A War of Stones: Book One of the Traveler Knight

by Howard Norfolk

  “This is the battle that you started when you killed Sarik,” she said.

  “Yes,” he admitted, “but it had been going on for long before that. It was mine to act out alone at first, but then others saw that it was being fought, and they chose to fight it also. Now it belongs to all of us.” He wasn’t sure if she accepted or believed that. A part of this was just a trick he had played once or twice on the others, as a way to direct the blame and trouble away from his own actions.

  He had used what happened to express the way he felt inside, and they all had all shared this dissatisfaction, and so it had been accepted. He was certain it was done sometimes like that among the stone men, by the prince and the counts of Gece. It was the making of great words, and the thoughts that lay behind their laws.

  Only a few minutes later word came to them that Sternia’s vanguard had appeared out of the trees and walked up to cover the tops of the hills that ran across the center of Big Stone. He went out and looked with the other buggers, from just past the last factoria buildings and hovels on the outskirts of the town’s edge.

  There were a lot of them, and he swore as he looked upon the darkness of their ranks that he could also smell them, and they were rotten. The wind was blowing a patchwork of white and gray clouds in from the west now with the smell, and bright spots of sunlight moving here and there over the fields, the tents, the buildings and the masses of the two armies.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  KULITH

  THE BATTLE ON THE MEADOW

  Kulith went back almost immediately into town and got the rest of his armor and kit from the inn. There were about twenty White Knife warriors now there, and most returned with him back out to the assembly, wanting to be involved in the great glory of the battle. There was the promise of the dead penny just around the corner if they won, but it appeared most of the buggers wanted to fight today because it meant something besides loot to them. He didn’t entertain that they really understood what being free was, but they all had a mutually shared hatred of the thrings because of the constant threats of being killed and converted into undead minions. Perhaps the relief from this was what freedom meant to them, and it was enough.

  Though they were all starting to form up, to roll their drums, wave their banners and blow their horns, he knew it would still be a long time until the actual fighting began. Perhaps this was just a great assembly after all, to get their courage up and show themselves to each other. When they all got on the field together Kulith knew they would see what the chiefs around the fire pit had anticipated, what he had only seen in his mind, or in scraps.

  The great formations had provoked a sense that the two armies were closer than they actually were, and it had boiled up and got the living’s blood very hot. He didn’t want the buggers trying to close the space by going up the slopes to meet the thousands of rotten bodies they now saw there, and the veterans were also too experienced to do it, though their hearts and the younger ones begged them to do so now, and to get it all over with.

  There was a very great and high morale already, and it was growing all the time. There were going around as if they knew that they would win, if they simply went out and fought. When he had returned to the room at the inn, Little Toad had asked him what they should do if the buggers lost, and he had just laughed back at her. He walked on ahead, up to where the war bands were forming their battle line, with the thyrs all standing in one great group of several thousand, throwing colorful, inflated pig bladders back and forth across the ranks, and others moving supplies by cart and stacking great piles of thring lances where they could be taken up as needed.

  It appeared that each group of buggers assembled there in the middle of the line had done something at one time or another to come into odds with the rest of the horde. Kulith had been angry with Long Ridge and the thyrs whey they had deserted the campaign half way down the Stones, and then for attacking the Stone Pile on their own. They all remembered the Red Tounge goblins from the wild, bloody sack of the Red Tower, and the others for similar things. He looked over and saw that Kroson and his hundreds of warriors were immediately standing on his left, and so he had not been left completely alone with Long Ridge, his thyrs, and his several other possible enemies.

  Long Ridge came over and had the audacity to poke at him with his clawed fingers. “You owe me for sixty two barrels of water,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” Kulith commented. “That number seems a bit great, and is different than what I counted coming in. How did you manage to count up to sixty two?”

  “Pay me!” Long Ridge demanded. Kulith reached around for the purse of gold coins he had brought, and took it from his belt.

  “You could have done more,” he told the thyr. But it was better than nothing, and they would need the water, while the thrings would not. He handed over the gold, and Long Ridge weighed it in his hand, and then he went to open it.

  “Are you going to count it now?” Kulith asked Long Ridge. “Don’t you trust me?” The thyr stopped what he was doing, thought about it, and then closed it and put the purse away into a larger bag riding along his hip.

  “We can reckon it later, if there is too little there.” Kulith showed his anger at this comment with a snarl. The dumb, dirty dog faces were just going to barely make it through the whole campaign on his side of the line.

  He stalked away from the thyr, considering if it would have been a better policy to kill anyone who angered him, and he went over to see Kroson, who was talking with his war band braves and sub chiefs just a few yards away, near a great pile of metal tipped lances, fire pots and shields. Kroson turned around when he was alerted by the others to Kulith’s approach. He closed the distance and grabbed his hand with his own, before Kulith could do anything about it.

