Knights of the Sword

by Roland Green

  Tarothin lifted Rubina’s hands and bowed until he could brush them lightly with his lips. He nearly chipped a tooth on one of her rings—three or four to each hand, he judged—but he was rewarded with a silvery laugh.

  “I have nothing to do that could reasonably vie with the pleasure of accepting your invitation,” Tarothin said, trying to assume the accent of a comic actor. This time Rubina’s laugh made him suspect that the gods had not made him for acting.

  “I rejoice,” Rubina said, putting an arm briefly around Tarothin’s waist and standing close so that honey breath tickled his ear and played over his cheek and neck. “But now I must leave you, to make my chamber ready for hospitality instead of merely work.”

  She seemed to vanish between one breath and the next, and it was a moment before Tarothin realized that while-they talked she had maneuvered him close to one of the doors. She had simply stepped through it the moment her last breath flowed past him—though it was not entirely Tarothin’s imagination that he could still smell her perfume in the air, and under the perfume the essential scent of woman.

  What might come of this, Tarothin did not know; he was not even going to waste time guessing. However, there was one stop he would make on his way to Rubina’s chambers.

  Jemar the Fair was in port, with three ships, one of them Sea Leopard, whose Mate of the Deck was another old comrade of the quest into Crater Gulf, Grimsoar One-Eye. Grimsoar One-Eye was once comrade in night work with Sir Pirvan the Wayward.

  What mortal men could know of matters along the north coast of Istar, Jemar and his men might know—or at least know who did. With Grimsoar helping, Tarothin might even be able to draw on Pirvan’s wits—although as an oath-bound Solamnic Knight, the man could hardly offer more than advice without the permission of his superiors.

  Tarothin told himself that he was not seeking all this to raise his standing in Rubina’s eyes and advance himself toward a more agreeable conclusion to the dinner. He was seeking knowledge that might altogether prevent a needless war, or at least turn a large war into a small one. And those who said all wars were evil had never talked to those who lived because someone kept a war small.

  For centuries, the world had accepted the reign of Istar because it had brought peace and a fair degree of justice. If this was about to change, by the folly of kingpriests or anyone else, it was not something to endure idly.

  Chapter 4

  It was only the remnants of a storm from far to the north, beating on the rocks at the foot of the cliff. But even those remnants turned into breakers two men high when they reached shoal water.

  When the breakers reached the rocks, the spray leaped to the top of the cliff, silver as it leaped, leaving rainbows as it fell back. By long-nurtured and finely honed instincts, the homecoming raiders of Darin, Heir to the Minotaur, opened the distance between them and the cliff, as much as the narrow path would allow.

  All except Imsaffor Whistletrot. He perched on a jutting rock, just above the highest reach of the spray, and stared down into the water.

  “No shellfish for dinner tonight,” he said with a grimace.

  “I thought you hated oysters,” one of the men said.

  “Oh, I do. But most of you big folk love them, which is one reason I’m not sure the same gods created you and kender, and you’ll be in a bad mood, which—”

  Darin reached out one long arm, gripped Whistletrot by the collar, and drew him back to safer or even somewhat dry ground. This stretch of the coast seldom went long enough without rain for the ground to dry completely, which meant slippery footing for those unaccustomed to walking it.

  Darin and his comrades did not complain of the weather. Their food came from root crops (which could well-nigh flourish in a swamp), from the trees and the animals of the forest, and from the sea. That this land was no friend to farmers was all the better for them, as they had no love for neighbors.

  The big man looked up at the sky, alternately veiled and exposed by the dance of the clouds. “Best we make haste,” he said. “I can endure a cold victory feast, but the cooks will mutiny if they must serve it, and Waydol will have something to say as well.”

  The pace quickened. Among the men, only Darin could have truly said that he loved Waydol. But every man here respected Waydol, valued his wisdom in war and council, and feared his tongue as much as, or more than, they did his fist.

