“Blow your horns!” Kulith shouted to the goblins standing nearby. Little Toad put her hands over her ears as they went to carry out his order, and Kulith for a moment feared he had just stupidly signaled for an attack to begin on the Stone Pile. But then the goblins started to blow the retreat, and so everyone stood their ground and watched.
The defenders of the Stone Pile tore into the sides of the ram’s canopy and covering with their weapons, as spears and swords were thrust back at them from the small defensive openings in its sides. Then there was a final shove forward, for perhaps six or eight feet, and the entire ram began to tilt up in the back as it fell afoul of the pit trap in the inner courtyard. There was a great, rough sliding noise, and the ram’s rear lifted clear up as it tilted, until the peak of the apron struck the arch of the gate and bounced back once before resting there against it.
From under the rear, like ants from a turned log, the buggers who had been manning it boiled out with shields, and turned them immediately to face the walls, and were not surprised by the defenders moving in around them, and there was a small, brief battle while the rest of them watched, until they broke free, fortunately before there were more bowmen collected to shoot down at them from the walls. They withdrew in good order, back down the hill as the ram behind them burst into flame, like a great candle, burning up over both sides of the arch, raising a column of black smoke in a line skyward through the hazy blue of the late afternoon.
The buggers around the rim of the circle camp looked back and forth at each other and smiled, as the defenders stood helplessly and watched a new pyre rage. The rope ladders were moved away, and the other buggers went back up them into the castle while the slain rose and stood wide of the fire, so that they would not be cooked hard by it. It was a diversion, but it was a dangerous and vital thing, and it had worked and filled the pit trap beyond the gate with sand and rubble concealed in the front of the ram, and its own destruction. The lord of the Stone Pile would have to consider what that portended: if eventually they would fill up the pit trap, and the next door broken open by force and the place overrun.
They had a great feast of pig meat and rice, and tump in bowls with pumpkin and apple juice, but not much was said during it that was new. Kulith described to them what the next ram should look like, and what the purpose of it would be, but everyone knew it was just another diversion, and they did not pay much attention. They were all satisfied to eat the pork, to stuff themselves with bacon and greens, and go over and look at the figures that Little Toad had written on the slate, and hold the weights for themselves to see how much that equaled. Outside the ram still burned in the passage, and again lit up the blackened wall of the Stone Pile.
The next day something unusual happened, and Kulith was immediately troubled by it, though eventually it came to nothing. There was movement and activity along the wall to both sides of the main gate, and he and Kabi went out and sat down on benches to watch it, as they drank several quarts of milk that someone had gotten from the pigs, to see if it was consumable.
Instead of clearing the gate out and digging the rock and sand from the trap, which would have been hard to do because it was still all hot, the rope ladders were lowered down, and the thrings stood back as some of the goblins and trolls descended them. Then they stood waiting there with the thrings for something else to happen. Kabi belched a little beside him and wiped off her mouth, and set down the cup she had been drinking out of.
“They seem undecided about what they want to do,” she said.
“It could be some attempt to surrender, or call a truce,” Kulith thought out loud, and so he began to pay more attention. Vous Vox was nowhere to be seen on the walls, or any of the other chief ghouls, and he wondered for a moment if there had been a quiet rebellion within the fortress. Even if there had been, he didn’t think it would save the place from its destruction, rape and pillage. That arrow had been knocked and held taunt for too long. They watched as some of the guard along the ring mustered into formation and got ready to fight, should it now become necessary. Kroson’s band was near them, and Kulith went over and watched what was going on with them.
“Are they going to clear the ram and the debris?” the goblin asked Kulith, to see what his opinion was. Kulith looked over and shook his head, as he had at least already ruled that out. Then they saw what was being tried and Kulith smiled in surprise, but then he grimaced at the great conceit of it.
Several barrels were lowered down on ropes, as Vous Vox himself now came to stand above the gate. The old ghoul was supervising personally now from along the top of the wall. The ropes were taken away, and with Vous Vox’s nod from above, the barrels were pushed forward with feet and hands, to roll free and down the slope of the hill toward the camp.
Kulith still suspected some magic trick, and then realized with anger that no more than what was being done was necessary. The barrels alone and what was inside of them would suffice, and he would now have to deal with it. Still, he acted like they were possibly full of plague, and a dangerous trick was happening that needed to be avoided.
“Stop them, but do not get too close!” he shouted to the others, at Kroson’s warriors who had started going up the slope in a line. They moved forward from the ram building yard and stopped the first three with their thring lances, sword tips and spear heads. One of them burst, and the silver pennies stored inside of it jumped up to glitter and flash through the air, to be seen for a moment before falling back and spilling across the grass.
“It’s the dead penny!” Kroson shouted back at Kulith, removing all doubt. The buggers around them, and those up the slope shouted too, and they now ran forward toward the other barrels that were being rolled down, to intercept and seize them.
“It is a trick!” Kulith shouted.
“What can be done about it?” Kabi asked him, as she neared.
