A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  Wayland had to only come up to the edge of the land and look down upon the shore line of the Dimm to see that Weech’s hall and other parts of the village had been set ablaze, perhaps hours ago. Goblins ran about, going back and forth in distress, with a large group standing near the docks, perhaps using buckets of water from the lake to try and quench the flames.

  Wayland wheeled his mount around and turned off to the east, heading for a trail he had seen that would parallel the road down out of the hills. He had considered this as a possibility: that the troll would observe Weech’s behavior after the return of his warriors, figure out what had happened, and then launch his own scheme. How that had all fallen out was beyond Wayland’s ability to measure, but he thought that Lord Weech had lost.

  Either way, he was happy to now be leaving the Dimm and at not having to get any nearer to Warukz. He traveled back across the ridges, and then looked about for the trails of the other two groups, to catch up and rejoin one of them if he could. The goblins and trolls he saw along the way were all in ones and twos, either standing by the mouth of their caves or out on the trails, and they just jumped aside and got out of the horse’s way.

  He stopped later in the afternoon and took water from a creek as the sun hung low, back over the scrubby hills he had put behind him. He was in a little valley between two of the slopes, and he was following it down as far as it went toward the dusty floor of the Vara. Across the low to the right of him there was a sudden flash, and he he saw movement and heard something large crashing through the brush and trees below a broken ridge of rocks.

  He got ready to ride away, but waited to see it plain before he did, since it was a good distance from him, and it might be one of the other groups. It came louder, and then he saw the darting shapes of goblins with spears moving about, chasing after something larger. Wayland drew his sword as he watched them, unsure about what he needed to do. He slowly coaxed his horse up behind a line of brush that he could look over, and then he waited there.

  The worry he had felt moments before: that one of the groups of his companions had been caught by some remnant goblin force and was now being hunted gave way to indecision, as he now saw the troll Kulith crash out of the brush, holding the Tuvier Blade in one hand, its length a golden blazing wonder, and in the other a stout wooden door he carried as a shield. The door’s surface was festooned with arrows and broken off spear tips, and as he watched, the troll turned it back around and intercepted two more arrows that were fired over at him from above.

  Wayland realized that he was looking at the battle from a distance: as an observer who did not need to interfere. The razing of Warukz by the troll had naturally made him the target of their ire, and he was now the rabbit in this chase. Wayland thought about the concern that the troll had shown for the countess, even if it was a loathsome, self serving one, based mostly on the ransom he had thought to collect. Mostly he thought it was the Tuvier Blade that drew him back, somehow hotter than the evening sun on his eyes as he stared over at it, as it moved and darted around. And the door also, as the troll held it now and caught a goblin’s lance upon it.

  It had the sharpest edges of chivalry in it: the type of thing Wayland had heard players sing about from time to time but rarely ever seen for himself. It made his little dance of the street at Troli look small and his fight at the West Lands tavern appear common. It drew him into its action like a spell.

  He urged his horse out, and got it into a canter, as he watched the troll and the goblin pack fight it out through the thinning brush and trees, moving toward the valley floor. They broke out into the grass on the flat below, and the pack immediately started to circle around and attack him from all sides at once. Wayland urged his horse to go faster, cutting around the brush as the troll dashed out and struck down one of the goblins with the Tuvier Blade, not letting it go around him.

  “Hah!” Wayland out called to his horse, as he raised his sword and shield up. He angled around, to come up on the goblins, passing by while their attention was focused in on the troll. He lifted up his sword up and swung out to the side in his saddle, as they finally heard the horse’ hooves and the creak of his tack. He caught one under the chin with his blade as it turned, and the power of the mount helped send its head spinning off through the air.

  As Wayland began a long turn through the grass, the troll used the confusion he had caused to attack and lay about himself with the Tuvier Blade and the wooden door. He cut the goblins down one at a time, and smashed them back with the door as he needed. They scuttled away and then came back at him in a rush with their spears and swords, swarming all around him. Wayland was returning back on his horse by then and leaned out with his sword as he passed. A spear came up across at him this time, and he knocked it away. Another spear went across his leg as he lifted his guard, and it cut a red crease across it.

