A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  “I’m less worried about Izur raiders now,” he commented.

  “In a few more days we’ll be right before them, and be able to see the Golden Slopes beyond to the north. We will reach the Grotoy to Rydol road, and the gates of Zinsy there. Berize is just north of the trade road, about ten miles further on with its great fields, from there through the woods, almost to the foot of Sarsving Castle.”

  He had been listening closely to her, as she was in a good mood, acting almost friendly toward him. But he wondered now if the information she was repeating was done so as a veiled threat, showing him how powerful she would soon be. He was sure she would need him though, in spite of how mighty she became, or acted. And if the Sund came this far north, they would indeed try to camp on her fields. He wondered how she would act then.

  Being near the main road between the two great cities had its advantages, Wayland knew. Johnas Tygus would direct the servants and soldiers from Grotoy to journey and meet them there, at the crossroad town of Zinsy. It was a big walled burgh with a charter from Berize. He had no idea what they were famous for, though such places were always famous for something. Perhaps it just existed as a market for the produce from her great estate.

  “What made your father set your uncle so far away from Rydol?” he asked her. It was a touchy subject, but sidestepped talking directly about her and her relationship to Wenslig.

  “It was a simple thing,” she replied, but he sensed immediately that she was somehow being evasive. “He created it to give him some dignity and autonomy. Berize is what you on the isles would call a barony, with its own court. And there, both Grotoy and Rydol could watch over him; for both my father and Grotoy were always worried that he would try and unseat me.” Wayland felt like he had just caught the birds in the bush.

  “I see how that worked well for fifteen years,” he said.

  “I hadn’t thought much about it before, but I see it now as plain as the rain. That is what living on the Dimm has done to me. I have become an adult in my mind, as well as my body, from standing in its muck, surrounded by its monsters.”

  He quietly nodded back, and almost rode away, seeing how she had gone morose again, and not knowing of a good thing to say. She was rubbing at the scars on her wrists, as both the women still did sometimes. The marks were just little white lines now, almost faded into her tan.

  “Perhaps you should cover those over,” he advised her. “Rubbing them at the wrong time may give away how you are thinking, and act as a sign that your enemies may use against you.”

  She pushed down her sleeves and glared over at him. Then she blinked and stared out at the trees on the side of the road. Brigha looked over at him angrily out of her pretty, green-shot brown eyes, and shook her head.

  “You are too devious for your own good,” Sunnil said a moment later, when he was about to leave. “Ride out ahead of us now and scout the road. When we stop tonight, I will consider what you have said. Do as I say now, and I think you might just keep your skin.”

  Wayland rode away from the wagon, signaling over to Horwit and Samur. They joined him and increased the gait of their horses up into a canter, enough to make their boots bounce a little. When they had gone around the next bend in the road, they all backed down and looked for something to occupy their time. To the east, there was a shallow rain lake upon a pasture, with the tops of the Silvers reflected upon its surface. A few wood smoke plumes could be seen here and there, but the breeze was quickly dispersing them.

  “Ever been on this road?” Wayland asked Horwit. He shook his head back.

  “We stayed on the main trade route.” He replied. “I’ve passed below the Silvers on the Grotoy to Rydol road, but this one is straight through the back country of Gece. No self respecting east to west trader would be caught dead out here.”

  Wayland sighed and looked out off the road. In one of the pastures a tall peasant in a hood was cutting down a small tree for wood. The figure stopped its work and slunk back into the trees, seemingly afraid of the men on horses with their bows and swords.

  “They seem an odd lot,” Wayland remarked, to himself and to the others. “I wonder how it is out here, compared to the way they behave in the cities and towns.”

  “I don’t want to find out,” Horwit said, “but I think we will have to anyway.” They turned with the road and saw that it passed now ahead through a dense forest of pines and oaks, then wrapped around the sides of some small hills, the tops of those lightning scorched and almost bare but for brush.

  “I smell blood and guts, like a kill was made near the road,” Wayland said to the others. He slowed and then stopped his horse. Samur looked around, even checking the near trees.

  “Is it wolf or bear bait?”

