A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  Sunnil had taken part in the sapping ceremony to start the siege as a bargain, in order to send yet another letter out to the West Lands. She could tell that some of the chiefs were becoming annoyed, distracted, and almost angry about what was happening on the Shore above North Stone. As she had once threatened, the Yellow Duke of Wallenz had invaded the Priwak, and a sizable force had begun to burn out all the settlements that they found there, where the slope came down and stuck out as a headland upon the Dimm. They were now threatening to lay siege to Doom Wall, and its castellan Hovus Black Smile was sending a runner down every other day to the chiefs with a sharp message, demanding that warriors be returned north, or that they send her instead to be bargained across.

  But because of what Kulith had told them earlier, no one wanted to do that now. They were counting on her to divide the dead penny, and they were all getting nervous with each other: becoming selfish and defensive. None of the warriors wanted to leave, with the prospect of a huge, unimaginable looting lying just ahead. They were savage and stubborn, and warrens and farms could always be rebuilt later.

  She watched the attempt to break the gate with the ram, and then she followed them back down to the town. It was deep night by then, but the stink from the funeral pyres and ash still hung in the air over the island. She didn’t know if it would ever smell right again, and it probably never had to begin with. They buggers settled in, to drink and eat, all waiting for the next day. That was never easy for goblins, and in another hour, fights began to start out in the streets of the town.

  “Let them go at it,” Kulith said, and gestured with his hand for her to come away from the window. She shut it up and came back to watch him sitting at a table, eating a greasy plate of meat with bread, and trying to drink a watery mixture of edge berries and tump.

  “You should stop them,” she reproached him.

  “If they are not smart enough to wait, to get their share of the dead penny, then maybe they are the ones we should get rid of now.”

  “You made them free, and now they squander it!” Sunnil said, in an open declaration of her opinion on the matter. “If they do not understand this, you should tell them it, so that they stop.” The troll looked over at her, and then he took his hand for a moment off the golden hilt of the Tuvier Blade.

  “We are monsters,” he said to her. “We are never free of ourselves.”

  The next morning there was a big meeting on the edge of town, near where they were laying out a ditch work to be dug around the west side of it. They had primarily done this it seemed, to keep the rest of the buggers busy, but they all wondered if Sterina would return and attack them again. In the distance, the smoke still rose off the great pyre, where they were still burning the bodies that were found, or the new ones created through fighting and sickness.

  All of the great chiefs were there, meaning ones with more than a hundred warriors, and many of the sub-chiefs also, who might have no more than a handful of buggers who had followed them from a warren, cave, plot of land, or pot fire in the horde.

  They had used sticks to measure out how far they had dug, and they tried to present this visually by putting it out in miniature on a model, but it was ultimately unsatisfactory. One of the groups had hit sloping rock, and now they were digging around it, toward another tunnel company, which would eventually end in a fight. Perhaps one of the other groups was lying about how far they had dug by the way they had discussed it. How and why, she was not sure.

  Sunnil had intuitively seen it though, as she watched them drink tump, eat broiled meat off sticks, and discuss how much progress was being made. She was sure Kulith had caught it also, but he had said nothing in his usual fashion of ignoring the things that the chiefs and buggers would have to work out for themselves. Eventually they turned to her, and Kulith lifted his hand to beckon for her to come forward now and talk about how the dead penny would be divided up and split out evenly.

  “I have thought of several ways this could be done,” she said to them. “I have determined that the easiest way to do it will be by branding pieces of wood with a hot iron, the iron displaying a design and words only known to myself and the trolls, who will be in charge of the division.”

  There were a few snarls, but everyone had already accepted that there would be no other way to do it. She then proposed using wood shingles from some of the partially destroyed buildings in town, putting them now to good use. After these were paid out, they would be collected up and immediately burned.

  “I will look upon the treasure, and make equal shares of it for you all, putting aside a small portion to be divided among the chiefs, and the rest to stand against the debts of the horde.”

  “What guarantee do we have?” called out one of the small chiefs.

  “You have mine,” Ovodag said.

  “And mine,” Kulith said, a moment later. “I have made it so that you have kept everything you took from the West Lands, from Sarik’s horde, and kept it all from Sterina’s grasp. I defeated her warlord Geizus, so you should all believe me.”

  “And you must all trust each other,” Kroson called out, as he stepped forward, dressed in bandages from the wounds he had taken during the great battle. “It will not be one or two trolls who will take the dead penny, but all of us working together, and even then I doubt that we can carry it all off.”

  “I will show you how hard it will be!” Ovodag said. Two of the trolls parted, and Rat Ears stood there, his feet in shackles. He had been beaten several times, and the bruises and cuts were evident through his matted fur. Ovodag pulled a great bag of coins from a chest and threw it down at the goblin’s feet.

  “If you can carry that to a boat,” he said to the goblin, “you may leave this island alive with it, as our thanks for your warning. But do not return here to Big Stone, or you will be found out and executed.”

