A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  “Use them well,” he told him, “or it will be otherwise.” The goblin then moved off, either to go break down his tent, or just start off immediately on his journey home. The circle of encampments they had built was rapidly being abandoned, as the goblins and trolls moved off in ones and twos, or in whole bands. Perhaps the tents could be used to cover over the Stone Pile’s damaged roofs, and the wood burned in its fireplaces.

  “There goes one goblin that will have the means to eat through the winter, if he does not get himself killed,” Long Ridge commented. Kulith nodded back in agreement, picked up the goblin’s loot, and threw it into a chest with the other items he had so far gotten away from the buggers, mostly for their own good.

  “I will have to have this all melted down, and struck into coin,” Kulith commented, surveying it. Another group of goblins approached him. “Well, what was taken from the fortress that you shouldn’t have taken?” he asked them.

  “It was on your orders, sire,” one said. “We have collected what was left after the burning of the lich.” Kulith nodded, and he considered it. He had already sent the buggers who had surrendered from the Stone Pile north with a large band of returning braves, to go to garrison and inhabit his lands on North Stone, if they had not all been taken by Hovus Black Smile. But some of them would still get over to the Pale Shore eventually, he was sure of it, and pay a visit to the Knife Back Palace.

  “Don’t touch them directly,” he instructed. “Put them in a leather sack, and pack them in dirt in a metal chest. I’ll send them to the manor house and Mavas can keep track of them.” The troll he had mentioned was Kabi’s brother, who had surrendered at the end of the fight. Kulith counted on him to now do the right things for her, and eventually the wrong thing to him. “They will make their way to Sterina on their own, after a little time.”

  “As a gift?” Long Ridge inquired.

  “Yes, as a present,” Kulith said. “It will tell her to stay away, and that I am coming for her next.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  KULITH

  TOOTHSTONE

  They took many of the rafts that Sterina had built and used to move her army to Big Stone, and they turned them around, crossing several miles over the Dimm to the most northern island of the Face, to the stone known as the Eyes. They attacked and burned out two warrens there, and terrorized the fishers and farmers, with many buggers carrying off the sows and other women, which they felt they did not now have enough of, and had thus become more valuable. The buggers who had taken part in the sack of the Stone Pile were indeed now planning ahead, and looking for something to spend their gold bits and sacks of silver pennies on.

  Kulith had taken twelve rafts of buggers and three rowing boats and gone south, across a bay to invade the Nose, which turned out to be little more than a triangular hump of land covered over with grass, with three long spits sticking out around a central raised set of hills. They found an empty thring hall there, and a factoria for the grinding corn, its owners and thralls all journeyed and perished in one of the earlier battles. Then they sacked a bugger village at the end of one of the spits, and left the other two they saw for the others who would soon join them. Kulith hadn’t seen any real enemies on these islands, and he felt that he might be wasting his time.

  This impression finally changed when he landed on the Mouth a day later, and he saw Toothstone rising there, on its southern tip. When he stepped out of the barge he walked up from the low rocky beach, it covered over in the skeletons and decomposing bodies of hundreds of thrings that had mustered from the Pale Shore to fight, come ashore here, and been deemed to be in too poor of condition to continue on. He couldn’t even pick them out now as singular bodies, but instead just as a great field of bleaching bones, as if a huge graveyard had been turned over and emptied there.

  He was focused on and continued to gaze up at Toothstone, where it stood near the shore, as big as the Red Tower, but totally an opposite in strength. A deep channel was excavated up to it that let the water in from the lake, and it swirled around the sheer walls in a wide, squared off moat. The battlements rested partly on mortared, cut stone, and also on top of a natural rock that had been carved out and become part of the castle walls. The walls themselves were at least forty feet high, thick, smooth, and unrelenting.

  “This is the way they should have built the Stone Pile,” he said over to Narus the Nail, who was still leaning on a crutch from the wound he had taken from a metal tipped thring lance.

  “It was lucky for us that they did not,” the chief replied back. “How are we ever going to get inside that thing?”

  “The easiest way possible,” he replied, though that did not as easily come to his mind. He looked back at the barges that had sailed with him, and saw that some had not yet arrived. He would wait for the rest, and then they would plan out what they would do.

  The next day when he woke up, he discovered that Kroson had not arrived, along with the ten barges holding four hundred troops and most of their supplies. Only one came, and the sub chief on it walked over to him and reported that Kroson had viewed the walls of Toothstone from afar and turned back, stating that he would return in three days time with at least twenty more boats. In the afternoon, ten of the boats that had been with him on the Nose landed, and the trolls and goblins aboard them looked up at the Toothstone partly in wary apprehension, and partly in a grudging awe.

  “There has to be a way in, and we will find it,” Kulith told them.

  “Why?” one of the buggers asked him. “Is there a mountain of silver and gold in there like at the Stone Pile? It doesn’t look near big enough to give us loot to make it worth our efforts.”

  “This is the last thring fortress on the Stones,” Kulith explained to them. “This is one of Sterina’s dwellings, and so it will have inside it many valuables.” Another searched along the crenellations and the tower tops.

