Knights of the Sword Page 8

  “Later,” Darin said, stopping Whistletrot with a firm hand on his collar.

  “Or did they find a way to eat the sea trolls—?” Darin heard, as Whistletrot danced off out of reach.

  He sighed. Victories came and went, as luck and the gods would have it. Kender never changed.

  Chapter 6

  Preparing for a quest or even a journey was a matter of no small complexity when one was a Knight of Solamnia.

  Still, it was only in rare moments that Pirvan envied his younger self. To be sure, that younger Pirvan had few possessions he could not carry on his back, and no one to whom he needed to say more than “good-bye.” And that only out of courtesy, and sometimes not at all, when he did not wish his departure known.

  Also, when he reached his destination, if he was not seeking a new place for night work, he had little to do, and none of that in haste. To be sure, he needed a roof over his head and food in his stomach, but a host of cheap inns and lodging houses offered both, and in some of them fleas were rare and willing servant girls not unknown.

  Now, of course, the effort required to go a-journeying sometimes seemed to Pirvan sufficient to take a large force of cavalry on campaign. Orders to the men-at-arms who remained behind, likewise the servants, likewise the stewards, bailiffs, village headmen, and all the others who could bring Tiradot Manor to ruin through malice or carelessness. Procuring horses (if any in the stables were unfit) and everything needed to turn a simple horse into a gentleman’s mount, as well as food, drink, tents, money, and all else that might be needed if a day’s journey ended short of a civilized tavern (the kind that had not been cheap when Pirvan’s purse was lean, and were no cheaper now that it was fat).

  Weapons—not so many hard decisions or so long a list, Kiri-Jolith be praised! Pirvan knew that he was still some distance from the full range of weapons skills that a true Knight of Solamnia had to master. At least Haimya’s still being his master with the broadsword meant that he had a good teacher.

  The armory gave up only sword and dagger for Pirvan, two swords and a shield for Haimya, and light armor—helm and back-and-breast. They also had various concealed weapons—concealed not only from the eyes of the passerby but from the armorer, who had to report such to the Knights of Solamnia.

  Pirvan did not know what the penalty was for a Knight of Solamnia who carried a loaded cane or a swordstick. He did know that he much preferred to remain alive to find out.

  Then all the days of preparation had fled, everything was packed or returned to the storerooms, and the horses themselves seemed to look impatient every time Pirvan passed through the courtyard. He did this several times on the last day, in his mind saying farewell to a place that had become home in a way he had never expected it would in the days when his new rank still sat on him like an ill-fitting helmet.

  He and Haimya had gone journeying on the affairs of the knights many times, and a few times on their own affairs. More often than not, they had faced perils greater than Pirvan suspected this quest would offer.

  Yet the farewell to the manor had become a ritual, and he suspected that his spirit would say it on his last departure, when they carried his mortal shell out to the burying ground beyond the stream.

  There was also another farewell to be said, and there was no ritual to this, because it was to Gerik and Eskaia. No ritual, because with each farewell they knew more about what their parents faced than they had before.

  What they faced, and what might take them from the world without so much as leaving a body.

  There were times when the words of farewell nearly choked Pirvan. He wanted to say other words, words that would not choke him. Words such as:

  “Ogres carry off Sir Gehbian and everything that is his. We are staying home.” The affair of Sir Gehbian of Juhrwood had left Pirvan with headaches and Haimya with a limp for some months, and without exceedingly shrewd healing spells neither would have come home at all.

  He dreamed of saying such words, but in the dreams the children did not leap about, shout for joy, and hug their parents. Instead they turned gloomy and sullen, muttering of “honor” and “you are not what you were” and other phrases that held no filial respect but rather a deal of painful truth.

  “We bred them true,” Haimya said one night, after Pirvan revealed the dreams to her. “True from the bone out, and no denying it.”