“Nothing,” he admitted, admitting also that Vous Vox had just outsmarted him with his ancient, undead brain. “This will just have to sort itself out.” There was a great clamor as the news of what was happening near the gate was passed down the line of the camp around the Stone Pile, until there were warriors rushing to the spot from every direction, across the grass, chasing after the barrels, with some even going dangerously close to the walls, to intercept the casks before the others could.
Fearing an attack, or just responding to the troops rushing about and seizing on the barrels, the buggers and thrings on the walls of the Stone Pile began to shoot their bows, raising great sheets of arrows up into the wind, to fall down and kill the hapless, greedy rebels.
“Call them back! Sound the retreat!” Kulith called out to them all. “Get them back away from the walls!” He grunted to himself, seeing that it had sorted itself out, and might come to his advantage later if he played it right. But it was right now making more thrings for Vous Vox, and they would have to be dealt with first. He leaned over and kissed Kabi, right on the side of her mouth atop one of her fangs, which was supposed to be good luck.
“Kroson!” he called out to the chief, when the bugger had stopped shouting for the moment at his warriors, at those who were still running around on the side of the hill after the barrels of silver pennies. The chief turned back to look at him, clearly furious and exasperated by what was occurring.
“Bring me all of this money that you can get away from the warriors without a serious fight and it will be displayed, to show what their shares will be. And I also want to know how many new thrings were just made for Vous Vox by this, to shame the ones who were greedy and stupid, but have survived.” He then had a last thought, as a response to Vous Vox, so he would not try it again.
“Get all the archers together this evening and have them wait with the wind. When it shifts tonight, they will each light and shoot ten burning arrows up over the walls of the Stone Pile to be carried into range, or they may shoot them at the thrings surrounding it. That will be my response.”
The bugger chiefs were able to secure
six intact barrels containing silver, pulled from the dead penny, and these were brought over to Kulith’s tent. He, Kabi and Ovodag sifted through them, checking at the coin size and quality, and they smelled them for thring magic or other taint, and found none. He had Little Toad practice measuring them out, and put it into bags. The trolls tasked to help her then practiced doing it, using scoops, scales and weights, and he had them do it until they were each proficient at it. He then left thirty full bags full of silver sitting in a pile where the buggers could come and look at them, and set these and the remains under guard.
There were four or five other barrels worth of silver now going through the camp, that they had not retrieved, but there was little that could be done about it without causing the infighting and chaos that Vous Vox was attempting to create with them. Little Toad had taken an interest in the barrels that the silver had been contained in, and so Kulith went over and watched her try and figure them out. She was putting the marks from them on a slate, to compare side by side.
“Those are the marks of Gerid,” Kulith explained to her, pointing at some of them. “These brought his tump to the Stone Pile last year, and were consumed by the garrison.” She looked them over, her green eyes glowing in the light of the oil lamps that were now lit inside his tent. He wondered if she had gone white on him for a moment, but it was a different type of demon, and it had always been inside her.
It was a given that the human nobility was interbred, and that the most vicious and beautiful of them did that breeding. She had thus always had the potential to become mad, or bent and dangerous in their particular evil ways, in their slow, grinding and deliberate cruelty. Now she had caught the sickness of the horde: the fever for the destruction of Vous Vox and the Stone Pile, just like the rest of them had. He wondered if it was perhaps time to go and hold her head under the waters of the lake, and thus save everyone a lot of trouble later on.
“These marks were made by the vintner,” she explained, “and the tally of the shipment is here.”
“I remember these, because Sarik had some of them shipped out to the horde in the Priwak,” he remarked.
“But some or most of it remained here.”
“Naturally,” he agreed.
She circled the tally marks on the side. “The barrels were taken when empty and filled with plunder, with the taxes from the dead penny, and placed in the vault. When Vous Vox told them to go and get it out, they took the most recent ones that were in the best condition, standing on the outside of the rest.”
“Perhaps,” he agreed. “It is a shame we do not have the other barrels, as we could estimate what was put aside in any given year by having many of them so marked. There is no real way to know.”
“But they have also given that to us!” she insisted. She turned another one of the barrels around, slowly to reveal some other writings made on it. There were lines of Mancan numbers, done deliberately and painstakingly so as to be read over again, many times. The lowering of them over the wall had obliterated the writing on some, but on this barrel they were still clear. She tapped her chalk next to these, and then pointed at the first line.
“Last year’s tally,” she explained. Still, they did not know where it had been in the sequence, and of what weight of coin the rest of them had contained. The barrels had all had about one hundred and fifty pounds of silver in them, of mixed coins and bits, so that was an average. Someone had earlier remarked that two or three of them could have been filled with an entire year of revenue from the dead penny, and Kabi had said that the whole process was not remarkable, and had not required a great deal of effort or time. Little Toad then tapped a final line of numbers underneath the first, and she put these on her slate.
“This is the total inventory number of all the casks,” she said. It didn’t seem that Vous Vox could have been so stupid, though his undead brains and magic were very old. Perhaps he had only thought that the buggers would not try and understand it.
