A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  “Is that all there will be?” one of the new chiefs immediately asked. Kulith really didn’t know, but it was the best estimate that Little Toad had worked out for him, based on what Kabi had seen and what they expected.

  “That’s a lot of silver,” one of the older chiefs commented, his observation still sounding contrary, but it then became important. “A warrior would not get a quarter of that in a year of raiding if he was lucky, and only a few would get that much. And that would be before the Overlord of the Dimm demanded his cut.”

  “Which will no longer happen,” Kulith said firmly. They were all stunned for a moment by this admission, because it had not occurred to them to think that far ahead, or to consider it. “By next year, the tax of the dead penny will also be halved,” he continued, “with certain duties and prohibitions removed all together. I want you to take this money and build castles and stronger warrens that the thrings cannot penetrate into, and start to trade with it among yourselves for the things you want and need.”

  Everybody shifted around. It was a new idea, and no one really believed it would work. Kulith doubted it himself, but at least he had said it to them, and it was possible. He sat down and let the rest of them speak their minds, nodding, not objecting, and perhaps only considering the points of the arguments they made. Later they broke apart and he went now to find Kabi. It was time to defeat the fourth type of bugger now lurking in his camp.

  She was experimenting with a brand, heating it and applying it to a wooden board, to see how it would mark. She stood back from the brazier and looked at it, and then she saw him. She set the brand down on a stone table and came over to see him.

  “I have told all the chiefs now to move their warriors over to the Stone Pile,” he said. “We will form a ring of tents around the structure, and feast there until the walls are breached.” She did not say anything, but looked interested. A blush of red spread from below her eyes down across her cheeks to points just above the notches filed into the bone on both sides of her jaw. One of the gold bracelets she had worn had been lost somehow, and replaced with a silver one of lesser value and workmanship. She had retained the gold necklace, but not the jewel that had been hanging there on it. She touched the necklace then, in a gesture of remembrance, shame, ambition, or some other emotion she hid now from her face.

  “We have had our differences, you and I,” he told her, “but perhaps that is almost at an end. This rebellion business is beyond any of us, but someone has to try and do it. If we succeed now, and it seems certain that we will, I will have removed a great part of the fear that weighs down and crushes each bugger every day.”

  “So I have felt it too, all my life, just as you have.” He said. “But you can see now if you have eyes at all, that it has been diminished. What will it be like after Vous Vox is gone, after Sterina is perhaps gone too? You will feel as good then as you have felt bad, I reckon. And if not, then we can always run off and live in the Khaast Forest or in the swamps in the Golok March.”

  “The humans will see us from afar,” he continued, “or perhaps only catch our scent. They will say to eachother: there are buggers here, the ones who fought against the stinking thrings. They will have to admit that we were very brave to do that, and it is what they would aspire to have done in our places, if they were under such tyranny.”

  She listened politely to what he was saying, and parts of it she appeared to understand, and it interested her. But it was not what she really wanted to hear. He understood that his great gift was being able to, along with the wielding of a magical sword, tell people what they wanted to hear, and fill them up with words that made their lot acceptable.

  “You should come back to my tent now,” he then said to her, “because I miss you, and I can make what you fear go far away. We will live like royalty for a little while, and then go set up a village somewhere, with a strong central hall, using what I have learned, perhaps on North Stone, or in a new way, by building it out on the Eastern Shoal. I want you to come back: I desire you. You waste your time following in the footsteps of Little Toad: doing the stone woman’s work. Yes, I watch her, but only because she is very dangerous to us. She will soon become our worst enemy, and it is better to know and understand her now, than to not.” She paused, looking over at him, and then she answered him.

  “I will return to your tent, since you have said it so to me. But you must treat me as your first wife, or I will not stay.” He beamed and reached across and took her hands in his. She flushed again, in excitement.