  “Who denies it?” Pirvan said, reluctant to be consoled. “But remember. Now we must say farewell when we march. In a while we will not be saying farewell, because they will ride with us. Then comes the worst part, when we must sit by the fire and watch them mount up and ride out.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Any man who bids Eskaia sit by the fireside and embroider, she will stab with her longest, sharpest needle. And have you thought of how to reconcile Gerik to a life he would call less than honorable?”

  “Hardly. It seems he has learned some good from those lordlings, as well as the rest.”

  “I suppose his mother had nothing to do with it?”

  “Less than his father, I—”

  Pirvan silenced her with a kiss, and that particular argument died aborning.

  * * * * *

  “Papa,” Eskaia said. “May I ask you a question?”

  “Is it one I must answer?”

  “I think so, because it is one that both Gerik and I need answered.”

  “Why isn’t Gerik here, to ask it himself?”

  “He—I think he is afraid.”

  “Afraid?” Pirvan frowned, then said with mock seriousness, “It is unworthy of the blood of a knight—”

  “It’s the blood of a knight we’re worrying about,” Eskaia exclaimed. “Both of us. What will happen to us if you and Mama do not come back?”

  Pirvan looked at the sky. No god appeared to offer guidance, advice, or even a rude gesture indicating that the problem was entirely his to solve.

  For this last, Pirvan was grateful. He was in no mood to be told what he already knew.

  He also knew that it was not a question of who would be the children’s wards, who would pay for their education, how Eskaia would come by a dowry and Gerik his apprenticeship in the knights, and so on. They knew all this, and would be insulted if he repeated any of it.

  “Eskaia, I am not sure what you want to know that we have not already told you.”

  The girl looked at her father with a pitying expression that Pirvan knew too well. It implied if he were not her father, she might call him too witless to be at large on the streets.

  “Uhh—it’s hard to say it right.”

  “Try. I’ll listen to anything from you and your brother. So will Mama.” Once, at least.

  “Papa, if you and Mama die, who will train us so that we can avenge you?”

  The words came out in a rush. Pirvan was conscious of standing mouth agape while his wits tried to assure themselves that his ears had not played them false.

  He bought some time by hugging Eskaia, but his tongue ran away and he had to explain what he meant by “breeding true.”

  “Does this mean we will be able to fight as well as you?” she asked.

  “Even as well as your mother, who is better than I am,” Pirvan said. “Remember, when I was a thief, I went armed only to defend myself. I was no fighter.”

  “Yes, it was very honorable of you to try not to hurt anybody while you were stealing,” Eskaia said calmly. “But if someone kills you and Mama, our honor means killing them.”

  “Indeed,” Pirvan said. He could not escape the feeling that while his back was turned his daughter had changed into something he did not recognize. Love, yes. But recognize—that was another story, one he suspected that all fathers could tell.

  He considered explaining how the children of Knights of Solamnia were bound to other notions of honor than blood vengeance—or at least ought to consider themselves so bound. From what Pirvan had heard in the way of complaints from his comrades, even those children who bred truest in the en
d sometimes made their fathers’ hair stand on end.

  Instead, he chose a more practical form of reassurance. “You will have all the training you can use, from all who have the care of you,” Pirvan said firmly. “But worry about avenging us when we are dead and our killers are not. I hope you do not think that your mother and I will ever be easy prey?”

  “Never!” Eskaia said. She stamped her foot. If she had been asked to spit on a temple floor, she could hardly have been more indignant.

  “Then we are done with that, but not with the farewells. If your brother could bring himself to come down—he need not wash—”

  Eskaia was off like a stone flung from a siege engine.

  * * * * *

  Now all the farewells and even the scurrying about to retrieve vital items forgotten at the last moment were some days in the past. The journey from Tiradot to Istar lay over well-settled country, with good roads even in the hills and enough honest folk about at all times to discourage the other kind.

