A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  They came around to castle to its front gate, still a blackened husk, because the new iron parts had not been made yet to put on the wood, and they entered on through it. He was met there by some of the White Knife warriors who had already left his service. He had paid then off well, and he supposed they had all agreed to come and stand there to act as neutrals, as they were the closest thing he had to pot mates and friends.

  The inside of the tunnel had been cleared out and the boards across the trap replaced. Four of the bugger chiefs waited for him, standing up on the fighting walk above the inner gate, in the windows where the thrings had stood only weeks before in their vain attempt to stop the siege. Ovodag looked down at him, from out of one of the embrasures.

  “You have come back, my lesser brother. Now it is time to deal with you!” He sounded drunk on tump, and it was only just now noon.

  “I have learned some very important things already from attacking Toothstone,” Kulith said up to them, looking around at the windows, resting both hands down on his hips. “What could have been so important as to bring me back here, when I’ve only just begun to clear our path onto the Pale Shore?”

  “The war is over!” another chief shouted down at him. It was the Red Tounge chieftain, the one he had never gotten along with since the argument at the Red Tower.

  “There are still troops on the north shore of the Dimm from Alonze to Grotoy,” Ovodag said to him. “They are burning out the warrens, and destroying the little food they have left there for winter.”

  “We can always buy them more,” Kulith replied. The other chiefs and especially his brother were unable to see the larger picture of what they could now accomplish since they were in charge of the Dimm. “We must run down Sterina while all the swords are still sharp!”

  “She’s not much without her army,” another chief said. “She wouldn’t even come here herself to face us in the fight. With the power we have now, we have decided that she is a small fish, and too far away. We now want peace. We need peace!”

  “You have annihilated most of Sterina’s army from the Marsh Shore,” Kulith said. “But there will come a time when it will stand fully rebuilt, and she will never forget this defeat. She will never be weaker again than she is right now.”

  “You led a horde for too long under Sarik,” Ovodag said. “All you can think about now is the next campaign, the next battle. You are making the same kinds of arguments that every stone man lord or king has ever made to draw a sword. You said there would be peace, but now you say it cannot be.”

  “That’s not true!” Kulith said, but he realized that he may have made an enormous error in that, and wondered how he had missed it. This was the same logic he had used against the thrings, to persuade the other buggers that they had to go. There had never been a time of peace and he had promised them one, and he had not seemed to afterwards deliver on it.

  “The power you have!” he shouted out, to the chiefs standing above the inner gate instead. “I have given you the power that you have. I may have been blinded to your wish to end the campaign, but I work in all your best interests, not against them.” He shook his fingers. “You are there because I have put you there!”

  “And you are there because of your own actions,” another chief called down to him.

  “You are possessed!” Ovodag shouted at him, the accusation echoing in the passageway. “What else have you forgotten, that you promised to do?”

  Nothing came to mind at first. Then he realized the reason why the Yellow Duke was still prowling the shores of the Dimm with his small army. He had forgotten his promise to take Little Toad and ransom her back to the stone men. But this could of course have waited until after the fall of Toothstone, or could it have not?

  He took his hand from the golden pommel of the Tuvier Blade and shook it out. He tried to think logically, cynically of what his course of action should now be. They were throwing him out of course, and he felt a surge of indignation, of righteousness flare up and make him speak.

  “Yes, you are all against me! What will you do tomorrow to still get along when I am no longer here for you all to distrust and hate?”

  “We don’t hate you, but you are under a spell,” Aluury said down to him. “Long Ridge would say so himself, if he were still here. Get rid of the countess: take her back to the West Lands so that Wallenz and Grotoy will leave the Shore of the Dimm.”

  “Then throw away that sword,” Ovodag told him, “but put it somewhere that we surely get it back from, if we need it again. Then you can go see your sow and raise your pups, just like the rest of us.”

  “That is fair, because we are buggers, and not thrings,” Aluury said. “You are a hero, but most heroes also have some flaw.”

  “Get it,” Ovodag said over to another bugger nearby. A shape moved, and then a doubled bag of leather was thrown down, landing on the wooden beams atop the passage trap with the clunk of silver and chime of gold.

  “We will keep the rest of it here, safe for you until you return. We wouldn’t want to overload you, when you are trying to carry back three hundred pounds of silver.” Another chief, he thought it was the Red Tounge chief, laughed at that. True, he had never thought to collect on it, but he also didn’t like how it was now being turned into sarcasm, and directed back at him. They all knew why he had set such an unwieldy amount as the ransom. He wanted to kill the Red Tounge chief now, he was sure of it.

  But Kulith was no fool. Without the sword he would just revert to being the lesser son of a Priwak troll. Perhaps he would not completely lose his status, but his days of telling others what to do were now over. To challenge and slay the goblin chief would then be impossible to get away with. Ovodag was in charge, and though Kulith had planned for this to happen and tried to convey that fact to his brother, it was not going to be a partnership. He had got them to all agree again, but it was only to now stand against him. He was an upstart now, and he was being effectively exiled.

