The reign of Istar t2-1

by Margaret Weis

  Moran said more diffidently, "Finally, in private, you've faced a certain amount of… of hardship from the other boys. For the most part, you endured it patiently."

  Tarli's eyes widened. "You knew, then."

  Moran nodded. "I needed to know how each of you would respond. Being a knight is learning to act like a knight." He finished, watching Tarli's face, "Not just in training or in combat, but at all times."

  He waited.

  Finally Tarli said, unembarrassed, "Then you know about last night, too."

  "I do." Moran cleared his throat. "You fought in direct defiance of the Measure. What you said, even more than what you did, shows that you don't believe in the Measure."

  Moran sighed. "Believe me, Tarli, I'm sorrier than you can imagine. But you just weren't meant to be a knight. You have your own way of doing things, your own view of others' rights, and your own code of honor, and they'll never square with becoming a knight." Righteous but unhappy, he faced Tarli.

  "You're absolutely right, Sire. The knights are all wrong for me." Tarli made it sound as though it were the knights' fault.

  Moran stared at him. "You don't mind?"

  "Not anymore." Tarli frowned. "I would have minded when I started. Did you know, I promised my mother that I'd try to become a knight?"

  Moran shook his head, partly to clear it.

  "She said it would be good for me and for the knighthood." He sighed loudly. "Sometimes, these past few weeks, I've wondered if she meant it as some kind of joke."

  Possible, Moran thought, smiling sadly. Very possible.

  "Ah, well. Time to go." Tarli stood up, but he didn't leave. "By the way, I do have another name, Sire."

  Moran stiffened. "So I assumed."

  "I just don't use it, since my father and mother weren't married." He looked, clear-eyed and innocently, at Moran.

  "Your mother's name was good enough," Moran said gruffly. Since that summer, Loraine had become elevated in Moran's mind into a sort of spirit-woman, someone whose love was too wild and pure for Moran.

  "By rights I can use the other name." Tarli didn't sound bitter or ironic, merely stating a fact. "Did you know that?"

  Moran nodded. "I assumed you didn't know the name." He added quickly, "Which is not an insult to your mother. She was a wonderful woman. I knew her well, you know."

  "I knew that."

  Moran licked his lips, which were suddenly dry. "Of course you have the right to use your father's name. I think" — he paused and braced himself — "I think he'd be proud."

  "Are you?" Tarli asked quietly.

  Moran was stunned by the simple directness of the question. Tarli had to repeat it.

  Finally Moran stammered, "I… uh… She never told me…"

  "Well, my mother told me. And she always told the truth." Tarli looked tolerant of someone else's failing. "She said you probably wouldn't like it if I took your name. She said you might feel awkward about it, training boys like you do. It didn't make sense to her, but she thought you'd want it that way."

  Moran nodded. "She was good to me when I needed her most. Except for leaving, she was always good to me." He asked a question he'd wondered about for eighteen years. "Did she know that I would have married her?"

  Now Tarli looked startled. "She never told you? She knew, but she didn't think it would work. You're very different from her." He added calmly, "But I think she loved you."

  "I think so, too" Moran thought, briefly and with regret, of the demands of knighthood, of bastardly scandals in the knighthood, and of the fact that conflicts of duty can be every bit as painful as conflicts of honor. "You have my permission. Use my name if you wish."

  Tarli smiled. "Thank you, but I think I'll keep using my own name, plus my formal name, now that I'm an adult."

  Moran, amused by this sudden eighteen-year-old adult, said, "And what name is that?"

  Tarli answered easily and calmly, "Tarli Half-Kender."

  Moran's jaw sagged slowly, like something settling into a swamp. "Half… kender?" he repeated faintly.

  "That's right." Tarli flipped the broken lance end-forend.

  Moran remembered Loraine's words. No matter who the child is, or what it's like? And her laughter. I love strange places and strange men. Even her constant patting of her hair, over her ears. "Half-Kender?"

  "I suppose I could use 'Flamehair.' It's a respected name among her people, you know. I didn't want to use it at first, since it would look like social climbing."