  He kept his seat and gritted his teeth as he experienced a long, queasy flash of pain. He looked down at the blood coming through his leathers and slowly turned back around for another pass. The troll used the new attack to hack and smash, leaving a trail of the injured and dead, and it was now going quickly against the goblins. He worked his way through the knee high grass to an outcrop of flat stone that stood there, about as high as a man. He stepped around it and used it to guard his back as he continued to fiught them, and he immediately killed another goblin. There were less than a dozen remaining now, and they were having a lot of trouble trying to get in at the troll.

  Wayland rode in on another one, the creature darting away at the last moment. He caught it with the tip of his blade and let the movement of his mount as he passed twist and jerk it back free. As that one fell, another goblin was screaming, cut through by the Tuvier Blade. The troll Kulith used the sword to pin a spear head on the rocks and then he smashed the goblin wielding it with the door. As Wayland moved back around them, the remaining goblins gave up and ran back away from the troll, throwing their spears at him, shooting some arrows, and cursing. Kulith used the door to catch and block them. They scattered as Wayland passed by across the grass, then moved to get back up into the trees and the brush.

  Wayland reined up and watched them go, all of them headed back up across the hill they had just fought down. Some were looking for those that had fallen, to help them away, and others were taking up weapons and plunder. Kulith withdrew his arm from the ironwork on the door frame and let it drop down to the ground.

  “You came at a good time, stone man,” he said. Wayland nodded over, and eased himself down off his horse.

  “I saw Weech’s hall burning from the hills, and figured out what had happened,’ Wayland told him. “I was headed to the Darkling Gate, to catch up with the others who might go there.”

  “And Little Toad?” Kulith asked him. “Did you find her?”

  “The Countess Sunnil of Rydol was rescued from Malice Chalice,” Wayland told him. He felt a stab of regret for leaving them again, to go along with his other wound. “What an ugly bit of gallantry that was,” he commented to himself. The troll watched him for a moment, and then it sighed.

  “That is very good,” Kulith said, and then the troll laughed. It sounded like a stable boy blowing out his nose after a long day in the hay. Wayland cleaned his sword off and put it away, then looked down at his leg. The goblins were now up in a group, talking, heading quickly to the east along the top of the hill, back toward Warukz possibly, or to somewhere else.

  “What will you do now, Golden Sword?” Wayland asked. Kulith looked about, thinking, now that he was free of Weech.

  “We will go and find Little Toad,” he said. “I will make her keep her promise.”

  “Huh?” Wayland said back, not thinking that was a very good idea. He smelled another fight occurring if that happened, for several different reasons. The troll was supposed to be smart, but he was not showing it now. Wayland pulled a bandage out of his things and wiped out his wound. It was badly cut, in a long slash, but he would not let it stop him.

&n
bsp; “Did she promise to give you three hundred pounds of silver if you returned her to Rydol?” he asked the troll. “Did you ever think that you would collect that? That was like saying to Rydol that they would never get her back, and that’s what Lord Wenslig thought.”

  The monster sheathed his sword, crossed his arms and stared over at Wayland with a look of complete understanding about what he had done, with even a little upward turn of a smile, of arrogance about the facts and how they had played it. Wayland gave up, and went back to closing and tending his wound. It was deep and he could see the meat beneath, and he knew it needed to be sealed. That could not be done out here, except by burning it, and that might kill him.

  He would have to let it bleed, or he would have to do it himself. He got out his needle and thread. They had made them practice giving themselves a stitch in Marmad, but he was hampered by the location of the cut, and now he started to feel sick. He splashed it with water, and let the shock pass.