  “What will you do tomorrow!?” he said again to them, looking up around at their faces, which was bad luck. The small door portal built into the second gate below them now opened and one of the White Knife warriors pushed Little Toad and the archer out through it, and then shut it back up.

  “And my sow?” he asked them.

  “She is up on North Stone,” Ovodag said, “which is another reason why you should be concerned. When you return from this, we will tell you exactly where she is.” Kulith did not liked the way he had said it, as if it was meant as a treat. “Now go,” Ovodag commanded him, “and do not return until this thing is done.”

  They were given a small skiff, with oars and a triangular sail, of the kind used by the buggers in the Tooth Swamp for fishing, hunting, and moving about. Kulith put some food, water, and a cask of tump down into it, and then his treasure: just the sack of it they had thrown down to him from the walk above the gate. At least it was mostly of gold. They pushed off from the dock of Ghost Harbor, the buggers all stopped again to watch them go. Most of the White Knife warriors who had been with him through the campaign were there, and one of them banged on a drum, to send him off.

  The thyrs had made a showing also when they heard, but not Long Ridge, who had already taken hundreds of his warriors back north to the villages and warrens they controlled, to consolidate his rule. The sail took wind and blew them out across the water, the shallows going to dark as the bottom got deeper. They went to the south, and then turned back to the east as Kulith reckoned, to make for the harbor of Warukz that lay on the edge of the Dimm, straddling the Priwak and the uncertain boundary between the West Lands and the Golok March. It was quicker than taking her to North Stone and it would be cleaner, and he did not favor himself against the hundreds of Alonic soldiers now prowling that coast.

  They went by several small Stones, and Kulith named them off to the others as they passed them by. He stood at the front of the vessel and looked off as they drew near the Rocker, a large island near the south shore of the Dimm, w
here the Old Roarer had been chief, and where the ruins of the Sandcastle were still visible on the headland. The archer and Little Toad silently watched him pay homage to Old Roarer as they passed by, the far shore and what could have been the ruin debatable at their distance from it.

  After a minute or two they heard the roar of a swamp lion come back across the dark green water from somewhere, and Kulith let out a long breath that he had held. He nodded to himself, moved back from the bow and increased the sail, taking them across the far water through the numerous small islands known as the Pennies and onward after that toward the distant eastern shore of the Dimm.

  The great responsibility he had carried for so long was finally being lifted off of him, and he was his own troll now: no longer subject to the beck and whim of the evil, undead overlords who had ruled the Stones. No longer either was he held to the horde or the chiefs, as they had just told him as much. He was free like them, but perhaps now freer than any of them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  WAYLAND

  KROLO

  Wayland had been trying to arrange for a set of ransoms, perhaps the last he reckoned, since the others all seemed to be dead, or had been taken far out onto the islands of Lake Aven to serve the monsters. There had been an increase in them, prompted by some movement in the buggers, perhaps to try and stop the Yellow Duke’s soldiers, or to exchange them all before the winter set in, but now he was reaching the end. It was a thing a merchant knew: to tell when a source or a market was tapped dry and the effort was no longer worth the return.

  There was a reluctance forming in the soldiers who were now doing the heavy part of the work across the channel from North Stone. Two had become sick one night, and when the company had woken up the next day, the men were both found dead. The rest of the story was hideous. They had been placed in shrouds to be taken down out of the mountains, but they had soon begun to move. The shrouds were broken open only to have the dead men attack and try to eat their fellow soldiers. They had both turned into ghouls, and it was assumed that all the old legends were true. Half the soldiers had refused to fight under such cursed, unholy conditions, and the other half had began to pray and rely on relics to protect them.

  They had resorted to capturing bugger skiffs off the lake and using them to shoot arrows with threats attached over the walls of the old Mancan fort. Wayland didn’t think anyone there could read them, and he could only imagine what the parchment was used for instead. The tactic of stealing their watercraft, from dug out wooden canoes to large flatboats infuriated the buggers, as they were relied on like horses and carts were on land. The Yellow Duke had armed many of his men with crossbows: a peasant weapon that had been outlawed, but was perfectly useful in shooting bolts out of one boat at another.

  He sat in the Silver Girdle’s common room, and was talking with one of his contacts. The man was a dark-haired Golok of middle years who had been doing business along the march for a decade, and sometimes he traveled all the way up to the east shore of the Dimm. Around them the commoners were drinking and eating, with people coming in to buy ale or fish pies every few minutes, and then take them back out.

  “There’s a rumor,” the Golok said, and he fingered one of the silver coins Wayland had put out in front of him with a nail, scraping it across the wooden table top, making a wet line.

  “There’s always a rumor,” Wayland replied. “How many of them have bore fruit we were able to actually pick?”

  “This one is very specific. A troll was said to have rowed into Warukz with a girl and an injured man. It was said that the man was an archer from Alonze. Of course, everyone thought it was the troll, but as soon as he got there he just started getting drunk and abandoned the other two.”

  “No ransom demand then?” Wayland asked.

  “Not that could be told. One of the local chiefs took the girl and the archer from him, and put them to service. He threatened the troll, and now he guards the hall there as well. The girl disappeared, was probably sold on. The archer is still there, digging cesspits and repairing nets for the goblins.”