  “So how does it feel, to be worshipped as a god, if only for just one day?” he asked him.

  “Is that what they think?” Kulith wondered aloud back, as he now shook the pig snouted goblin’s hand.

  “It’s what they hope. Wouldn’t you pray to something also if you could, when faced with that?” He gestured up at the tops of the hills, where the advance force of Sterina’s army kept growing, thickening and moving as it adjusted itself down the east side of the hills.

  “Pah!” Kulith said. “We have done this all before. What I’m surprised with is that the thrings have not devised some other tactic to try and thwart us. Perhaps that is how we can always win: the fact that we can change, and they cannot.”

  “And our numbers, which are greater than ever before,” the goblin leader added. “It was luck that Sarik died when he did, so that we were able to use his horde for our own ends.”

  “Yes, that was fortunate,” Kulith agreed. It seemed like Kroson was thanking him now for that deed, and for the great mercy it had caused. At least one of them had thanked him, but perhaps any one of them might have also done the same thing in his position. His collected guilt seemed to lessen a little, the whole of it being now more tolerable to bear. He considered: what use had a bugger for sentiments or shame?

  “What did the others say?” Kulith asked him.

  “About what?” Kroson asked.

  “Say about sticking me in the middle with the thyrs on one side, and with the Red Marks and Red Tounge on the other. You know that we do not like each other.”

  “It’s no wonder.” Kroson said. “We gave them to you because they cause the most trouble for us, and for the enemy. The Red Marks is always out looking for a fight, or provoking a new one. The thyrs are so fierce that they attacked the Stone Pile on their own. You will need such insolence and daring, to get in among the thrings and find their leaders.”

  So it had made sense, as well as being convenient for them. Kroson turned around and looked back up the slope. He pointed at it, as did a score of the others nearby, all shouting and talking at once. A mass of white bodies were coming down the hills, quickly in a great, thick line.

  “Here they come!” he shouted out to his
warriors.

  The injured buggers had found a suitable roof to watch the battle from, and with a few grayed White Knife veterans Sunnil and Edou had been escorted through an old stone hall past an ancient Mancan fane preserved there, and up into a bell tower. All the bells in it had been taken out years ago, one goblin said, when Vous Vox had made a sudden prohibition against their use. By walking around the landing, they were able to look out from the arched casements in any direction and see Big Stone for miles around.

  The old moldings at the top of the tower were carved with the shapes of monsters and vines, in a crude, uneven way that had no doubt been executed by buggers. They held onto them as they looked outward, standing on the uneven masonry and a wooded landing of cross beams. The thrings from the Marsh Shore were just visible as a great, white and black mass coming down from the heights of the island, over the rolling slopes and through the little valleys, past the burned out or intact warrens that stood on the slope.

  Along the streets of the town below there were groups of buggers shouting out the alarm, moving back and forth, they stopping and snatching up thring lances from where they stood ready, and forming into thick lines bristling with hundreds of points. There was an argument between the White Knife veterans and the injured buggers there who had accompanied them to the tower top. One of the buggers wearing a large bandage pointed over at the White Knife.

  “You should be going below, in case they come,” he said.

  “There will be a time for that maybe, but they are not very close yet,” a veteran replied back.

  “We can watch these two,” he said, persisting.

  “What are you planning?” the White Knife veteran pointedly asked him, as he touched the hilt of the dagger at his belt. The goblin backed off, shaking his head. Another one of the White Knife growled, and then said, “We aren’t going anywhere. I like this view.”

  The white, fishy mass of thrings separated about half way down the slope and formed themselves into great, thick lines, each containing thousands, about twenty or so bodies in depth at any one place. There were then three of them soon, like foaming waves coming onto a beach. Up on the top of the hills regular bands of buggers from the Marsh Shore were now emerging, forming up and beginning to loosely march together down the hills.

  There were shouts from the street, alerting the others in the town of something going on now to the east, at the water’s edge. The reserve that Kulith and the others had set to watch the water, and many of the injured who could still stand moved that way with thring piles, spilling out between the buildings to go across the two or three miles of land where the camps and stores sat, in front of Ovodag’s harbor. There was a lot of shouting and calls, and then there were many smaller goblins running back, to seize up more thring lances from the stores and take them to give to the larger ones perhaps, on the line now fighting with the enemy.

  “They have come from out of the water too,” one of the goblins atop the tower said.

  “We should go and help,” a wounded goblin offered.

  “Yes you go,” one of the White Knife veterans told him. “Go earn your shares there, the lot of you.”

  They looked at each other, and then some grunted in assent and moved off down the stairway. When they were seen below, they were grabbing up lances from a pile and taking them toward the fighting out beyond the east end of the town. One of the White Knife then turned around to another.