  Moran's room reeled around him. "Half-Kender?" How could he have been so stupid? Or was it that he just wouldn't admit it to himself?

  "That's right." Tarli stared off into space and said reflectively, "But my mother left her people and came here. Kender all love wandering. That's why she left here, too, partly."

  Tarli walked around the room with his duffel, looking absently at things. The shaken Moran would later discover that a bottle of wine, a table knife, and a copy of The Brightblade Tactics had disappeared. "I'd better get going."

  But Tarli stopped and rummaged in the duffel, which seemed disturbingly full. "Could you give these back to your cleric friend?"

  Moran took the offered scrolls. "He gave these to you?"

  "Not exactly." Tarli grinned. "I just needed something to read one night, and his room was unlocked — or almost." He trailed off, then brightened. "The parts about the knights' treasury are pretty good."

  Moran unrolled the top scroll (the seal was already broken) and read:

  Most Revered Cleric Ansilus, in Istar.

  Greetings, and the blessings of the only true gods, from their servant and your brother rakiel; may you and they speak well of him.

  Written when the moon Solinari is on the wane in the Month of the Moon Lunitari ascendant in the Queen of Darkness.

  So far, things go well. I have learned the extent of the knights' wealth here in Xak Tsaroth and believe that it is more than is needed for a defensive training force in peace time. I will recommend that the Church could make better use of it.

  I have gained access once to the Treasury, and have enclosed an itemized list of its contents. I am unsure how the money and precious metals are transported from the Treasury and where the knights' main store is, but hope to find out soon. The old man who trains these peasants is a fool…

  Moran closed his eyes, remembering Rakiel asking questions, Rakiel filling out forms, Rakiel offering to handle requisitions for the lances.

  "Plus this. I kept it because of the map — I love maps — but I don't suppose I'll be back here ever."

  The "map" was a floor plan of the Manor of the Measure, with the storeroom marked in red. On the bottom of the scroll was a careful tracing, from the top, bottom, and end, of the treasure room key.

  "I'll kill him," Moran muttered, but even as he said it he recoiled. There was no honor in Solamnia's best-trained weapons master killing a cleric who trembled when the knight brandished a butter knife.

  Moran turned the paper over thoughtfully. If he could soothe his honor somehow and refrain from slaying Ra kiel, this page alone, sent to the Order of the Rose, would humiliate the clerics and probably keep the knights in Xak Tsaroth free of their influence for years to come.

  "Thank you for showing me this," Moran said.

  Tarli smiled, looked at the knight affectionately. "Uncle Moran, you've been good to me."

  "Uncle Moran? You may call me 'Father.' "

  Tarli nodded, almost shyly. "I'd like that. You know, you've been almost a spiritual guide to me — "

  Moran, holding Rakiel's tracing of the knights' treasury, had a wild idea.

  "I may still be your guide," he said slowly. "Tell me, Tarli, where will you go from here?"

  Tarli frowned, considering. "No idea," he said finally. "Maybe to meet my mother's people again. I've been with them, and they're nice." He frowned still more, and Moran was reminded forcibly of himself. "But sometimes I think I ought to make something of myself."

  Moran took a deep
breath and said carefully, "Have you considered the clergy?"

  From his blank expression, clearly Tarli never had.

  The blankness turned to wonder. "You know, you're right," Tarli said excitedly. "They're perfect. I'd have a wonderful time. The more I know of clerics, the more their code seems more like mine than the knights' does." He looked up suddenly at Moran. "No offense."

  "Oh, none." Moran hid a smile.

  "Tell me, do the clerics accept common — accept people like me?"

  Ah, Tarli, Moran thought fondly, there ARE no other people like you. His hand closed in a fist around Rakiel's letters. It was hard, not killing a man for a debt of honor, but this way might be better.

  "I'll write your recommendation myself. The clerics owe me a large favor. You'll get in, sight unseen." He pictured, briefly, Tarli in a classroom of fledgling clerics. This was better than murdering Rakiel in uneven combat.

  "Thank you." Tarli was genuinely surprised and pleased. "Mother always said you would be good to me."

  "Ah. And what will you do as a cleric?"