  He started a stitch, and then retched out over the back of the rocks they stood by. He came back and cleared his mouth out with water. The troll watched him and thoughtfully thumbed a bump on its forearm. As Wayland stood there, gathering up his nerve again, the creature used his fingers to draw out the iron point of a goblin arrow and then threw it away. This caused Wayland’s bile to rise again, and he just let it out there into the grass. He cleaned himself up, then not to be upstaged by the troll, put several stitches across the wound in a ragged line, closing it up. Then he glared back at the troll, and he put his knife, the needle, and the thread away.

  “Were I that strong,” he commented quietly, and he bound it up tight. He would try again later to put a few more stitches across it, when he felt better and the wound had numbed more, so that the skin was not given a chance to pucker and pull away. The troll watched him, looking critical of his work, and of his stamina through the whole ordeal. The troll offered its arm out to him, showing the spot where the arrow had struck it.

  “Put some of my blood in your wound,” he said. “It will ease the pain and heal it up quick. Sometimes, we do this for the little buggers, if they are hurt very bad.” Wayland had heard tales of troll healing powers, but it was something he would not do.

  “I think not,” he said, staying on the well reasoned side of caution. The troll squeezed the skin on his forearm and made several drops of his blood well up out of the wound. It ran down to a finger and he flicked it over onto Wayland’s cut lag, staining the skin and the bandage.

  “I said no!” Wayland shouted back at the troll. The blood smeared along the cut as he tried to clean it off, and it hurt too much to rub openly at it. He cursed and began to roll the wound up in more bandage, as Kulith stood back, crossed his arms and laughed at Wayland.

  “Troll magic is great,” Kulith said. “Troll magic will heal you, but now your women will only gives birth to trolls.” He laughed harder, like a great bout of sneezing, and then he felt down along his own leg, where a loose flap of skin marked a goblin’s blade cut. Wayland was shocked by the remark, and angry. When he had finished tieing up his leg, he turned back to meanly talk about old ransom demand.

  “I must point out that the Countess of Rydol was just rescued by a Knight of Pendwise, and her cousin from Grotoy, and some other errant men roped into it. She probably now feels under no obligation to grant your ransom demand, and in fact blames you for being taken away and held in the first place.” Kulith snarled back.

  “You do not know what was promised,” he said, “and why it was done. You do not know what happened out in the Stones, on the Dimm. She promised something to keep from getting eaten by a monster there. She promised me sanctuary.” Wayland saw this as something he did not really need to argue about. He thought that any notion of sanctuary was bound to die on its own. He did anyway.

  “Even if she still sees it that way, to every other stone man and wood man in the West Lands, and in the wide world beyond you remain a monster,” he said. “You destroyed the garrison at Fugoe Castle. You also took the Tuvier Blade. You are the one who burned the countryside, killed off the folk, and took hundreds as slaves. Many of those people are dead now, and the rest who remain in bugger captivity are lost, destined to suffer the magnificent horrors of your homeland until they too are dead.”

  “I killed Sairk and the Vagrim,” Kulith said, thumping his chest. “I killed Vous Vox, and Gezius, and I fought the Whisper. I tried to kill Sternia too, but she wouldn’t let me get close enough to her. I sacked the Stone Pile, took the dead penny and stopped the body carts. I killed thousands of thrings and buggers. What had anyone in Aukwen Yard done with the Tuvier Blade before that?”

  “I don’t think any will see what you did as done for their benefit, or as rightly done,” Wayland said, shaking his head. “They will say that you are an evil creature who went on a selfish journey of conquest. They will say that your brother betrayed you, and made that road his own. Your power was stolen away the same way you took it. They will treat you like the monstrous pariah that you are. No matter what benefit in the field, the potential for the new harm you might make will have them forever protecting themselves against you.” He had been tough, blunt and he hoped he had dissuaded the creature.

  Kulith blew out and shrugged, then went over to the stream nearby and took a long drink. When he returned, Wayland was ready to ride. Still, the monster was holding fast to his notion of going to see the Countess Sunnil.