  “Go and bring up a dozen of those lances, in case we need them to block up the stair.” It didn’t have to be said what they would mostly be blocking the stair up with. It would be done with the bodies of the first couple of things that tried to climb up to them.

  The great combined horde out in the Meadow began to roar, all in unison it seemed, and were displaying their lances by thrusting with them up in the air, in waves of points, all combining in the eye to make a ripple move across their formations. It was great and fearful, and the West Lands had thankfully never seen its like.

  Sunnil gripped the rough stone and watched the first line of thrings make their way down the sides of the hills and approach the lines, which had began to move slowly forward, closer to a central position upon the weedy, harvested fields, and atop their old campsite, with only a small break here and there in the lines showing where the watering canals ran.

  The thrings approached the line, and the first rows appeared to abruptly stop there, and the second rows tried to then climb over them. It was the wooden lances she knew, stabbing out, fixing them all in place. There was movement among the buggers also, as more lances came forward, into the hands of the strongest goblins and trolls at the front. When the second rank climbed its way over the first rank, they were also stopped, and then the lances began to move forward between hands again. In this way when the third rank of thrings came over the top of the others, they fell and flopped down before they could attack. The goblins and trolls caught them and pinned them, using their lances to fix them to the ground. The smaller ones came forward and cut at them with swords and axes. This was repeated once more, and then the buggers moved their line back, to give themselves space ahead, between them and the piled up thrings.

  In this way was the entire first wave of mostly rotten, weaker thrings destroyed within a few minutes of contact and fighting, before the second wave had gotten down the hills to join them. When they did, they had to climb over the others, or pour through the breaks in the masses of lanced bodies. The fighting became a general blur, as the bugger line moved back and forth to destroy these, as the torrents of thrings found some easy passage and poured on through.

  Behind them on the other side of town there were also noises from fighting, and a vague, misty line of battle could be seen over the spires and tops of the roofs. The goblins ran back through the streets in ones, twos, or in whole groups on errands. An hour passed, and then another. The lines of thrings became a solid mass to the west, across the valley floor in front of the goblin lines, as they had appeared from afar when they had first come out of the woods on the heights.

  Behind them now was a great, thick mass of buggers and what looked like human infantry, and these stood and milled in back of the thrings, waiting for their chance to come forward and attack.

  There was a movement of the goblin archers in response to this, who had so far not played much of a role in the battle. They ran along and adjusted their mass to the south, to fall out behind the thick bugger lines between the Stone Pile and the town. The fortress itself sat off in the distance, dark, the pennants atop it snapping, a helm or weapon glinting every now and then from its heights. Neither army had approached it yet, nor did it seem to figure much into the evolving battle.

  There was a surge near the docks, along the shoreline, with the loudness of battle picking up there, with the crash and clang of metal blades, which was different than the sound of a battle fought against thrings with lances. The wounded were starting to come back, to fall and prostrate themselves by the old fire pits, upon the dirty furs and piles of straw and blankets. They saw a thring run by below with a jerky gait, its arms flailing. Several goblins pursued it with weapons and lances, and tried to run it down.

  “Go get the lances and we will stand with them now on the stairs,” the leader of the White Knife warriors said to the others. He gestured over to Sunnil and Edou. “Don’t lean out of the windows or move around. You will be seen by the thrings and draw them to us.” She moved back, where she could only see the hills out to the west, and the patchy sky roiling above them.

  Kulith had watched in satisfaction from behind as the forward line of thyrs lanced and destroyed the first great wave of thrings to come down off the hillside. There was no hesitation and no loss of rhythm in the thrusting and moving of the wooden piles. The horde had turned itself into the instrument that was required to do this work. Then there was a long breath, where no more lances fell, where there was just some small work and skirmishing done with swords and axes, and then they all moved back under Long Ridge’
s command, and they could see the line of pierced thrings, laying in large heaps where they had fallen, many still driven through with the lances that had been used to stop them. The thyrs roared, and this was picked up by the goblins fighting with them, to either side, and carried on down the line.

  The next wave of thrings approached, and these were immediately slowed down by the destruction of the others that had gone before. While the first line had looked rather shabby, bony and weak, the next group consisted of well kept bodies with heavy muscles, and clean white flesh. They were proper ghouls who had been created in the Great Swamp by Sterina, and had awakened in death as strong, mindless monsters. They were used as laborers, or for her shock troops in battle. They were more athletic, and some bounded over the debris, while others just pushed through the mass, and then attacked with speed.

  When they hit the front ranks, more piles and lances were needed to try and pin them down, and here and there gaps were opened up; as the buggers moved about and protected themselves. Thyrs shouted out as they were knocked down and bitten into, or tore at, and those behind moved hastily forward to cut the thrings off of them. As these warriors moved, Kulith found that he was gradually moving forward, to join in the line of fighting.