  “Come and help me set up our tents, on the spot I have picked,” Kulith asked her. “I will get some sows or some injured warriors to help Little Toad do her work.” He came around the table and took her hands again, and led her out of the building, onto the street of the town. As the Stone Pile came into their view on its hill, he began to explain to her his plan to finish it off, and as they walked towards it, he pointing out to her where they would set up the tents, and what she could help him do there. For now, he had defeated the fourth type of bugger, and everything could go on smoothly until the sack.

  The tents began to go up in a great ring, with stones being laid and soil from the diggings used to build up platforms that were leveled out on the sloping sides of the hills. On these were then placed the major tents of the chiefs, and soon everyone wanted a flat place on the slopes, built by digging in, building it up, or in some cases by erecting floors of wood supported on frameworks of posts. A smaller circle was made and a gap left in one area, for the construction of the rams, and for the bringing in of heavy lumber. This created a lot of work for the buggers, and they toiled for several days as the next ram was built there, and as the sapping tunnels were extended more towards the walls.

  Kulith built defenses around several of the wells that were proven good, and were set ideally for the water to be transported over to the camp. This reduced the diseases a great deal as the old, polluted ones were abandoned. The buggers could now drop trash and make their slit trenches wherever they wished, outside the defenses that were being built around the new encampment. The thyrs began to drive their pigs down onto Big Stone and put them into corrals, or made great herds of them to graze out upon the slopes and open meadow, and on the stubble of the harvested crops. The burning of the bodies was completed and the great pit then filled in. A tumulus was built over the spot with a stone cap to mark the site.

  From the battlements atop the Stone Pile Vous Vox watched the industrious buggers, and brooded with his remaining thrings and guards. The new ram they built was a long, complex structure, and it took time to get it right so that their ideas would work, mostly through trial and error. As they at last got it figured out after several days, Kulith received the real news he had been waiting for.

  Kulith was sitting on the edge of the bed frame they had built inside his great tent. The tent was a collection of the three tents he had previously acquired, now stitched and toggeled together, with internal walls and platforms made of discarded thring piles and wood. Little Toad had come back earlier with the archer, and had been explaining and demonstrating the weights and wooden tiles to him, while Kabi had stood aside, in a new, provocative green dress and black silk bodice decorated over with red and gold geometric designs now popular in Bezet. Her old jewelry had been replaced with other pieces that were only slightly more modest.

  Little Toad appeared calmer now, in better health, and passably clean, though not to the standards of the stone men. Kulith nodded along, but only understood about half of what she said. To him it was not so important that the division of the dead penny be equal, only that it appear equal for the most part to the rest of the buggers. Little Toad took it seriously though, and so he was polite to her, though they both knew equality was an abstract concept.

  One of the White Knife warriors came in dressed in a coat of mail that had come off of one of Sterina’s ghouls. He carried a good sword, and a dagger with a silver hilt. Behind him was Long Ridge and Big Agrok. Everyone in the te
nt paused, including Little Toad, who set down the weight and scale that she had been demonstrating, showing him how it was equal to a five pound bag of silver pennies.

  “The tunnel to the south of the Stone Pile has hit the wall’s foundation,” Agrok reported to him excitedly. Kulith and the others only needed to turn and look at the map drawn out on a board upon one of the walls to figure out which one he was talking about. Then he looked at the other map, the one he had drawn with Kabi’s help at the Red Tower to see what they might have hit.

  “How does it look?” he asked him.

  “Like a seam of rotten wall, at least twenty feet high, with the barren bedrock underneath it.” Kulith considered it. If the north and west side of the fortress stood on bedrock, he was looking at a seam of foundation that extending from there around to the south and east, anywhere between those depths, or perhaps even a little deeper. He drew a rough circle, and then chalked in the height difference like a widening edge. He assumed Vous Vox had built most of the Stone Pile, and that the lich knew what the foundations looked like, and where they were weakest.