  Tarli's eyes looked far away and dreamy. "I'll go to my mother's people. Something tells me they'll need clerics in the future."

  He swung the stick at his side. "And I'll take them this weapon I've designed. It's a great thing for short people in a fight. I need a name for it." He spun the stick over his head. "Isn't that a wonderful sound? Hoop," he said happily. "Hoop."

  Moran scribbled a quick note. "Take this to the clerics and wait. I'll be sending… some other items… on to the Knights of the Rose." After a brief moral struggle, he added, "I hope the church will open many doors for you."

  "If it doesn't, I'll open them myself." Tarli stuffed the note in his duffel, which by now was bulging ominously.

  He said quickly, "Good-bye, Father."

  Moran's arms remembered what eighteen years could not erase. He caught Tarli and held him. Tarli kissed his cheek. Not even the Mask could have kept a few tears from Moran's eyes.

  Tarli dropped back to the ground and, in a gesture surprisingly like Loraine's, patted his hair back over his ears. It didn't matter, since his ears — however well they heard — looked exactly like his father's. He walked to the door, turned back suddenly.

  "Maybe I'll be able to teach the clerics as much as I've taught the knights."

  And he was gone.

  Moran, watching from the window as Tarli rode off on Rakiel's horse, laughed out loud for the first time in many years. "Maybe you will, Tarli. I know you will!"

  The Goblin's Wish

  Roger E. Moore

  The human carried a broad-headed spear with a crosspiece mounted behind the spearhead. The crosspiece would keep a speared boar from running up the shaft and mauling the hunter, but the human didn't think the crosspiece would be necessary when the spear ran the kender through. If the spear went in right, it shouldn't make any difference what the kender did.

  The little guy was only a hundred paces ahead now, and the chase was obviously getting to him. The man, on the other hand, had run after prey all his life. He knew if he could just get on a good, firm, downhill slope, he was sure to put the little unbeliever on a spit and collect on his hair. There was a five-gold bounty paid on kender scalps in Aldhaven. That was ale for a month. Good-bye, kender.

  The kender was fast, though, the man had to give him that. The little guy's filthy brown hair whipped back and forth as he ran through briars, splashed through creeks, and vaulted over rocks in his panicked flight, and his bare feet were quick and sure, even up dirt slopes. But the kender didn't have the long legs the human had. The hunter knew that was how the gods of evil marked their lost children, with misshapen limbs that mirrored their souls. Some people killed kender and their wicked kind out of righteousness, but righteous causes did not impress the hunter much. Bounty money was reason enough.

  The kender disappeared around a ridge, nearly falling over an exposed tree root. The man put on some speed, sensing his time was near. He'd never killed a kender before, though he'd once stabbed an old drunken goblin behind a barn and had gone for a lost elven boy two summers ago with a club, battering the lad until not even his own mother would have recognized him. The hunter had gotten only two gold for that scalp, which infuriated him to this day. He wouldn't be cheated this time, or the fat priest in Aldhaven who paid out the bounties would get a little lesson in the consequences of not keeping his word to honest men.

  The hunter rounded the ridge, arms tensing for the throw or the thrust, and there was the kender — down. The unlucky little guy had fallen over a log in an old creek bed covered with dead leaves, and he was trying to get up but was crying out because he'd hurt his leg. It wouldn't hurt much longer, the man thought, and he lifted his spear to run it through the willowy kender's rib cage. The human was so close he could see the kender's wide brown eyes. The kender put up his hands to ward off the blow, but thin palms had never stopped a spear.

  A thing like a red-and-black spider leaped out of the bushes on the low creek bank to the hunter's right. In a red fist it held a steel machete that swung down too fast to see or block. Pain jolted the hunter's body from his right thigh where the blade hacked its way through trousers and skin and muscles, biting into the hard bone. Blind with agony, the hunter went down. The spear jammed into the dirt and fell from his grasp, landing behind him. Then all he could do was scream.

