thrings were more powerful at night, and he dreaded that type of battle. He looked to the sides and rear, to see how many buggers were close by him. Could he do it himself? He hadn’t been able to do it before, and he saw again the limitations of the magic in the weapon he held.

  He waited and rallied the buggers to him who approached, lifting his sword for them to see. He knew they wouldn’t want to go back into lines, but it appeared they had no choice. He got a lot of thring killers to rally, buggers who had picked up lances from off the battlefield, or had carried them all the way across from where they had started. When the ghouls began to march down the incline and onto the flat of the field, the hardened wooden tips of their lances were now mostly buffeted and knocked back, and the buggers were pushed away by the spear points, a broken line of retreat forming as it bent back and began to break.

  Several trolls came up and joined them, and they began to wade in and call for the line to stiffen. Their larger weapons went back and forth, cutting at the ends of the spears, brushing off the sharp tips as they could. The buggers collected, arranged, and moved forward with shields and engage again with the line of ghouls, and their numbers now built back up, since the enemy had been found. It was fur, scored wood, dark flesh and dull armor pushing back against the thring line, with glinting points and wooden sharft around and above. There was a great racket and shouting, and slowly the ghoul line halted, and then it began to move back.

  There was a steady pounding: a constant hammer of spear heads and thring lances back and forth, and then it lessened a little as the ghouls were wedged apart in places, their sandals and shoes scraping and dragging at the ground as they braced and were pushed back anyway, by the shoving of the goblins and the trolls. The buggers began to cut into them again, and stab them forward through the heads with their spears and lances.

  The vampire reacted by moving forward, its long, ragged cloak flapping as it rose over the line and attacked one of the trolls with a quick-moving sword. The troll fought it off, dropping its longer weapon and grasping at it finally with his mailed fists. Kulith sprang into the opening made around the combatants and sliced through the flapping cloak, then slashed across it again, this time with the Tuvier Blade.

  The vampire burst into flame, it making a bright, pure gold light that caused both the buggers and the thrings to recoil away. Kulith jumped back and blocked the vampire’s weapon, before the other larger troll put his foot down and pinned it upon the ground, fire, cloak, and all. Two wooden lances drove down through it, and the fire became general, and burned up like a signal there, drawing additional buggers from across the field.

  They cut and slashed, and forced down the shields of the ghouls, and then began to drive in with swift thrusts of their lances. It was happening again, as Kulith imagined it was happening elsewhere also out in the gathering gloom, beyond the piles of thrings and cut down buggers, beyond the shouts and constant racket. They shoved forward once more and broke the new line into little groups with their numbers, and then they lanced or cut them down.

  Kulith urged them forward, shouting, and they broke through in another wave that dispersed quickly as it reached the rise of the slope to the west. He began to come upon withered and dying goblins and trolls, and they moved forward slowly, wondering what was ahead. Then he heard a loud sound, like a ripping of fabric, and an ugly ruby light leapt out and moved around in an arch for a moment, and as it passed it burned the goblins and trolls it struck, they falling on the ground with shouts, or worse gone suddenly silent and unmoving.

  He shifted his arms, putting the Tuvier Blade forward, ahead of him toward where the light had come from. The sword began to ring, the sound like a bell and then the blade blazed up into a candle of golden fire. He thought for a moment he must have found Sterina there ahead of him, that he would see the White Child herself in a moment with her red lock of hair. But then he saw that it was a troll a little taller than he was, with its skin white, and worked upon with black marks and magical signs. He wore a vest and leggings of gold-washed chainmail and leather, and in his hands was the source of the light, the malign energy that Kulith had just seen used.

  The thring was Geizus, the commander of the expedition that had come to wipe out the bugger revolt. Around him were arrayed several of the other greater thrings: some like ghouls, and some more like the vampires, dressed in heavy black coats. When he saw Kulith and his scores of following warriors appear out of the gloom, he turned around with the radiant purple staff he carried, and played it across the front of them like he was aiming an arrow at a moving target.

  The dirty, baleful red light shot out and dropped them with a ripping noise as it struck them, or just threw them back the way they had come. When it
struck the blade of the magic sword it flickered out while buffering him back like a strong parry, and then it leapt out again and continued on around in a partial arc.