  “I will go with you,” he decided. “You will go get Little Toad from the stone man’s town and bring her to talk to me.” It was like saying he wanted to get killed by the guards there, and Wayland didn’t try to argue it. He slowly pulled himself up off the rocks until he was standing, then he limped over to his horse and got onto it, mostly using his good leg. The troll came over and picked him up and set him down the rest of the way on his saddle. Wayland gasp out and steadied himself. He looked back over at the troll.

  “Don’t do that again!” he shouted.

  “Need you to go get Little Toad,” Kulith explained. Wayland grimaced and cursed. As they started off, he saw that the troll was also limping a little, and so he threw a roll of bandages he had left over to him.

  “Here,” he said. “Who knows, I might need you later on to carry me and my horse across a river.”

  “That is just an old story,” Kulith replied, and then began wrapping the bandage around the cut on his leg.

  They journeyed slowly to the edge of the valley, and then did not find the Vara immediately below. Instead there were about a dozen dry looking hills ahead, with trees in the valleys and rocks above; they all bunched up like the rolls of a blanket on an unmade bed. An evening haze beyond them all hid any view of the desert plain. They followed a trail down, finding caves, but none were inhabited now by goblins. The place seemed open and desolate, an empty border not worth occupying between the West Lands and the monsters of the Priwak.

  Most of an old Mancan watch tower rose off in the distance, on a hill, with the foundation of a stone building sitting there next to it. Some other stones out on the low ground showed them where they might find water. They made their way down across a dell, headed to the stones, and searched where the grass grew longer over the spring line running to the rocks. An old dry basin, the mortar cracked, stood unfilled. They used the pool of water they found right below it.

  They went up and looked through the tower next, then made a small fire against one wall where it sheltered them with its remaining crown. Wayland ate some water softened bread and a sausage, and then gave the rest over to the troll, remembering how hunger could make buggers lose their reason and attack. At least he didn’t want to wake up and find the thing eating his horse, or trying to eat him. He leaned back on a stone as the troll looked out of a jagged hole in the tower wall, towards the hills they had just descended through.

  Wayland woke up some time later in the night, thirsty and feverish. There was a strange light in the confines of the broken tower, more reddish than
a stoked up fire should make, and Wayland pushed himself up with his arms to see what the troll was up to, or discern if they were under attacked. He had placed Malice’s gold cup and his saddle inside the tower on a fallen stone after he had tethered his horse outside. Now through the bag, he could see a wane reddish light pulsing, as if the leather and cloth had disappeared to show him only the shape of the cup. Perhaps it had burned away, to be as dry now as his mouth. He tasted something then on his lips, like blood, but sweeter. It was nourishing and potent, and it pulled on him with a sudden urge to do something abominable, to allow him to drink more.

  Kulith appeared then from out of the night. He looked around, saw the cup in the bag and hissed loudly out through his teeth. He reached for the Tuvier Blade and drew it out from its black, cloth covered sheath, the golden light of the blade blazing immediately. The gold fire pushed the reddish light back, filling the ruin and the broken stairway with a glow like the sun at noon. Kulith lifted the sword back over his head, the light rising more and making the shadows dart around like rabbits, and then he brought the blade down on the top of the cup with a great, tearing crash.

  Both of the lights suddenly went out, leaving an afterimage in the air before Wayland, and blinding him in the dark. Slowly, the glow from the fire and a gentle glow off the Tuvier blade became apparent, and Kulith was standing before him, looking down at him.

  “Should have told me,” the troll said, waving two fingers of his other hand through the air. “Bad thring: Malice Chalice.” He picked up a water skin and tossed it over to Wayland. “Clean out your mouth.”

  Wayland put two fingers to his lips, and realized he had indeed bitten into them. He drank from the skin, and it tasted foul. Would he have spilled out and sipped his own blood from the cup? He shook out his head and lay back down, but didn’t sleep again before the dawn. When he started to move around again, he realized that his leg had gone stiff.