  “Perhaps someone just shot and dressed out a deer,” Horwit commented. “Like Uffo used to say, it’s too far off the road to worry about.”

  There was some cracking noise, as if somewhere out in the trees branches were being broken and moved aside, but there was nothing to see. The turned their horses and tried to orient on it, but like the peasant they had seen before, it was now moving away.

  “It could be a tramp, some refugees, or bandits just getting up a stew for their pot,” Samur considered. Wayland turned his horse back, as he was like them now uneasy.

  “The lady said something unusual about stopping tonight,” he said. “Let’s go back now, and I will question her.” They rode back on the road, down the slight slope of the first hill, then back around the curve in the road, the trees letting out on the noise of a fight and a scene of chaos.

  The men in the party were shooting up into the tree line to the right of the road with their bows, and two of them lay fallen on the ground. There was a horse down with a broken leg, and the wagon that Lady Sunnil and Brigha had been riding in was cocked sideways, with a long piece of wood thrown through the spokes of the broken rear wheel. The oxen had pulled it to the side, and they had gone down into a shallow ditch there. They bellowed and tried to move forward, but could not. The destruction was so sudden and arresting, Wayland only knew of one thing that could be blamed.

  “It’s the troll!” he shouted out to the other two, and he drew his sword. Wayland looked up the slope, and saw a tall shape moving there, with a long, steady, marching step, a great dark hood over its shoulders and head. The Lady Sunnil was tucked up under one of its arms, her mouth now wide open in another scream.

  “Don’t shoot!” Wayland yelled out to the men with bows, but he figured they knew enough not to do that. He jumped off his horse and looked about for Temmi, only to find he was one of the men laid out, with blood coming from a wound to his head.

  The ambush had gone wonderfully at first. Kulith had watched the three stone men ride by earlier giving him the perfect chance to overcome the rest. He had been cutting the tree into a lance and he now readied it by the side of the road. He carried another stout stick with him he could use as a club, because he could no longer trust the Tuvier Blade to do what he needed it to do.

  He had jumped up from his hiding place and thrown the wooden lance through the wheel of the wagon, then sprang forward with his club and laid most of the stone men guarding Little Toad out with a single whack each from it. The lame archer had been there, and as Kulith pointedly ignored him as he went for the girl. He had jumped forward anyway and and stabbed him in the leg, with one of his arrows.

  Kulith had then clouted him, and began carrying Little Toad away, under his arm as he menaced the remaining men who now feared to shoot their bows and hit the girl. The lame archer had laughed ruefully as he pulled himself back up, which Kulith had maked as being very strange. As he made his way up the hill, to the black horse he had positioned there to carry them off, he realized what had really happened.

  There had been some added marking on the arrow, as if it had been special. A spiral had been singed around the shaft, and stabbing an enemy you could just as easily shoot had made no sense. But he felt a familiar weakness now, a fee
ling he had felt only once before when he had been bitten in the Priwak by a poisonous snake. He was getting dizzy from the wound, and he stumbled up the hill as Little Toad shrieked and kicked out. The stone men were chasing after him now, kicking rocks and raising dust, and the trees in front of him were starting to blur. There were suddenly sparks flashing across his vision, and he had trouble keeping his feet.

  “Damned it all,” Wayland snarled. “Be damned this troll!” He signaled to his men and began to pursue the monster up the hill. Horwit and Samur drew their hangers and came with him, while the two archers followed more slowly, their bows partly drawn.

  Wayland turned and jumped behind a tree trunk as Kulith rounded back and swung the heavy club at him, it making a loud crack as the two pieces of wood connected together. Wayland continued in thw direction he was going, around the back of the tree, and watched as Lady Sunnil’s legs swung by and disappeared through the branches and green fir needles, those swaying back and forth by her passage. She screamed again, and he ran through them now, pursueing the two.

  Kulith went over the top of the hill and started down the reverse of it, into a little hollow full of trees and brush. A great black horse was tied to one of the trees, and it reared up when it saw the troll, the lady, and the men who were pursuing them.