  Not that Pirvan and his little company had much to fear from the common run of bandits and outlaws. They were too obviously armed and ready, promising no loot and many hard knocks, as well as an appointment with the executioner for any who survived the folly of the attack.

  Indeed, at times those in Pirvan’s company found themselves, in all but name, the guards of not-so-small caravans. Carters, pack trains, pilgrims, and the odd wayfarer who had no reason to be on the road but for the itch in his feet all seemed ready to stay within hailing distance of a Knight of Solamnia and his household.

  It was during the long, ambling days on the road in such company that Pirvan learned a good deal more of the affairs of Istar, as the common man saw them. For the Knights of Solamnia, everything appeared in the light of a history stretching back the best part of a thousand years. For the common man, the world began when he was born and ended when he died, and the farthest he could think forward was his children and backward his parents.

  At times, Pirvan wondered if that “common man’s” view of the world was something Sir Marod had sought to find in him. No doubt Sir Marod had feared to be insulting by saying so aloud, but Pirvan found the idea no insult, indeed rather the reverse.

  He would have taken up the matter with Sir Marod at some time, by choice over good brandy. Sir Marod would keep all the secrets he was required to keep and ten more besides, if he was allowed to do so. Pirvan had sworn some years ago to nibble away at Sir Marod’s excess of secrets, like a mouse at a cheese.

  The journey was agreeable in all save duration, which made Pirvan think yearningly of flying on dragonback, even precariously strapped to the exuberant young bronze Hipparan, except for one disagreeable incident. That came on the fifth night out, when lowering clouds that promised rain induced them to stop early, at a sprawling inn called the Chained Ogre.

  The name itself rang harsh on Pirvan’s ears, and he decided that making the innkeeper a trifle uneasy would only be fair pay for the man’s dubious taste. The knight had not forgotten his old night work skills, including finding concealed routes into and about any building, being quiet and invisible, and picking locks.

  The only difference was that now Pirvan put on the simple, patched garb that any manservant might wear, and he looked as if it had been dragged behind a wagon over several days’ worth of road. Add a little work by Haimya on her husband’s hair, and no one who had not seen him more often than the innkeeper and his servants would have been able to recognize him.

  He had been about the inn for nearly an hour, and was beginning to expect to be disappointed in his suspicions. He promised to continue his search until the rain stopped, then retire. They would need to start early tomorrow, to make a decent day’s progress over muddy roads.

  Pirvan was now in the attic, which, from its mustiness, dustiness, and burden of useless articles, must be visited about once in the reign of each kingpriest. Then he heard a sneeze, and as he raised his lantern and drew his dagger, he saw something moving.

  It was a small figure, and his first thought was some apprentice potboy or stablehand, eking out night after night amid the dust and debris of the attic after a day’s exhausting labor. That was bad, but not something where Pirvan’s duty or the law allowed him to interfere. Mutual recognition of each other’s laws was part of the Swordsheath Scroll that bound Solamnia and Istar, and the laws of Istar said nothing against making apprentices sleep hard in filthy attics.

  Then Pirvan looked more closely. The small figure was not a boy, but a kender—sex impossible to tell. Moreover, the kender had one eye half-closed in the middle of a purple bruise, and both its feet were chained to a log that must weigh as much as Grimsoar One-Eye.

  Pirvan walked over to the kender so noiselessly that he was standing over the other before the kender noticed him. Then the kender gasped, went white, and covered his face with his hands.

  Pirvan’s first reaction was the impractical one of wishing to slaughter on the spot whoever had abused the kender this way. Kender had more than their share of annoying and even bad habits, but to make one this fearful—and thin as well—required brutality that no crime could justify.

  Or at least no crime that the kender themselves would not punish readily. There was no part of Istar where one could not find within a day’s ride enough kender to administer justice to one of their own. Why had the person responsible for this brutality not thought of that?

  Pirvan decided it would be well to find out who that person was, and to assist his memory.