  “Discontinue work on the north tunnel,” he said. “Have the chief report here for payment of what he is owed.” It was not a time to make enemies. “Have the two chiefs in the other tunnels now dig sideways to reach and intersect the south shaft, and we will feed all the supplies and dirt through all three, confusing Vous Vox. If we cannot keep him from knowing where we will mine the wall, I will blur our progress as much as we can, and surprise him.” Four of the other chiefs were there also, and he looked at their faces and got silent assents or nods from each.

  He looked at Long Ridge. “Start to kill all the pigs and store up the fat in boxes and barrels. It should keep well enough in the cool weather. We will dig the slight out, and then bring the fat in through the tunnels. I’d like to have it ready to burn in about a week.”

  “Those other tunnels will not even reach the south one by then,” Big Agrok pointed out. Kulith thought about it. It was vital that all three be worked on, to continue the ruse.

  “Pull out all four digging teams, and bring them here to be paid. We must of course, do this quietly. Agrok will then take over and use his buggers to dig all the tunnels and the sap. You will dig out from the south tunnel to the sides also, to more quickly reach the other two that are being dug. That will save half the time, and prevent misunderstandings. Move the dirt at night, as much as you can, or otherwise try to conceal it.” He doubted that this could be done, and the eyes on the walls of the Stone Pile were probably keeping track of every foot of timber that went into the shafts, and every bucket of dirt that went out.

  “Have the next ram prepared to be used on the gate in two days time. All the chiefs should be notified, and have their buggers ready to stand to for the final assault sometime next week.” That would keep them focused until the sap was complete, he thought. They all went away, leaving Little Toad without an audience, with only Kulith, his servants, Kabi, and a couple of the White Knife hanging around.

  “How many pennies will fit inside a barrel?” he asked Little Toad.

  “It’s not a question of how many will fit,” Sunnil replied. “It’s the ability to move the barrel once you have filled it, and have it stay together.”

  “So a cask can hold forty pounds with a little room to spare, and perhaps five times that much in a barrel, before it is unmovable, and will split its hoops.” Kulith scratched his chin and nodded. “Old barrels though, will not hold so well as that.” He looked over at Kabi. “How many barrels did you see, and how many vaults?”

  “Several hundred, stacked four high,” she told him. “There were ten vaults at least, and some of them were much grander, and I never saw inside those.”

  Little Toad did a rough calculation on a piece of slate. Of course, some of the vaults could be empty, while others might hold more or different types of treasure. And of course the dead penny hadn’t just been stacked up for seven or eight hundred years. There had been withdrawals at times, to purchase foreign luxuries and slaves, and for public works that the buggers could not be forced to build for free. The Wet Way had been constructed by the Growler using paid labor, long ago at the start of his tyranny, and Kulith had used it to invade Big Stone. Of course, a lot of that money had just gone back to the thrings in the form of tribute, or taxes.

  This was the last time they would do this, Kulith decided, as it had lost most of its magic to motivate the other buggers. An idea was sometimes better than the truth, because the truth would sometimes bite you, or give you away, like an unfamiliar dog. She showed him the numbers, and he nodded, not really knowing what they meant, but that it was enough. She figured it with the gold amount at one tenth that of the silver.

  “Twenty two pounds of silver, and a pound of gold each, or its value in silver or other things that they can carry away,” Kulith said to the others there. Little Toad frowned at his inaccuracy, but she nodded along after a moment.

  “Set each share at this amount, and after we seal the camp and bring out the treasure, we will give each bugger who fought a shingle. When they receive their share, they surrender the shingle, and they must leave the ring and not return. Anything that is left will be kept as a reserve, to pay our debts and stand as prizes for the chiefs who are here, with three shares also going to Hovus Black Smile for his troubles.”

  Some of them had not wanted to give the troll anything, but they had all finally admitted that he had kept the supplies moving south, and was now contending with the incursion by the soldiers from Alonze, that harried the northern shore of the Dimm. The real figure for the treasure many of them felt, or knew from Little Toad’s figures, was surely much greater, but Kulith was content on playing it safe.