  Within minutes the path turned away from the sea and began to climb. No one who had not walked this path many times could have easily told where he was climbing to; the trees grew that quickly. Ferns and livid fungi that did not need sunlight also grew thickly where the trees left them space, and even a few ground-hugging vines flaunted dew-wet leaves among the decaying branches and needles.

  Darin inhaled deeply. This forest was the true smell of home for him, for all that he had raided deep inland and far out to sea. He would ask nothing better of any god than to live out his life here, taking Waydol’s place when the Minotaur at last lay on the pyre, and continuing Waydol’s battle until the time came for him to pass the burden to his own heir.

  Bird whistles sounded from ahead. Sirbones quickened his own pace, to draw level with Darin, curiosity plain on his face.

  “Best not hurry,” Darin said. “This path is treacherous.”

  “I think those bird whistles mean more than treacherous paths,” the priest of Mishakal said. For all that he seemed old enough to be father to most of the raiders, he had kept up with them all the way from Dinsas without much effort.

  “Oh?” Darin said. He was hardly surprised, though some of his men were a little uneasy at Sirbones’s deftness in winkling out the band’s secrets. None of them had been foolish enough to attack a man under Darin’s protection, not to mention a priest of Mishakal, whom it would be impious and perhaps impossible to harm.

  “Yes. Were I in your shoes—”

  “I am barefoot, as you have doubtless noticed.”

  “So I have. But one need not say everything in the simplest fashion. Words, I have discovered, sometimes need to be caressed to bring them to a proper state.”

  Darin refused to contemplate how a priest would learn of caresses—though, to be sure, he had heard that celibacy among the followers of Mishakal was a common choice rather than a rigid law.

  Pray that Sirbones has no eye for woman that will break the peace of the band.

  “I am not worried about your words. I worry about your ears. Are they open to listen? Waydol says, truthfully, that our having only one mouth but two ears means that we should listen more than we talk.”

  Sirbones grinned and nodded in total silence.

  “Very well. The paths and the land are a good defense against anyone less surefooted than a ranger or hunter. But if anyone should send a host of rangers or hunters against our stronghold, we have added to nature’s defenses. Some intruders would be slain or crippled; we would have warning of the rest.”

  “You do not say that I should ask no more questions, but I hear it in your voice,” Sirbones said.

  “You hear truly,” Darin said. “I also ask of you one further bit of wisdom: stay in single file with me and my men. Some of our gifts to strangers reach close to the edge of the path.”

  “Pits of poisoned spikes and the like?”

  “You promised to ask no more questions.”

  “I made no such promise. I merely understood your command.”

  “Then why do you defy it?” Darin snapped. He was just weary enough and eager enough to be home and at rest to have small patience for the priest’s jests.

  “Your pardon, Heir to the Minotaur. I presume greatly on your hospitality.”

  Not so greatly, when you know as well as we that having a healer-priest among us will be a blessing worth enduring much worse than your tongue.

  But Darin did not put his thoughts into words, not only from courtesy but also to save the breath he would need for the rest of the climb.

  * * * * *

  Pirvan and Haimya m
et Grimsoar One-Eye in the same solar where Pirvan had earlier that day dealt with Sir Niebar.

  The great hall was the most honorable place for feasting an old friend, a guest who had traveled far, and a mate in the service of Jemar the Fair. It was also the most open to the curious and the indiscreet.

  So when they were done with the wine and cakes (two platters, as Grimsoar was a light drinker but ate in proportion to his size), they gathered certain articles—maps, for one—from their hiding places and began to talk seriously.

  “What brings you here, with the air of one who had rancid butter on his breakfast porridge?” Haimya said.

  “I wish it was something as simple and harmless to others as my stomach,” Grimsoar said. “But it concerns more. Karthay and Istar are on a course that may make them collide hard enough to sink the both of them.”

  Pirvan nodded. “We’ve heard that Istar’s fleet is to sail north and scour the coast of outlaws and pirates. We’ve also heard that Karthay may have the notion of rebuilding its own fleet if Istar does this.”

  “I know naught of Karthay,” Grimsoar said. “Or at least no more than one can hear in the streets. Building new ships there is a matter for the higher councils, and even Jemar’s got few ears there.”