  “Give it up troll!” Wayland called out to him. “Yield the girl, because I will never give her up! There are too many little buggers here for you to get away, you know that. It’ll be like Warukz again, and we will just shoot you full of arrows.”

  But it was apparent that Kulith had already been wounded by at least one arrow, and now the troll staggered, and then dropped Sunnil down into the brush, where she landed there with an indignant squeal. The monster turned and came back after Wayland, swinging the stick again, not even taking the time to draw his sword. Wayland dropped under the stick, and then stabbed the monster in the gut. His blade scraped off of something hard, but then passed through, and the tip of it disappeared.

  The trollgruneted, and then it threw him back. He hit a tree trunk, and then slid down it to stop. He ducked lower as he saw the club swung down to brain him, and it struck the tree and his shoulder instead with a crack, and dry leaves coming loose from the branches above, and the bark ripped free, to shower down upon his head. The troll grunted as another arrow hit him in the thigh, and he turned back around, looking that way. He jumped forward and swung at Horwit, and he beat back his sword with the branch, and then made a great passing swing that sent him flying. Kulith rolled off into the bushes, as another arrow passed close by.

  Wayland got up and chased after him, and he stabbed him in the leg, next to the bloody shaft already there. The troll howled and swung back with his stick, shattering it now on the next tree trunk. There was an axe at its waist, and he dropped the wood and tried to pull it out and get it into play, ignorign the Tuvier Blade. Edou shot Kulith through one of his forearms with an arrow, as he lifted up the axe to strike.

  Kulith howled out and dropped the axe on the ground. Then he fell, and lay there panting in a patch of grass, red all over with his own blood. Edou said something, like a curse in Alonic, and rested on a large rock nearby.

  Wayland stalked around the troll and cut the black horse’s tether, and the creature reared one up, then turned off and galloped away out through the forest, the heavy saddle on its back bouncing and jingling. Sunnil had stood up by then, and was wiping the tears from her face. Edou had another arrow now pointed at the troll, and was watching, should he try to rise and fight them again. But there was something really wrong with the monster, and his great, deadly efficiency had snuffed out like the flame of a candle that had burned too quickly and bright.

  “Stop following me!” Sunnil yelled down at the troll. “Go back to the Dimm!”

  “Little Toad,” the troll said. “Little Toad has promised!”

  “Then you should have kept yours to me as well!” she cried. The troll waved with its good hand down at the pine needles, the grass, the dead leaves and sticks there on the ground. “You are safe here. Keep your promise to Kulith now.”

  Wayland got Horwit up, and found his sword for him. He had a gash on his head where the troll’s club had hit him as it had passed. Edou helped Sunnil out of the bushes, as the troll kept looking up at her, breathing heavily, in great effort.

  “Back to the road,” Wayland said to them, motioning with his bloody sword to return down the hill. The troll was wrong: none of them were safe here. “Get them all ready to move,” he said to his men.

  “Kill him!” Sunnil yelled back at Wayland, as she was led away by Edou. Kulith looked at her until she disappeared through the small trees. Then his head turned to Wayland. “She promised,” he said, not pleading, but saying it instead in surprise.

  “Where is the Tuvier Blade?” Wayland said the troll, as he flexed his own sword arm. Then he saw it was strapped there to the troll’s side, under the black cloak he had donned as a disguise. Kulith chuckled.

  “It has made me do this, but it won’t let me use it now.” Wayland didn’t know what to make of that. He knew it was a powerful tailsman from what he had witnessed in his fever dream at the Mancan ruin.

  “Let’s see what it tells me to do,” he said brutally, as he pressed his own sword’s tip down against the monster’s chest. He grabbed the Tuvier Blade’s hilt and shook it free from its binding with his left hand. The sword sprang up to him and hissed in the air, its silver and gray pattern weld lighting up and holding a golden, shimmering color, like a brand just taken from a fire. Wayland tried to bring it down to the neck of the troll.

  A burning sensation came from the hilt, and he felt wrenchingly sick, suddenly weak with fatigue. There was a hard pain in his left arm, like he had just twisted it. It shocked him again, so much now that he shouted out and let go of the sword, and it fell free and lay there on the forest floor.