  The goblins parted, and the creature went over to the bag. He hefted it up, and staggered forward under its weight, dragging the foot shackles as he moved forward across the ground. Rat Ears thought he would be allowed to take it at a tolerable pace, but the trolls followed him, and made it otherwise.

  They struck him on his exposed back with switches of cracked cane, the sound of it more terrible than the actual blows. He shuffled forward more quickly now in pain, and then looked back, trying to keep ahead of them. The goblins who had vegetables handy threw them at him as he passed. A few threw their empty tump cups at him. Some hit Rat Ears and either shattered, or bounced off from his fur and bones.

  The goblin fell over, and then jumped back up when one of the trolls struck him again with a cane. He dragged the bag, then picked it up and staggered off again toward the docks under his heavy load. The horde was happy to see him go, and they seemed to relish both the spectacle, and the inventive punishment that Ovodag had chosen for him.

  “Tomorrow, we will try to break down the gate again,” Kroson called out to the chiefs and others still listening. “Those buggers who wish to be in on it must come and see me today. It will all be very amusing to watch.”

  They waited until the next afternoon, and then they rolled up the new ram they had built. It was bigger than the last, being about half again as long and high. It caused so much worry that Vous Vox or another greater thring inside the fortress commanded all the remaining undead around the walls to move forward immediately and block the road in a deep rank. The volunteers wetted it, then got into it from behind and began to push it forward up the road, as the rest of the buggers stood around and watched with interest.

  They began to shoot burning arrows down at it when it was still several hundred feet away, and Kulith and Ovodag held their breath. The lesser thrings made for it, closing in long before it reached the remains of the old ram, which stood in a pile of cinders and blackened iron, still pressed against the ragged front of the wooden gate. The goblins blew their horns, urging those inside on from afar, as the thrings pushed back on its front, trying to stop the forward progress of the monstrous moving
rectangle covered in wet hide.

  Weapons flashed out along the sides and front of the ram, wielded by trolls and thyrs who had expected it. The thrings were mostly cut to pieces, except for several that climbed up the front of the ram and hung there, dangling off the apron to no purpose. The ram, as big as a wood man’s barn and twice as long moved forward slowly again, with battens being moved from the front like oars to push aside the wreckage. They reached the gate and put the frame against it, as Vous Vox called down lightning again from out of the sky, darkening the afternoon for a moment, before the white flashes and booms.

  There were again three heated cauldrons of oil atop the gate, and these were lifted and turned over to spill their contents down onto the top of the ram’s apron, where it stuck and sheeted down off the sides, sending up white smoke from the overlapping hides and wood. There was a hesitation, and then the goblins and trolls along the top of the fighting walk shot arrows down onto it, and it burst into flame. There was another pause, and then the ram began to move on its chains, inside the apron. It came back and then swung the other way. It struck the gate once, twice, then three times, and then it seemed to go slack. That was the signal. As the buggers along the walls of the Stone Pile celebrated in a roar, and the undead looked down in stony, contemplative silence, the front of the ram erupted into smoke and flame. The fire rose higher and moved along toward the back of it, catching the entire peaked roof alight.

  Apprehensively they watched, and then from the middle of the ram came a second sheet of fire that shot up, turned as they watched it to a solid sheet, putting off black smoke that quickly became very thick. The buggers who had volunteered to man the ram broke from the rear and ran as fast as they could away, down the road and across the side of the hill. The archers on the walls followed them with the points of their shafts, but they were hard to see now through the great column of smoke.

  Then the front of the apron erupted, bursting apart, throwing pieces of itself up into the air as a great fireball rolled outward and consumed the gate, the wall, and the top of the gatehouse. The concussion knocked thrings and buggers off the walls, and most of the ram crew were struck down as they ran. The heat and light came back to the others standing around and watching, and they put up their hands to shade their eyes.

  When the great fireball had rolled up and dispersed into the sky, the goblins and thyrs began to sound their horns and bang on their drums, as they watched the gate house of the Stone Pile burn merrily away. The chiefs all turned and looked at one another in satisfaction, gloating, glorified by the spectacle they had made for all the other buggers standing there. If they had not thought that they could finish the job, they were now sure that they could, and that their weapons were stronger than all of Vous Vox’s magic.

  As the buggers traded knowing glances and drifted back toward the town and camp surrounding it, the survivors of the attack made their way back to the foot of the road where they each received a purse of silver and gold for their efforts. There was nothing more to be done now, except to wait for it to burn out, and see what it looked like then. Sunnil returned with Kulith and the chiefs to the town, and they settled in to eat, or get sleep, or wench with their sows, counting on the results they would see tomorrow, and that it would be auspicious.

  The next day the horde woke up hopeful, with great anticipation for the final end of the campaign. Kulith roused off his furs and discovered that several things were happening at once, some of them large, and some of them small and easy to deal with. The first was that the front gate of the Stone Pile had been reduced to ash, and now the blackened tunnel behind it holding the trap and second gate could be plainly seen. The second thing that he was told, as he was observing the first with several of the chiefs was that the thrings had began attacking and poisoning the wells on Big Stone, as they had on North Stone and some of the other islands.