  The scalp hunter was able to think a little bit as he screamed, because he didn't want to die here. He tried to get up to run but had lost all feeling in his leg below the wound. He looked down in terror and saw his thigh cut open right down to the broken white bone. He gripped the flesh to pull it shut and stop the bleeding, but his hands and arms were slippery with blood. The air was full of the sharp tang of gore. There was movement down the trail behind him. The hunter looked through pain-dimmed eyes and saw the goblin there, walking casually, its red-splattered machete dangling in one hand.

  It was a goblin, the hunter knew, because it looked a lot like the old drunken one he had killed, but this goblin was big and young and did not look drunk at all. It wore a ragged black tunic with a thin rope belt. Wiry muscles flowed under its dirty red skin. Its black eyes were relaxed and seemed to smile, though its round face was as cold as stone. The goblin eyed the now-silent kender, then bent down and picked up the boar spear with its free hand to examine the tip. The goblin tossed its machete aside.

  "Don't kill me!" the man screamed in the trade tongue. "In the gods' names, don't kill me! I was after the kender! Please, get a me a healer! I'll give you anything, anything at all, but please don't kill me!"

  The goblin snorted gently and looked down at the hunter. "Get priest? What you think maybe priest do for me when I knock door, eh? Think maybe priest say, 'Hey, goblin, here silver for you. Be good, you go home?' "

  "Don't kill me!" The man sobbed, tears running down his face. The pain in his leg was unearthly, and the blood just kept coming out. "Please don't kill me. Please."

  The goblin hefted the spear, feeling its balance, then gripped it hard in both hands and upended it, ramming it into the hunter's abdomen, pushing it through and twisting it until the man's last screams and spasms had passed and his head fell back on the leaves, his mouth and eyes open forever.

  The goblin jerked out the spear and stuck it in the ground. He recovered his machete and wiped it off on the hunter's stained trousers, then stood up and looked at the kender again. The kender was on his feet down in the gully, staring at the dead human.

  "Rats," said the kender. "You got him too quickly."

  The goblin lifted his chin, judging the distance to the kender. The spear could reach him with a good toss, and the machete with the right spin. But the kender was doing nothing to require immediate action, and he had no obvious weapons. "Too fast, say?" the goblin asked, mildly curious.

  "Yeah," said the kender. "He would have run right into my pit in another three steps." The kender stuck out his bare left foot and nudged at the thick patc
h of leaves before him. A stick shifted, revealing a long, dark split in the ground. The goblin carefully took a step closer and saw that, indeed, there was a pit in the center of the dry gully. It was an expertly done pit, at that.

  The goblin stepped back, eyeing the kender with a faint amount of respect. He hadn't seen a kender in years and had thought they were all dead in these parts. Pointing down with his machete at the dead human, the goblin asked, "He want hair bounty on you?"

  "I guess so," said the kender, still looking at the man. "I was about to skin a deer when he saw me. He just started running after me, and I ran away." The kender sighed and looked up at the goblin, the hunter forgotten. "Say, are you hungry?"

  The goblin's empty stomach lurched when the deer was mentioned. He could go for several days with no solid food, but it had already been two days and the taste of grass and leaves did not appeal to him. He had been an informer and extra muscle for a human moneylender in East Dravinar when the Kingpriest's men had broken into the warehouse, with magical lights and swords in their hands. The goblin was the only one to get out through the skylight before the vigilantes seized the rope. The screams of the thieves and other thugs had grown faint behind him as he fled across the rooftops to escape into the countryside. Stolen food from farm houses had helped for a while, but the farmers, after the first half-dozen break-ins, had been prepared for raiders.

  "Are you hungry?" the kender repeated, still waiting for a reply. "I mean, I've got a whole deer, and the meat won't go to waste with two to eat it. Do you want some?"

  The goblin thought about it some more, fearing a trick, but his stomach won. "Yes," he said simply, marveling at the novelty of it all. No one had ever asked him if he was hungry before. No one had particularly cared.

  He'd just make sure the kender didn't try anything without catching the wrong end of the machete first. Just to be safe, he picked up the spear, too.

  "Well, let's be off, then," the kender said, waving the goblin on to join him as he set off into the woods. "Mind the pit. It took me a week to make all the stakes."