  The hint that the Knights of Solamnia might have such ears was too plain to ignore. Pirvan sighed. Best clear the air among us at once, he thought.

  “The Knights of Solamnia are sworn to aid Istar against its foes,” Pirvan said. “If Karthay means to become one, then my oath demands that I end this discussion.” Ignoring Haimya’s looking not merely daggers but arrows and broadswords at him, for she was of Karthayan birth herself, Pirvan continued. “However, if our purpose here is to prevent Karthay and Istar from becoming enemies, then all that I know is at your service, as is all the strength of my arm.”

  “And mine,” Haimya said, with a look at her husband so different from the previous one that he flushed, and for a moment his head spun from more than the heat of the ill-ventilated chamber.

  Grimsoar’s smile was a bit wry. “I didn’t hear either of you promise anybody else’s arms or anything else.”

  “We didn’t hear you promise any aid at all from Jemar,” Haimya said. “Or is it that you are placed as we are—you cannot make promises that you know your masters will keep?”

  “I wouldn’t call Jemar a master,” Grimsoar said. “He doesn’t have any mucking huge stack of books to tell him what to do and how to tell everyone else what to do. The sea doesn’t allow that, so if you knights ever want to launch a fleet, you may need something a bit—”

  “Grimsoar, old companion,” Haimya said, in a voice as soft as silk and as chilly as the blade of a Frostreaver, “leave it be. Or tell us what you can honorably say, and we will ask for no more. But if we spend more time in rude jests, Gerik and Eskaia will be old enough to join us on this quest before we have decided to launch it.”

  The two men looked at each other, then burst out laughing. “Very well,” Pirvan said. “I will sit silent and let Grimsoar talk. He has never needed encouragement to do that before, so I—”

  “Good husband,” Haimya said in a tone of gentle menace.

  Grimsoar’s rumbling voice broke the silence. “We began to smell trouble, those of us who had our noses to the wind, when they appointed Aurhinius to command in the north.”

  “Gildas Aurhinius?” Pirvan asked.

  “The very same,” Grimsoar said, then added, for Haimya’s benefit, “and no friend to even retired thieves. The army sent him over to the watch about ten years ago, to put some discipline and order into them. I suppose they thought he was too rich to be bribed.”

  “Did he succeed?” Haimya asked.

  Grimsoar nodded. “At the price of a few good men and women Pirvan and I knew, dead, rotting in dungeons, or slaving their lives out in quarries. Aurhinius loves fine armor, but he fights like a smith’s masterpiece of a sword.”

  “Not one sent out lightly, in other words,” Haimya said. The two men nodded.

  “Aurhinius has gone north already himself,” Grimsoar went on. “He took ten ships and about two thousand men, mostly to put some muscle in the garrisons up yonder. But there’s recruiting going on, veterans being recalled, workers being hired on in the shipyards to speed refits and new construction—oh, Zeboim’s own lot of trouble for honest sailors.”

  Pirvan managed not to laugh at Grimsoar’s description of Jemar and his ilk as “honest sailors.” Outright piracy was a smaller part of their work than before, but other ways of separating people from their gold still flourished among the sea barbarians.

  Pirvan rose. “Old friend, my lady and I will have to think about this. But I promise you, we’ll think toward the goal of doing something, or having it done if our own hands are bound.”

  Grimsoar’s grunt made it plain that he would have preferred more, but knew he could not ask for it. Beyond that, friendship bound him to silence, at least as long as he was under his friends’ roof.

  * * * * *

  The two paths converged before a vertical slit in a cliff face not much lower than the towering pines behind them. Darin saw Sirbones staring at the slit, wondering whether men could pass through it even if it led anywhere.

  “Don’t worry, friend priest,” Whistletrot said. “The finest kender minds have worked on a solution to this problem.”

  “Aye,” someone said, “and if we’d waited for a solution from them, we’d have been better off going to the gnomes.”