  Most buggers would kill a pot mate for five or six gold coins, and he was offering them each a handful, on top of a small fortune in silver. What they would do with it after they got it was anyone’s guess, but that was the way these things went. The bugger smart enough to sell tump and sows to the rest of them after the sack would instantly become rich, and though he had breached this idea to the other chiefs for their benefit, they had been unable to figure it out, as trade like that did not exist. They could not create or seize it, and bring the money back to themselves. The haphazard commerce being done now would simply continue, and the buggers would have to go up to North Stone to find what they wanted. Only the horde supply line existed, which they had taken mostly intact away from the thrings.

  Little Toad wrote the amount he had said on the slate, and they put it aside with the weights equaling the amount, so that matching ones could now be found or made and used at the division. The ones who had stayed now excused themselves, and Kulith himself needed to go and meet the digging parties and award them as they were due. Tomorrow, they would consolidate the tunnels and start cutting the sap.

  There was some wild drinking in the camp circle that night, accompanies by fights, and some of the vampires in the Stone Pile tried to take advantage of it and get an easy meal. There was a general alarm, after which they shot arrows and chased the monsters around with piles, hoping to spear them before they could escape, or get back over the fortress walls.

  Kulith ran back and forth, only to see one of the monsters streak by on fire, before being brought down and fixed to the ground with piles. They made a pyre on top of it, and burned it down to ash. The rest escaped, as were their wont, and Kulith realized this might make for a rash of new undead on Big Stone: a plague of the type that the Whisper could create, if not quite in the same way. But it also meant that something had changed in the Stone Pile. Perhaps they had run out of blood, or the alliance between the undead inside was on shaky ground. If anything, there were now several less demons they would have to fight once they got inside the fortress.

  They spent most of the next day looking for the ones who had escaped, and trying to find where they had laired. One was found in the town, and hunted down and destroyed. Since the new ram was ready, Kulith
had it rolled into position, and then the buggers who were involved met with him and they discussed together how it would work. In the evening most stood outside their tents and shanties to observe its assault.

  The ram was very long and narrow, with several sets of small wheels, made to fit through the broken gate and set in front of the next one across the entrance court. Kulith was surprised that no one had come out of the Stone Pile and tried to dig a trench across the road, as it would have prevented any more ram attacks, at least until it was dealt with. They buggers wheeled it up closer, and the number of defenders on the walls surged. The crew then talked for awhile themselves, ignoring the Stone Pile, discussing what they needed to do. When all was ready, they climbed on inside it, and the last goblin waved a red flag over to Kulith’s tent, and then he waved one back.

  It moved slowly forward, approaching the wrecks of the other two rams, which had burned down to be mere black outlines, with the ironwork and chains only left there to be push or rolled over. The defenders atop the gate were perhaps cautious now about trying to set it afire, and there was no great attempt to do this. They threw rope ladders down over the walls instead, and goblins and trolls went down these, or descended by sliding more quickly, to drop and stand next to the ram.

  Kulith saw what they meant to do immediately, and it was a very clever strategy. They would try and capture the ram and keep it there, lodged in place, to prevent any further attempts to break down the inner gate. In effect, it would become a new second gate for them. The trolls and goblins saw it too, and they shouted over at him to call for an assault, to save it from its fate, and prevent what the defenders of the Stone Pile were trying to now do. He was uncertain of the whole plan for a moment.

  Then he picked up a yellow flag from where he had set it ready, and began to wave it up at the ram. They were supposed to watch, to be able to see him if he did it. It was supposed to signal when the ram was well into the passage, for them to then do what it was intended to do. A white line had been painted down the side of the ram’s canopy, for him to measure how deep it had gone inside the gate house. It was only in half the distance, and it was going to now be seized, or otherwise prove ineffective.