  To complicate this, the sickness that had been plaguing the encampments had flared up again and had killed a score of the buggers in one place alone. They had avoided this mostly by continually changing camps, as one became too polluted, by moving on to a new, fresh one. There was not much space left now that had not been fought over or camped on at one time or another. Now that the buggers could see the gate burned down, and through it, they would be unwilling to move to where they could not see clearly what was happening.

  The third thing happened when he returned to the town afterward. He watched Little Toad and Kabi begin to argue over the brands and the shingles they were preparing in a cleaned out factoria for the division of the dead penny. The White Knife warriors looked on in concern, ready to restrain the female troll, and they felt that Kulith was ultimately responsible, and needed to do something about it.

  He was concerned, but was also now juggling other bigger problems that the great chiefs could not hope to adequately deal with. The prospect of fighting between the buggers before they had taken over the Stone Pile was again a growing possibility. The burned gate was tempting them, and they felt worry over the impossible amount of trust they had put into the tunnel companies to do adequate jobs and not try to take over or loot the fortress for themselves.

  Kilith often felt that he was fighting a moral battle against the fourth type of bugger: a part of himself as well, and by satiating or redirecting his own dark nature, he thus controlled the others around him. So he called them all together, and told him his plan, hoping they would also feel as eased, after it was done.

  “We are close to getting into the fortress,” he said to them, as they ate a haunch of horse meat seasoned in salt and badger sauce, served with cooked potatoes, and drank tump diluted with edge berries and water. The old veterans like Narus the Nail and Big Agrok nodded, as they had always felt he was holding things back, and knew more than was said to the rest of them. The younger chiefs who had replaced the old ones lost in the battle looked back and forth, but mostly kept their mouths shut, just worried that somehow the others would steal the glory and treasure from them now. Kulith looked over at the thyrs, sitting in their own small, proud group.

  “Long Ridge is collecting up most of the thyr’s pigs right now and is driving them down to Big Stone to be used to make the fire in the sapping of the wall. I have paid him ten pounds of silver and ten pounds of gold so far, taken from the dead penny and the plunder we have collected.” It was an exorbitant amount, more by far than the countess’ ransom, and it was challenged a moment later.

  “What are we getting for this? Some pigs?” Urubo’s replacement asked Kulith.

  “You and the rest of the buggers will move your camp and form a ring of pot fires and tents all the way around the Stone Pile,” he told him. “This will ensure that nothing gets out, and nothing gets in without us knowing about it. The pigs will be used to feed the horde, and the fat will be rendered off or cut free, and stored with rags in barrels and crates made tight with skins. These will be moved down into the sap when it is ready to be fired, and we will blow down the wall with flame like we did to their gate.”

  “Some of us don’t want to move out of the town, or from where we are now,” one said.

  “Then you should just let the others guard your silver and gold for you. After the fighting is complete, this ring camp will be sealed off and only those within it will be entitled to a share of the dead penny.” He had just placed a lot of rules on them, and he waited for them to protest, but no one did. They suddenly saw the beauty of it also: that they would all be watching each other, and what was done, He tapped the hilt of the Tuvier Blade with one of his fingers to get back their attention.

  “There are a number of other things that we need to do. We should armor all the good wells by placing brochs of stone around them, to prevent them from being poisoned by the thrings. The movement of water back and forth to the ring camp in barrels will help hide the creation and storage of the pig fat, and it will keep us from getting sick.” They loved a story, and the idea that they were fooling the cold, deadly thrings in some great way
got them interested, and they knew it could be passed on to their braves, and it would mostly keep them in line. The control of the camp diseases they did not find interesting at all.

  “It’s coming,” Kulith promised them. “It will happen with just a few more days of work.” He looked around, seeing he had restored order for the most part, then he continued. “I agree that there should be a wall around this town, but I also think that there should be a tower built up on the spine of Big Stone, with a fire kept in it that can be used to signal down to us if an attack is coming from the Pale Shore. It will also act as a beacon, to warn away our enemies. We will light it only after the Stone Pile has fallen.”

  They all liked the idea of it: to have a big burning light over Big Stone, and thus over the entire Dimm, that warned off their enemies and put fear into those seeing it. So they agreed that another larger broch would be constructed on the spine, with a warren on the high ground, standings as an observation point over the new frontier to their west. There was an immediate argument about which group it would belong to, and Kulith answered that by saying that it and the land around it would belong to the group who put the most effort into creating the sap.

  He knew that such a reward would be double edged for the receiver. They would take on a greater responsibility, and it would always overlook the forest, which he now considered the entire existence of to be a nuisance and danger, since it helped to hide the Whisper and perhaps other thrings.

  “There is one more thing that I want to say here,” Kulith told them. “Have each bugger create as big sack of leather, strong enough to hold at least thirty pounds of coins.”