  “All I see are a few buggers standing guard,” he said. “If there is a greater thring in there, it’s not coming out any time soon. This is a fine crypt for it to stay and dwell in.” Kulith frowned and looked away, across the bones and skin lying on the rocks, spread across the beach.

  “We could take away the water, and drain out the moat by building a dam near where it comes in from the Dimm,” he said. “Then we could break up some of the barges and make carts. We could fill them full of sand, and run them at the rock wall until we have a nice pile.”

  “Then what do we do?” a goblin asked him.

  “We light it on fire and get the wall red hot, then we throw water on it until the rock cracks, and we keep doing it until the stones break, slide away, and it puts a hole in the wall.” It was complicated to understand, and it might be hard to bring the water forward and splash the wall, but most bugger warriors had started their careers using a stone club made by drilling a hole through a hot rock with tiny drops of water. They knew that part of it was likely to work.

  “I like the idea. It’s simple and seems fast,” one of the goblin chiefs said. “The fire will make it almost impossible for them to shoot arrows and look down at us.” Kulith was not too sure about that. Though the walls were not that wide, he knew they would certainly try.

  “I don’t like it,” a troll chief said. “There are too many things to go wrong.” He shook his head at Kulith. He reached down and touched the golden pommel of the Tuvier Blade at his side. It gave him sudden insight, something that he might use to persuade them.

  “True, but if there is no great treasure here, another surely awaits us, equal at least to what we found at the Stone Pile.” The chief made a noise and turned away, then turned back to give his opinion.

  “There is no greater treasure anywhere, at the Knife Back Palace, or at the Swamp Gate. Sterina did not store the treasure she received, but used the revenue to keep herself and her children in bloody style, and to build the roads across her lands.”

  “Do you realize that they will eventually come back to the Stones, to get more bod
ies and flesh?” he argued.

  “Let them try,” the troll replied, and turned around and strode back to where they had set up camp along the shore. Kulith soon went back also, and he eventually cajoled the others to start the dam on the entrance to the moat, and set up a force to make a defense as the work progressed. By the evening, the buggers were in good spirits, and they all ate meat and drank sweetened tump, and danced around the fires, shouting and singing.

  By the middle of the next day they had sealed off the mouth of the moat, and were thickening it with more rocks and spades of clay, to make it water tight. There was some frantic movement atop Toothstone, but the drawbridge and gate in its side did not open to send out buggers and thrings to try and stop them.

  They began to drain the moat then with buckets, with about three hundred of them moving back and forth near the dam, emptying out the water back into the Dimm. After a couple of hours, they saw that the level was dropping, but that it was a slow going and the work of draining most of it out would take weeks.

  They broke up several of the barges and made two crude wagons that they then loaded up with rocks, sand, oil and wood. The path the wagons would take to the castle wall was cleared of bodies, bones and other debris. Then they discussed how to get the first couple of wagons close enough to the moat without getting shot full of arrows. They retired to the camp, and ate a hearty dinner of gator meat, lamb from the Nose, and fried potatoes, washed down with too much tump.

  In the morning after they had woken up, it took some time to recover and resume the work. Kulith had hoped to have a great deal of progress to show Kroson when he eventually arrived with reinforcements, and the delay bothered him. Kulith was soon summoned over to where they had placed the dam across the moat. The day before they had made some progress and the water level, and both sides had been noticeably different.

  One of the goblins who looked like his father had mated with a possum, and who had once worked as a vintner in one of the thring factoria was in charge. He had placed a stick in the moat with a mark on it for the water level after the previous day’s work. Now he explained and showed that the water had risen almost all the way back up to its previous point.

  “How do you think it has refilled?” Kulith asked him, though he had already considered himself several possible ways.

  “The water flows through the soil, it is known,” the goblin said, “but I don’t think this is the way it has happened. There is some underground channel on the moat that is connecting it to the lake waters, and this is doing it. If we keep draining it, it will eventually be uncovered. We can then find its spout, or the channel in the ground, and block it up.”

  “Excellent,” Kulith replied, and he tossed a small bag of coins over to the bugger. He looked around at the others. “Continue work draining it and try to find this channel. We will attack the wall with the wagons and see how effective they are.”

  The trolls then assembled over by the wagons, and it was determined that an armored coat reinforced with a headpiece, arm pieces, and additional leg pieces would make it almost impenetrable to goblin arrows. They would also use shields, and wrap the front of the wagons extensively with wet hides to keep the volatile load from going up if it was shot into with fire. They set in to make make the armor, and adjust the loads in the wagons, while three more barges were broken up to assemble more.

  The afternoon came, and Kroson had not returned from Big Stone. Narus the Nail, who wanted the fortress and the territory after the sack, put a bench out on the shore to sit on, and had a pavilion built there around it from driftwood for his warriors. As it neared time for the cessation of the day’s work, a coastal row boat was sighted, making the crossing over from Big Stone. It came up to the shore and beached, and a couple of goblins got out of it and stood there, looking about, then came over to the half-finished pavilion. It was Gujin, one of the small chiefs of Kroson’s allied Red Marks. He waited for Kulith to arrive, and then he relayed his message to them all from the Stone Pile.