“That number is too large,” Kulith said cautiously. She started a calculation, as he tried to estimate it. There was no telling how much silver was connected to all those others numbers, or of what form of treasure or amount the rest of the inventory referred to. “Speculation,” he added, and he spit out to the side upon the floor. “He could have put a number on everything in the Stone Pile, including the chamber pots and brooms.”
“Someone else may figure these out,” Little Toad said to him. He just shrugged back at her.
“Perhaps, and they will come to the same conclusions as I have. Remove the markings, and have the barrels sent out to be reused.” He erased the figure she had come up with on the piece of slate, and put it down with the others. “Now put yourself to some better use of your time.”
He went outside of his tent palace and looked across at the Stone Pile. He had come out at a particularly good time, as the archers had set up past him, a quarter of the way around the other side of the fortress, and as the wind picked up they had began to light arrows and shoot them up over the battlements, while the ones shot back at them fell short. All the thrings that had been created during the confusion earlier, and the ones made before, several hundred it looked like, had moved off to try and stop the archers, and had met with a screen of trolls and goblins armed with lances, and were now being destroyed.
The roofs of the Stone Pile were all not made of slate and lead, and the wooden ones, in the lower areas of the outer walls particularly, had fitfully caught fire and began to burn. Though it had gone almost dark now, the smoke had begun to roll up into the sky, making for a new, heavy line of black. If it had been daylight, Sterina’s forces would have seen it. They had been watching, sending boats over to look at what they were doing, and had tried to retrieve what was left of their own navy from the shallows along the forest. But she didn’t have another army to send, at least not yet.
Kulith thought now of the number that Little Toad had written on the slate, and he involuntarily raised his arms up to the dark sky and clenched and unclenched his fingers several times, to try and relieve his nerves. They were a storm coming closer, getting louder and louder before reaching its climax and passing on overhead. When it did pass, either Kulith or Vous Vox would no longer be here. He exhaled and then breathed back in the moist Dimm air, as the flaming arrows continued to arc across the black sky in front of him and set the Stone Pile alight. The sword at his side made a noise like a murmur, which it hardly ever did. He turned back, to some of the chiefs nearby who were also watching the show.
“Tomorrow, we will start building the next ram,” he said to them, and then he went back inside his great tent.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
KULITH
THE LAST MANCAN
There was another surprise waiting for Kulith, and all he had to do was get up and leave Kabi’s side the next morning to be confronted by it. Narus the Nail was waiting for him there, still using a crutch to get around, and it was obviously of great concern to him, to get him up to move about and come personally.
“I want to report to you something that I have found,” he said. They left the circle camp with some of the White Knife, and went on down the slope through the grass to one of the pens where the pigs were being herded in and slaughtered by the thyrs. Narus stopped and put his full weight down, and sucked in at the pain it still caused him. He drank from a bottle of tump, and then composed himself.
“What do you see?” he asked Kulith.
“No. Tell me what you see,” Kulith replied instead.
Narus used his crutch to point out, down at the slaughter yard, at the rending pots over their low fires beside it, at the wagons carrying the pork up the side of the hill to the camp, and the barrels and containers going the other way, toward the stockpile that would be used for the sap.
“There are too many pigs being slaughtered, and no account for where the fat has gone. I have had some of my buggers watching the process. Long Ridge has brought in too many, and Big Agrok is rendering them all
just as fast as he can.” Kulith considered it, as they had just estimated that the sap would take at least another ten days to be ready to fire.
“When do you think that they will be ready to light it?” he asked Narus.
“Sometime in the next three days,” he replied. “They have started preparations to that end, getting their bands ready.” Kulith frowned, as it showed that some of the buggers were still being very deceitful, by trying to limit the amount of warriors within the ring at least, if not outright trying to attack and take the Stone Pile by themselves, before the rest could be fully marshaled and brought up to fight.
“Reckless,” he commented, remembering how Long Ridge had tried earlier to attack the fortress with just his thyrs.
“What are you going to do about it?” Narus asked him.
“I will make it my own plan,” he replied. “It is our plan now, since it cannot be helped. Have the thring lances, the swords, the shields and the torches brought up, and bring all the injured warriors up from the city that want to be included in the ring. We will proceed, and I will make a comment on it to the others, today. Until then prepare, and continue building the new ram.”
He went back to the camp and had all the warriors around his tent brought up to the ready by their chiefs, and he told them to likewise bring up all their other warriors and wait for his words, that he would deliver to them in the early afternoon. Nearby the work on the new ram continued, it currently being fitted with its first pair of wheels.
He and Kabi had a lunch of pig meat, greens and rice, and then he took a large cup of watered tump and went over to stand atop the uncompleted ram. He drank from it as the bugger chiefs and others who were interested gathered around it, to see what he had to say. Before him, some of the roofs of the Stone Pile still burned, as well as the wood and frames of the structures standing underneath them. Vous Vox had his unnatural arms full for the moment. Kulith turned his attention back to the buggers: to the chiefs and the common warriors there.
A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight Page 48