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The kender was already snatching the meat pie out of Pirvan’s hands and falling on it like a wolf on a lamb. The only sound in the attic for quite a while was the champing of the kender’s jaws, followed by the crunching as the apples vanished nearly as fast as the pie.

The kender looked ready to weep when he was done, and Pirvan hoped this was not because he was going to be sick from eating too much too fast. Instead the kender brushed crumbs off his ragged clothing and managed a shaky grin.

“Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had a full stomach except in a dream?”

“No, but I do know about being that hungry. Honest thieves have to miss a meal every now and then.”

“You were a thief? I thought you said you were a Knight of-”

“I was one, and now I am the other, and how I changed is too long a story to tell. I’m going to leave before anyone wonders where I am and starts asking in a way to make the innkeeper suspicious. I may not see you again, but I swear by Paladine and Kiri-Jolith that I will see justice for you set afoot.”

The kender’s grin was not so shaky now. “Just as long as it doesn’t stumble on the way. That can happen, you know.”

Pirvan had no reply to that, so he left in silence.

* * * * *

The rain continued all night and much of the next day. The day after that, it began to clear as they breasted the last hill before Istar.

The white towers of the mighty city leaped above the walls, which themselves loomed like young hills marching across the flatland like a column of soldiers. The air smelled clean and fresh, if a trifle damp, like new laundry hanging in the courtyard.

Birds twittered in the bushes along the road, tarberry, verfruit, wild strawberry, and a dozen others. It was too early for even green fruit, but blossoms filled the eye with color and the nose with sweet scents. More birds hopped about in the fields, eyes fixed on the sodden earth for worms and ground-dwelling insects flooded by the rain.

Haimya drew level with her husband. “I hope the tower knows of our coming. It gripes my bowels to stay any longer in this place than necessary.”

“If all else fails, we can claim a little of what House Encuintras still owes us, or so they said in their last letter.”

House Encuintras had begun Pirvan’s road to the Solamnic Knights, when he broke in to steal the Lady Eskaia’s dowry jewels. Due to various circumstances, he’d found himself obliged to return them immediately, which ended in his being captured by Haimya and drawn into a quest that, to begin with, had no higher aim than ransoming Haimya’s betrothed from the pirates of Crater Gulf.

“They will pay on their debt only as long as the old man lives.”

“I have not heard that his health departs,” Pirvan said. “Indeed, he may live to bury us all.”

“If your tongue wags like this,” Grimsoar put in, “that may well be a true prophecy.”

Pirvan heard a harshness and a melancholy in the big sailor’s voice that had not often been there before. “We will certainly not talk of the business of the knights. What else can bring harm?”

“I’m a sailor, not a soothsayer,” Grimsoar replied. “But if tales of you and that kender have grown wings and flown to Istar ahead of us-”

Pirvan reined in and glared. “Now who is letting a tongue wag?”

“Our company is alone on the road, with no others in hearing,” Haimya said, putting a hand on her husband’s arm. “Let us hear Grimsoar out.”

“It’s a brief tale. I met a serving maid, for business that concerned us both, sometime before dawn. She spoke of how someone had been slipping up to the attic where they kept the kender. She hoped the man would soon be on the road, before the innkeeper found a way to make trouble for him.”

Pirvan had no doubt as to the “business” between Grimsoar and the maid. What bemused him was the innkeeper’s vigilance.

“Oh, by itself that’s less sinister than you might think,” Grimsoar replied. “Any innkeeper with a place that size and customers of the sort who often come there has enough spies to penetrate the inner circle of the kingpriest if he wants to. He may not wish to trade in his guests’ secrets, but he doesn’t dare let them keep too many.”

Pirvan nodded. It would be well to learn if the innkeeper was, in fact, trading in his guest’s secrets. Threatening to reveal that might allow settling the matter of the captive kender without a public scandal-always assuming, of course, that Grimsoar was wrong and that rumors were not already creating one!

They rode on, with more rain clouds beginning to build to the south. Pirvan did not care; the lowering sky well suited his mood.

* * * * *

They approached the city along what had been known for centuries as the Great White Road. The tale ran that originally it had been paved with chalk and crushed seashells, so that it blazed white in the sun. Now it had stone slabs like any other road, and after centuries of weather, earthquakes, hooves, and animal droppings it was the same color as any other high road.

It seemed to Pirvan that the villas and even palaces of the rich spread farther beyond the ancient walls of Istar each time he came to the city. In the last few years, he had noticed veritable villages growing up in the open spaces left among the more imposing homes, for those who served the rich.

Altogether, it made one wonder how Istar would defend itself from a foe advancing overland. Pirvan thought it would not be impossible if one fortified an outer ring of the villas and tore down an inner ring of them to leave five hundred paces of open ground beyond the walls. He also did not envy anyone who had to suggest this and listen to the screams of those whose emblems of wealth were to become fortresses or rubble.

Perhaps Istar did not intend to flaunt its wealth and power in the face of the gods. But even merchants, let alone priests, should remember that the gods saw everything, so they would see this piling of luxury on wealth on pride whether men wished them to or not.

The Great White Road divided inside the last of the villas, to lead to both the Water Gate and the Minotaur Gate. The first had its name from once being on a long-since-diverted stream, the second from being where a storming party of minotaurs had been fought to an honorable draw by picked Istarian warriors, including a few Knights of Solamnia.

When they rode up to the Minotaur Gate, they saw that it had been renamed. Now it was the Warrior’s Gate, and at the crown of the archway a minotaur’s skull carved in the finest Ergothian marble jutted out over the roadway. At least Pirvan hoped the skull was marble-he did not care to think what live minotaurs would say to the display of the skull of a dead one in such a public place.

Even less did he care to think what they would do; the next storming party would not be fighting for honor, but for blood, probably not caring much whose, either.

The gate was as well guarded as ever, though the guards seemed to serve three different masters. There were the men of the watch, the soldiers of the army, and the guards of the kingpriest, still in the white tunics that had raised so many protests from the White Robe wizards, and even some from the red and black.

At least the tunics were now cut so that it was harder to mistake a temple guard for any sort of White Robe, even without the short swords hung on belts and the thrusting spears slung across their backs. The leader of the priests might call himself the kingpriest, and that louder each passing year, but the name of “king” did not yet carry with it the power-and Pirvan prayed, to any gods he thought would listen as well as those of Good, that matters would never come to that.

What came to Pirvan’s party was a pair of men of the watch, both captains by the embroidery on their tunics and cloaks, and one fairly senior, judging from the gilded hilt of his sword. They approached Pirvan, made all the gestures of honor, then said:

“Sir Pirvan of Tiradot?”

“The same, and his party. To what do I owe the honor of this greeting?” Pirvan looked pointedly back at the line of travelers beginning to accumulate behind him.