  “Ovodag had ordered for Kulith to return to the Stone Pile immediately. He said that if Narus the Nail wants the Toothstone, then he will have to arrange and pay for a bugger army to come and take it. The war of the Stones is over, and the horde has been officially disbanded until spring.”

  “What about Sterina?” Kulith said angrily. “She isn’t going to just sit there at the Knife Back Palace on her throne and allow us to run about unopposed. We need to go and get her, right now while she is at her weakest!”

  “You need to go and talk to them about it,” the goblin said. “I am just the bravest one among them, who hazarded the results of coming here and telling you their decision.” Gujin shrugged, and spread his hands out in front of him. “You would not hurt someone like me, who fought with you from the start, and is still on your side of things. Let me tell you why they have done this thing.”

  “Go on,” Kulith bade him.

  “The Yellow Duke of Wallenz and the Count of Grotoy have marched a large column of soldiers to the Shore of the Dimm. Instead of raids and threats, they are now burning out all the warrens and caves they come upon them, and sending the sows and pups across the bridges into Doom Wall, to beg for food from Hovus Black Smile.”

  “We must respond,” Kulith said. It seemed now like this was a more urgent threat than Sterina: a first test for the bugger’s new sovereignty. The sword at his side shocked him, reminding him of his promise to it, and he flinched back from its hilt. Everyone saw it, and it made him suddenly defensive.

  “No,” he corrected himself. “Sterina is still far more dangerous than the stone men. They’ve done this before, but the White Child could be here in five days with another great horde, with the other half of her army. Burning out a few warrens is what they always do, and those can be rebuilt, perhaps now stronger. We will never have another chance like we do right now to take the lands of the dead.”

  “We may still,” Gujin said, “but this is what the soldiers of Wallenz and Grotoy are telling the sows, and shooting attached in writing to arrows over the walls of Doom Wall. They say this can all be averted if we return to them the Countess of Rydol. This is the thing that you have promised them for a long time, but it has still not happened.” Her captivity had caught up with him it seemed, and now he regretted coming across to the Face and not taking care of it beforehand.

  “Ovodag wanted me to tell you this,” Gujin said. “He said that the whole thing will end if she is now ransomed. He said that buggers should not have to go hungry, for the sake of a jewel. Return with us now to Big Stone.” It was well put and it had made him look pompous and weak. He growled, crossed his arms and looked around at the others.

  “What we are doing here, in the taking of this castle, is teaching us something new every day. These are things that can be brought back and used by the buggers to create better warrens, castles, and a stable realm. Even if we don’t go over to the marsh and get Sterina now and take her treasure, this siege and sack is still important.”

  “Don’t worry. I will convey everything we learn here to the others at the Stone Pile,” Narus the Nail said. The possum faced goblin was there, and he looked over and nodded to Kulith, willing to continue with Narus and complete the siege. But Kulith doubted that would even happen now. It was more likely that they would try for awhile, and then Narus would give up, and keep the knowledge to himself.

  “Things seem to be in good hands here,” Kulith said feeling tired inside, as he considered what might have started going on at the Stone Pile in his absence. “I suppose I can go back to Big Stone now, and make things right with the stone men.”

  But when they cast off in the early hours the next morning, Kulith felt like he had made a terrible mistake and the sword was hard and cold under his touch. He turned and stood up once in the costal boat, to look back at the beach and the Toothstone, and it was all he could do to control his emotions and not jump out and try to swim back to the shore.

  After a couple hours the wes
t side of Big Stone began to grow larger, and they turned south when he could just make out the forest, and they went around the headlands to the north, and rowed into Ghost Harbor where they tied up at the dock. The harbor had finally had its mouth cleared of the sunken boats, so that the buggers could use it as they wished. Vous Vox’s toy caravel was there, it nothing more really than an oversized sloop, and it was bringing in supplies from Warukz and the south shore of the Dimm to repair things, or build new as needed. There were other smaller sailing vessels there, and ten barges, perhaps belonging to Kroson, were anchored along the shore, under guard by some goblins.

  When the buggers there saw who was in the ship that had arrived they lined up and began to do a martial cheer, as he and his four White Knife warriors stepped onto the dock and walked across it to the road. He turned and waved to them, and looked at the faces of the old, the cubs, and the sows, and some of the regular bugger folk, all who had been scare during the war of the Stones, but were starting to come back now.

  They walked up from the harbor to the hills, in a small precession on the roadway that led to the Stone Pile. The whole southern side of its wall was still reduced to rubble, where the slight they had done had worked so wonderfully. A loose stone wall like the ones used in warrens had been built up across the gap from the fallen stones, and this stood some thirty feet high, with only a fighting walk along its top. The tunnel mouths down the slope had been filled back in. The great ring camp they had occupied was nothing now but a few sticks and dirty platforms, spread across the hills.