  “I am Sir Pirvan of Tiradot, Knight of the Crown,” he said. “I feel I am in the presence of injustice. Would you care to tell me your story?”

  This took a while longer than Pirvan had expected, but not because the kender rambled and backtracked and generally made a hash of the story. It was because the first thing the kender did was to burst into tears. This made Pirvan resolve to find some way of killing the kender’s persecutor slowly, but accomplished little else.

  Finally the story came out. “So many things wound up on high shelves around here, the night I stayed, that it’s no surprise that some of them fell into my pockets. I never thought anybody would put a brooch like that on a shelf, even if it was just pretty. When I heard that it was valuable, the first thing I thought of was returning it. That was what I was doing when they caught me.”

  Reading between the lines, Pirvan caught a tale of a kender staying in a human-owned inn where his kind were none too welcome, with fellow guests who openly hated nonhumans. Add a bout of handling that got a trifle out of bounds, even by kender standards (which was to say that the kender might have stripped the inn to the bare walls if he’d been able to carry that much), and the wrath of a good many humans descended even faster than a kender could run.

  “I suppose you know that you have the right to appeal to the principal kender of the area, or at least inform them.”

  The kender looked away. “They know. I appealed.”

  “And—they left you like this?”

  “There are not as many of our folk about as there used to be, not since the Brongon Hill fire.”

  Pirvan remembered that vaguely. It had wiped out a whole kender community—not killing many, but leaving the survivors destitute and forced to flee. Most went all the way back to Kendermore.

  “That was a forest fire, though, wasn’t it?” Pirvan added.

  The wide kender eyes were suddenly as hard as granite. So was the voice, rasping through the dust.

  “That is what they want humans to believe.”

  “They?”

  “The ones who started the fire.”

  Pirvan filled a whole tablet with mental notes about pointed questions to ask in a variety of quarters. None of those would help the kender here in front of him, at least not tonight.

  “Are there no kender left at all?”

  “Few who think of fighting back. More than a few who think that if the humans go on this way, there’s always the next hill and safety beyond it.”


  Pirvan noticed the kender’s unusually forthright and direct manner of speech. But then a long-dead knight had said, “It concentrates your mind wonderfully to know you’ll be beheaded in the morning,” and no doubt starvation, exhaustion, and beatings could do the same to a kender.

  “Uhh, there’s more,” the kender said. Kender could not really blush—fortunately, some said, or they would spend all their time blushing—but the kender suddenly could not meet Pirvan’s eyes.

  “How much more?”

  “Ah—the real power among the kender are the Rambledin—I suppose you can call them a clan. I was courting Shemra Rambledin. You’ve never seen, or even imagined, anyone so lovely. She could sit on my lap for hours and—”

  Pirvan coughed. The intimate details of the kender’s courtship didn’t matter so much as the fact that it had obviously gone awry. “So whatever happened, it turned the Rambledins against you. They wouldn’t help you, or listen to your appeal, or pass the word on to Kendermore or anyplace else where they could help you without worrying about human opinions.”

  The kender seemed half-asleep, as if exhausted not only by the day’s work, but also by telling his story. He still managed to nod.

  “Well—and what is your name?”

  The kender shook his head. Pirvan felt like shaking the kender.

  “Not everybody may refuse to help you, even if you think you’re dishonored. Those who want to help will need to know whom they’re helping.”

  “Gesussum Trapspringer—and no, I’m not anybody’s uncle. It’s a real kender name, and I’ve heard all the jokes about it that you know and all the ones you don’t besides.”

  Pirvan took a deep breath, then nearly coughed himself into a fit from the dust he inhaled. “What you need is some real solid food,” he said when he could speak again. “I think it’s time we improved the innkeeper’s hospitality.”

  If it could have been done without danger to anyone, Pirvan would have cheerfully used his night work skills to burn the inn to the ground. The next best thing was using them to visit the kitchen, undetected, and return, also undetected, with a bulging sack.