  Kulith charged ahead, the need to attack and destroy the ghoul with the purple staff overpowering his fear, reason, and any other need he might try to put forward over it. The sword got brighter, the light rising up for twice its length, like a shaft of sunlight glowed, and struck down upon him there, drawing the attention of all the thrings that were standing around.

  Geizus pointed the staff directly at him and made the red line of flame to shoot out. It buffeted Kulith and he felt thick, as if he was moving in water, and he was also suddenly sick, weak, as the light drained away his vitality. It ended in a moment, and he surged forward again, closing the distance as other shapes moved around him faster, trying to get there first.

  There were dozens of them there, and then Geizus was swinging the staff around and down at him in blurred a rush. The other thrings seemed to move away, avoiding them, perhaps having heard of the Tuvier Blade’s power. Geizus hit the sword Kulith had earlier picked up on the field, and the purple staff dug into it and burned the blade half way through with a flash of brilliant sparks.

  Kulith struck out at the white face with the Tuvier Blade, as the monster lifted him off the ground with the other end of the cold rod. The weapons struck on another, as he got back up, numbed. They began to strike at each other, the rod making his skin go cold as it made contact, or passed close by, Kulith guessing that it would do terrible damage to him if it happened to strike his exposed flesh. They went back and forth, both panting, the blades sparking off the glowing purple rod. The thring’s breathing sounded like a big sheet of metal being repeatedly struck.

  Kulith put the rod into a bind that cut another great gouge in the sword he had picked up, and then he flicked out with the Tuvier Blade before Geizus could bring the rod around, as he had just done before. The monster tried to duck it, but it had been aimed lower, and it took the point of the sword in the chest, going right through the gold armor like it was made of linen.

  Geizus shouted and moved back, stumbling away off the point of the Tuvier Blade. As he did, Kulith stamped forward and struck the purple rod across its middle, between the thring’s hands. It made a cracking noise and there was a shudder, and a pass of energy flew outward, throwing Kulith back.

  He curled with the blades as he fell and rolled, and quickly lifted himself back up off the grass, only to turn and see that the thring’s arms now both ended at the elbows in black stumps, while the wound to its chest had started to glow with fire. It opened its mouth, perhaps to say something, and there was only a tongue of flame inside it. Then several goblins rushed forward and struck it with lances, pinning it to the ground, and another then put a final one through its head.

  Kulith staggered a bit, and looked up the slope. The other greater thrings were fighting or running away, going back up the hill. There were hundreds of buggers chasing after them in groups, putting piles through the slow ones as they caught them. Ahead, the grass was almost clean of bodies, behind him, the valley floor before the town was a mass of rough shapes and little rises, all dark and getting darker. There was smoke and dust, and a white mist was approaching from the east, coming in off the Dimm.

  He turned and found that the thyrs had surrounded him, and he stood there looking about, feeling spent. Long Ridge loped up beside him, with cuts all over his armor and black ichor sprayed in a line across his chest. The thyr chief looked around, trying to find more of the enemy.

  “Where do we go now?” he called out to Kulith, too loudly through the gloom. Kulith looked around, his eyes going first to the thrings being chased up the slope by bugger mobs, and then he looked off and saw the Stone Pile in the distance to the south, visible because Vous Vox had called for torches to be lit along the fighting walk on the top of the wall.

  “We win this battle!” Kulith shouted back. He pointed down, to the south where the buggers were still fighting each other on the flat. A dozen Stone and Priwak clans battled the swamp goblins of Sterina, in a writhing mass, with the broken front just discernible down through its middle. There was nothing there on the left flank of the swamp buggers and where they stood but open ground.

  Long Ridge began calling all the other chiefs together, and the center of the great army massed and began to wander south across the slopes, looking off with Long Ridge toward the fighting. When one of the goblins lifted up a signal horn, Long Ridge stopped him, and just motioned for all the buggers to keep going, and to form themselves up in several rough lines. Kulith looked over at him and warned him.

  “Drink from one of the barrels you put out, as soon as you can find one. You are covered all over in thring blood, and your own.” Long Ridge glanced back, and smiled at him with his fangs.

  “So are you! Just remember, lesser son of a Priwak troll, who broke the line this day. It was the thyrs, the mightiest of the bugger tribes.” That was debatable, and pointedly not the truth as Kulith thought it. The thyr’s claim would be contested for a long time, probably as long as there were pot fires and buggers to talk around them. But Long Ridge and the rest of them had just destroyed the main portion of Sterina’s army, and so Kulith let him say it, though he did not give it a nod back.