  “Warukz is on the south edge of Lake Aven, near the western terminus of the Vara?” Wayland asked him, to be sure.

  “Yes, that’s the place. My rumor source tried to buy the slaves he saw, but the goblin chief was holding out for wine, and you know that’s a dangerous thing to deal in.”

  “It is,” Wayland agreed. One of the first tales he had heard in the West Lands was of the last large wine merchant to the buggers who had ended up being eaten at the feast he had just supplied the drink for. The Golok March had forbidden it after that, which meant that it had just become much more profitable to deal in. Still, no one wanted to take a big chance.

  “It is a good rumor, even if it is not true,” Wayland continued. He took a golden star out of a pocket and set it next to the half-swan the man had been playing with.

  “I trust his word, if not the knave,” the Golok merchant said defensively, as he tapped his finger on the new coin.

  “Well, let this gold be the measure of my sincerity,” Wayland said, and stood up from the table. It was indeed too good a rumor to pass up. Since the Countess Sunnil had divided the dead penny, her whereabouts had become mere rumor. There was some consensus that she had disappeared into the Stone Pile, and was still being held there.

  Wayland signaled to Sir Byrning, and they both went out into the street. The wind was cold and the sun was now low over the Priwak to the west. He pulled his cloak closed and moved faster, as they walked back up to the castle. Given the situation, there seemed to be only one path left for him to take. It was intolerable to stay here at Krolo any longer, to watch and listen to the Lady Tazah and Johnas Tygus get on.

  Perhaps if he made a big enough attempt at it, it would become an event that ended his involvement in the whole affair, and placed him somewhere else warmer and more interesting. And after hearing about it for so long, he had come to the realization that he wanted to go and see the Dimm, the fabulous fantasy land where monsters were real, if only to say that he had stood on the edge of it and looked. Besides, the rumor was too exact, and Johnas Tygus would think the same. He was set now on a new path that would take him across the lands and wastes to Warukz.

  “Any new news about Sunnil?” Johnas Tygus asked Wayland, after he had come over from the fireplace in the hall to the table. He said that every time he saw him, but with the pass of the days and the involvement of troops along the north shore of Lake Aven, he was now pessimistic.

  “The best that we could hope for under such circumstances your grace, Wayland replied. “She was seen with the troll who took her captive, by a trader just two weeks ago in the ruins of the Mancan port town called Warukz, on the southern shore of Lake Aven.” He briefly related the rest of the story to the surprised nobility of Krolo and to the young count, as they sat waiting for their dinner.

  “That’s in the Golok March, in Bezet!” Johnas Tygus said. “We could be there in ten days if we ride hard.” He stood up with a glass of wine and began pacing back and forth, obviously just as excited as the rest of them were.

  “We are preparing to do just that,” Wayland said, “but not so fast. It will take ten days to get to the border of the Vara, and then at least four to get over the hills to the bugger village. But I caution you about this, your grace.”

  “Why so?” Johnas asked, looking back, demanding that he fill in this detail of caution.

  “It is because we would be entering into a land that is always hostile. You are in fact, currently at war with them.” It was a sound statement of the facts. “This goblin chief though, they do not speak for each other, and he is a long way from Big Stone. He has asked for wine in trade for West Landers, and being a merchant, it would seem credible if I played this part myself and traveled with a small group to seek out our hostages. If I can find this troll in the ruins of Warukz, I may learn where the countess has gone to, and then we may try and rescue her.”

  “Do you plan
on paying her ransom?” Sirlaw asked, from where he sat at the end of the table.

  “We have always planned to do that, but it has come to naught. I propose, and it is not the first time you have heard this, that the great ransom they asked for her was always a ruse. It was their plan all along to keep her and threaten us, to make us stay clear of them while they battled their old masters. Now that the war is won, they do not need her any more. And we are no longer kept at bay by threats, and so they have cast her away, hoping that by doing so the Yellow Duke of Wallenz will retire from harassing their frontier.”

  Sir Byrning was also there, but he had so far said nothing. “A small chest of gold and silver might be useful. We could attempt to purchase back the Tuvier Blade, which I would like to take to Pendwise first, to show for my deeds and travail, and then send on to Aukwen, to its rightful owner.” He shrugged. “Whatever great ambition this monster had has played itself out. It would only be natural for it to now to be shed of these burdens.” Wayland thought about what the knight had said. Perhaps that was exactly what had happened.

  Johnas Tygus slapped one of his hands down into the other. “Still, I will add just two more men to your company of seekers. My torch mage Leofind, and myself.”

  Wayland shook his head. “This is a very dangerous journey and a troll of course, is always treacherous to deal with. Perhaps more so than any other bugger, because they are always able to rely on their great strength to reverse things, and to get their way. Everyone else here remembers Hovus Black Smile at Fugoe Castle.” It was as strong a warning, as strong as Wayland could conjure.

  “Then you will certainly require help,” he replied, in his casual, brash manner. “My father is hearty yet, and if I do not come back from Warukz, then Woodslaw can someday rule instead.”