  “Mercy of the Three,” he said to himself, amazed.

  “This troll is right,” Kulith said, having observed what had just passed. “Little Toad is wrong. Tell Little Toad I still want my chair.” Wayland moved and stood back from both the troll and the sword.

  “Clear off now or I will end you for sure,” he told him. “You aren’t in the West Lands anymore, and this is the freedom, or doom that you can take for yourself, depending on what you choose to do here. The Little Toad isn’t in any position to grant what you ask. When you took her, it destroyed her power to help you. This is your last chance. I’ll have more soldiers with me the next time, and the grace of a magic sword will never save you again.”

  Wayland turned and walked away, leaving the creature to live or die there as it pleased. He flexed out his left hand, trying to work out the painful sting the sword had given him. Was the creature right? He didn’t know. He cleaned and sheathed his own sword as he walked back over and down the small hill, back to the road.

  Ludt was able to move the wagon and splint the spokes on the wheel where the troll had thrown the piece of wood through it. Temmi was still senseless, as well as the Pendwise squire, who now had a broken arm to set, to go with his other injury. They bandaged themselves, killed the injured horse, and then loaded Temmi and Gatan up on the wagon, in back of the women with Edou.

  “Did you kill the troll?” Lady Sunnil called out to Wayland, as he mounted up and rode by a moment later. He was quiet, and his silence gave away that he had clearly not done as she had asked.

  “I did as grace, and as my conscience told me,” Wayland replied to her, and pushed his horse off, to go a little ahead. He started and kept a faster pace, while watching the wheel go around, wondering if it would hold. It creaked and shook every time it turned, and he knew they needed a new one, or a rebuild of the one that they had. That type of repair could only be made in a town or good sized village. The sun began to descend down toward the trees, and it made all the shadows go long, putting the road mostly in shade, and it seemed cold and friendless.

  They were all unhappy now
, and Sunnil used every chance she got to glare over at Wayland with unchecked fury, for letting the troll live. They looked forward, for a place to find refuge and help, and they finally came to a village cut there out of the trees, up on the side of a hill, with a wooden palisade for a wall.

  They turned in through the gate onto the street, the rear wheel of the wagon making noise and causing a shake that had woken Temmi up, and kept him and the squire groaning. There was an inn, and they stopped before it. Wayland called the stable boy and the porter, and got everyone but Edou and himself quickly on inside. He tried to summon the guard, but found that there was only an old sergeant and a couple of reeves there, and it took time for them to be found.

  He explained who he was and showed them his orders from the Grand Prince, and they went then to get their weapons and muster out properly. They returned to sit in the common room of the inn, or patrolled around the streets and walls once the gate was closed, to watch for the return of the troll.

  A healer was called for Temmi’s and Gatan, and he looked at Horwit and the rest of them that were hurt in turn. Wayland took the two private rooms the inn had, giving one to the women who seemed exhausted, and they lay down almost immediately and went to slept. Gatan yelled when they moved his broken arm to set it, and then the healer splinted it tightly up.

  Wayland didn’t sleep at all, and instead patrolled the streets with the reeves. He was second guessing his decision now, and knew it would be better to rest after sunrise, when the danger was less. When he reckoned this was near, he returned to the inn and tried to sleep for awhile in a big chair near the hearth. He gave this up when the common room opened, and he went then to check on the wagon’s wheel. He found that Ludt had engaged the smith and was fixing it with his help.

  They started off again toward Berize the next day, but had to leave both Temmi and Gatan at the village because they were too badly injured. They had lost time, and drove away from the village at a brisk pace, with half a dozen armed men with bows, who walked along and watched the forest to the sides. In the evening they came to a larger village, with a gray walled house at one end, on a small hill. Perhaps it was the place that Lady Sunnil had hinted of to Wayland, but he didn’t ask her again. They drove up to the manor, and Lady Sunnil presented herself to the resident knight. It was a pivotal meeting, as they were now indeed in a village belonging to the Honor of Berize.