  Sirbones actually looked uneasy. “This isn’t gnome-work, is it?”

  Laughter echoed from the rocks and back into the trees. “No,” Darin said. “Human, with a little help from a minotaur, and quite trustworthy.” He looked up at the top of the cliff and raised both hands over his head, palms outward.

  A rumble started from deep in the rock, swelling until the ground underfoot seemed to be shaking. Sirbones was plainly uneasy, still more plainly trying to hide it.

  Then the rumble faded. Darin walked over to a large boulder to the left side of the slit in the rock and pushed hard. With a squeal like a flattened piglet, the rock slid to the left. Behind it lay a dark, dusty tunnel—or rather, a semicircular passage carved out of the living rock to one side of the slit.

  At the far end, sunlight glinted on water.

  “Be our guest, Sirbones,” Darin said. “And be silent about all you see here and afterward. We will not harm you to keep you with us, but if any of our secrets depart with you, your priesthood will not guard you.”

  “I am guarded by Mishakal, whatever threats you make,” Sirbones replied with dignity. “But you are guarded from my tongue’s wagging by my own oaths and honor. It is the mark of a barbarian, Darin, to think that only he among all men has honor.”

  Before Darin could think of a reply to that, the priest unslung his staff, so that it would not catch on the rocks, and, holding it out ahead of him like a spear, vanished into the passageway.

  * * * * *

  Pirvan and Haimya made a point of doing their weapons practice with the men-at-arms or visiting fighters as often as possible. Too much practice with the same opponent could make a fighter used to that one opponent, no longer alert for the unpredictability of a new and unknown one.

  This, they both agreed, was an excellent way to meet a swift death in battle.

  Still, it lightened both their spirits to work against each other with wooden swords and padding. And today of all days, their moods needed lightening.

  They had been at it now for a good part of the afternoon, and Pirvan’s bruises were beginning to hurt, not to mention his eyes, where sweat ran into them. But Haimya was coming at him again, as light on her feet as a doe in the spring, and the bout was not over yet.

  He risked closing, beat her sword aside, and thrust inside her shield with his dagger. She brought her blade around just in time for him to lock it with his, hilt jammed to hilt. Also nose practically touching nose, and her eyes—blue today, though he had
seen them shine gray or green—staring into his.

  Then she laughed, no dainty girlish trill, but a hearty guffaw. “A draw, this one?”

  “Fair enough.” He stepped back, not lowering his guard until Haimya shrugged her shield off her shoulder and dropped the sword on top of it. Then she sat down cross-legged and reached for the water jug.

  “Are we going to help Grimsoar and all the rest?” she asked when she finished drinking.

  “You mean, do we seek out the cause of this trouble between Istar and Karthay and seek to maintain peace between them?”

  “You are talking to me, not writing a letter to Sir Marod.”

  “I had best practice for writing that letter, however.”

  “Not on me, I pray.”

  “Who else can I trust, for tolerance, discretion, and—”

  She kissed him. He kissed her back, then broke away, smiling.

  “—and interesting ways of interrupting me.”

  “I can make them more interesting still.”

  “The armory is a trifle open.”

  As if to underline Pirvan’s remarks, Gerik and Eskaia came running in.

  “Papa, Mama,” Gerik cried. “Your friend Grimsoar says he will tell us stories about pirates if you let him stay for dinner.”

  “Grimsoar is staying for dinner, and even for the night,” Pirvan said. “But you, lad and lass, still have to finish your lessons. The last time you showed me your tablet of sums, you had, between you, eleven wrong out of twenty.”

  “Oh, but—” Gerik began.

  “Do not say that your clerks will do that sort of work,” Haimya interrupted. “Remember that it takes time before you can pay a clerk’s salary. Also, if he thinks you cannot find his mistakes, he will either work badly or cheat you, or both.”

  “Now run along. We will hold Grimsoar to his promise if you keep a promise to finish your lessons before we call you to dinner!”

  The children scurried off, allowing Pirvan and Haimya to stand briefly with their arms about each other’s waists before they started hanging up their equipment.