Roland Green: Knights of the Sword

They were almost to the gate now, and ran the last fifty paces. As they burst into the courtyard, laughing like children, they met their own children running toward them.

“Papa, Mama,” Gerik and Eskaia shouted. “You have a visitor. He waits in the great hall.”

Pirvan and Haimya stared at each other, a nearly audible prayer on both their faces that Sir Niebar had not returned.

“It is not that skinny knight,” Eskaia added, reading her parents’ mood as she did so often and easily. “This man is not skinny at all.”

“Jemar the Fair?” Haimya asked, falling into the spirit of the game. Their old sea barbarian comrade-in-arms had put on a fair amount of weight since he had married Eskaia’s namesake, a merchant princess of Istar, and taken to family life.

“No. He is not fat, either, but tall. Very tall,” Gerik put in.

“How many eyes does he have?” Pirvan asked.

The children grinned. “We can’t tell, because he has a patch over the left eye.”

“Yes, and the other one we see looks red, as if he has been weeping or without sleep.”

Pirvan and Haimya exchanged quick glances. Grimsoar One-Eye had been Pirvan’s friend and sometime comrade during his thieving days, and was not much given to weeping. Nor did he often go without sleep, or sleep without snoring like an earthquake.

Except when he was in haste, and if he had come to Tiradot in haste, it would be well to learn why-also in haste.

“Gerik, go to the kitchen and have chilled wine and cakes brought to the small solar,” Pirvan said. “Eskaia, you run down to the millstream and say that your mother has private business and asks the maids to forgive her for not helping them bring the washing up.”

“Why do the maids need an apology from Mother?” Gerik said.

“Because she is breaking a promise she made to them,” Pirvan said sharply. “Anytime you break a promise, you apologize to those to whom you made it. Your mother and I do it, the grand master of the knights does it, the kingpriest does it.” If he still fears the True Gods, that is .

“Therefore, you will also do it.”

“Yes, Father,” Gerik said. He sounded subdued, if not precisely repentant, and scurried off toward the kitchen with the air of not wishing to be under his parents’ eyes any longer than necessary.

“He has been spending too much time with those three pestilential lordlings of Fren Gisor’s,” Haimya whispered. “We shall have to-”

“We can and will,” Pirvan said, tucking her arm under his. “But after we hear Grimsoar out. If we are going to appear dressed like this even before an old friend, we owe him haste at least!”

The green-walled chamber in Istar’s Tower of High Sorcery lay so far below ground level that it could hardly be said to be in the tower at all. It would have surprised no one, wizard, cleric, or common citizen of Istar the Mighty, to know that it was shown on no plan of the tower.

It might have surprised some wizards to know that there were indeed plans of the five great Towers of High Sorcery, and that these plans were often seen by common folk. However, it would not have taken a long explanation to end their surprise or ease their concern.

Tarothin the Wizard remembered giving one of those explanations himself some years ago, to a bemused apprentice.

“In the first place, the rulers of those cities and lands where the towers lie do not much care for our being more mysterious than we need to be. So any little gesture of trust in the right place may be a potent force for goodwill. Remember the Thirty-first Principle.”

The apprentice had been bright and eager even while bemused. He recited the principle briskly, from memory.

“A small spell at the right time has the power of a mighty one an hour late. A small spell in the right place has the power of a mighty one a thousand paces away.’ ”

“Exactly. Consider these plans of the towers a small spell for peaceful relations with those who wield power over our destiny without knowing much about us and often disliking the little they know.

“Also, there are times when one does not wish to use spells to unplug a drain or regild a ceiling in parts of the towers where nothing arcane or secret happens. Thus we bring in common workers, whose goodwill we earn by paying them for their labor, and who, when they see us as folk much like themselves, may lose a bit of their fear of us.”

Tarothin had laughed harshly. Once his laugh had been full-bellied; one woman had even called it jolly. But there had been rather less to be jolly about these past ten years than before.

“Of course, anyone entering a Tower of High Sorcery with hostile intent will find the plans more menace than aid. An army using them would be lucky to find anything important, luckier still to find its way out again. And every tower is guarded by wizards whose skills are devoted to making sure that the invaders have no luck.

“So you can be sure that the existence of plans of the towers is no mystery, nor any great danger to us.”

Mollified, the apprentice had returned to his studies.

* * * * *

I wonder what became of the lad , Tarothin mused, wiping his eyes discreetly as they watered from the smoke of the braziers. He had wits and a vocation, but seemed very firmly inclined to the White Robes. Too firmly for one his age.

It was unlikely that Tarothin would ever know. The full wizards of the White, Red, and Black Robes were not a multitude; the seats of a fair-sized games arena would hold most of them. But they were widely scattered, and it had become wiser with the years not to tell one another too much about their comings and goings, to say nothing of their secret refuges.

This meeting showed that problem as vividly as the freshly retouched gold inscriptions on the green marble wall behind the speaker’s chair. The chamber held seventy wizards, and apart from those of Istar, Tarothin did not know the homes of more than one in five. He knew their faces and their skills, but he could not readily have said where they came from.

There were exceptions, of course, and one of them was standing beside a bas-relief carving supposed to represent Huma’s minotaur companion Kaz. Rubina was a Black Robe who made no secret of being from Karthay, the great trading city near the mouth of the Bay of Istar and Istar’s leading trading rival. She also made no secret of being as concerned for the fate of her city as she was for the fate of the towers and all their wizards, apprentices, and servants, which was not proper in a full wizard.

However, it was hard to work oneself up to a serious argument with Rubina. She was too gracious, too witty, and many times over too beautiful.

At the moment, Rubina’s exquisite face was set in a mask of boredom, and her huge, heavy-lidded brown eyes were closed in a gesture not meant to be sensuous-at least Tarothin thought not. But then, the black robes weren’t meant to be alluring, either-but it was hard to look at Rubina in them without thinking of what she might look like without them.

The speaker was now repeating himself for at least the fourth time (Tarothin had given up counting) on the iniquity of the title of “kingpriest” for the principal cleric of Istar. Tarothin thought that if there was any point to be made on this subject, it had already been made, and the speaker was continuing because he did not know how to stop and nobody had the wits or courage to tell him to be silent.

The matter of the title was of some moment, to be sure. It had always been one title of the principal cleric of Istar, since Istar had been a village and all its clerics could be gathered in a single tavern, which was probably where many of them spent most of their time. A century ago, it had become the sole title, but the old titles did not vanish from usage and the new one was seldom taken seriously except on the most formal ritual occasions. The merchants and artisans of Istar were a hardheaded lot, or at least had been. They liked the idea of being the seat of the world’s virtue, but were not going to have themselves laughed at when there was work to be done.