  Long Ridge was now poised there with the surviving buggers, and they were about to sweep down and destroy the right flank of Sterina’s army. There was no question of what was about to happen now. He signaled to the other chiefs and they all started down the hillside, slowly closing in on the enemy’s flank. When they had gotten closer, Long Ridge let them blow their horns and signal out to the other part of the army that they were there.

  Kulith tried to follow them, but perhaps he had been hit too hard by the purple stick that the greater thring had held. The sword, perhaps disappointed, did not now refresh him well now. He had enough strength to make it over to one of the barrels the thyrs had set up before the battle. He looked down inside, to see that all the water had been used.

  “A bugger’s luck,” Kulith said, then slipped down and rested with his back against it. He only rested there for a moment, but it was a moment that went on and on.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  KULITH

  INTO THE STONE PILE

  There were a lot of rumors going around in the morning, after the battle, as they slowly cleared away and burned the bodies from it. It was said that Vous Vox had fled during the fighting. Another said that thirty human girls had been seen tossed up into the Stone Pile during the encirclement, to nourish the fiends and vampires still laired inside. Some said that Kulith was dead, or that Sterina had been destroyed on the field by him. There were a hundred glad meetings and reliefs as he went back and forth across the old line of battle and assured the others that he was alive. None of what was said seemed to be true, but it was what they were not saying that troubled him the most. No one could determine if the allied buggers had actually won the great battle they had just fought.

  It was hard to tell what had really happened, when there were piles of thrings as high as a the heads of the trolls all about, with the points of wooden lances sticking out of them all over like the thorns on a berry bush. And some of them were still moving, though most of had lost their animation, when the major thrings controlling them had been destroyed. The many fire pits, burning both thring piles and the decayed white bodies at the same time threw up a pall of smoke that the wind could not drive away. It settled, and grew heavier over the blackened field.

  The different commands got in touch with each other and gained an idea of what had happened on the seperate parts of the battlefield, stretching from just north of the Stone Pile across the Meadows, to a small warren three miles north of the town, and the entire battle came together like a story, and Kulith could mostly grasp what had happened.

  The thrings had sent several waves of their factoria workers and a great host of rotten bodies down the hills at them, and also a small
er horde had come directly out of the water on the east side of the island and attacked the docks, the supplies and the camps. These attacks had been stiffened by greater thrings, that could fight and do terrible damage, and these had either perished or escaped, as their fortunes had fallen out.

  This had been followed in the middle by several legions of thring ghouls who had fought like men, and these had included the masters driving the great ranks forward. There had been magical fiends, and vampires, and these were the ones Kulith had run into at the turn of the slope and fought with. Beside these, and now hampered by them all to a great degree were two separate hordes of buggers: one gathered from around the Knife Back Palace, and the other from the Sweep, a marshy area that lay to the north of the Pale Shore.

  By the time they would try and close and come to blows, the two armies had found themselves faced by growing piles and walls of undead, still squirming but transfixed by lances. These could not be gone through, and it became a great task to stop and move many out of the way. Sterina’s buggers had audaciously pushed through and created gaps by clearing them, and then marched through, where the thousands of goblin archers now massed to the south had shot into them, and they had found themselves unprepared to receive such a great volume of arrow fire.

  This had been about the time that Kulith and the thyrs had cut through the thring lines and attacked the undead men: the ghoul army Sterina had brought over from the Pale Shore. If the Red Toung goblins had planned some attack against him, they now found themselves too busy, as they tried to follow. The middle of the formation had then engaged in a great, more regular pitched martial battle than either the right or the left flank.

  Besides Geizus, Sterina’s children had mostly avoided fighting directly with Kulith, and this might have caused them to break ranks on the hill and eventually get run down in ones and twos by the thyrs, the White Knives, and the Red Marks. Sternia’s bugger hordes had come to different fates. The southern one had fought across the flat under the withering arrow fire and moved into a position where they could burn the battering ram, and conuct a pitched battle. The thyrs had then tuned and come down on their flank with the remains of the Black Reeds and Kroson’s buggers, and they had been mostly annihilated, only about a mile from the walls of the Stone Pile, the wolf cavalry finally chasing the survivors out along the south coast for miles.