Rakiel half-rose at the daunting boom of the Voice, companion to the Mask.
The boy said simply, "I want to become a Knight of Solamnia."
Rakiel chuckled aloud. The cleric's laugh ended abruptly when Moran, with a single wrist flick, sent the sword flying backward to THUNK, quivering, in the wall opposite him.
Moran resisted the temptation to see where the sword had landed. Always assume, Moran's own mentor, Tali-sin, had said, that it landed well if you still have work in front of you. Part of Moran was pleased that his skill had impressed Rakiel as much as it had the boy.
"Name?"
"Tarli. Son of" — he hesitated and said finally — "of Loraine of Gravesend Street. She sewed funeral clothes."
The Mask nearly cracked for the first time in Moran's career. "Loraine of Gravesend. A dark-skinned woman, one-half my height, slender, red hair?"
Tarli shook his head. "Gray and red when they buried her. It's been a year."
Moran felt as if the Mask were looking at him;
Moran's own sternness was piercing him. "We met. She did work for… a… friend of mine." He added gruffly, "You're holding my door knocker."
"So I am." Tarli turned it over in his hand, as if startled to see it. He passed it to the knight. "It came off."
The boy peered beneath Moran's arm and stared at the bound books that stood on the simple shelf above the bed.
"The Brightblade Tactics? Bedal Brightblade?" Tarli ducked around the knight, entered without being invited. He reached past the startled cleric, pulled the book out. "Handwritten." He turned to a careful drawing of an intricate parry-and-thrust pattern, trying to follow it through with his left hand. "Did you write this?"
"I did." Moran tried not to sound proud. It had taken years of reading, and more years of testing technique, until he was sure of how the legendary Bedal Brightblade had fought. "There are twelve copies of that book, one for each trainer of squires plus the original."
He had unintentionally dropped the Voice and Mask, and immediately brought them back. "Swordplay is nothing. If you want to be a knight, there is the Oath and there is the Measure, and they are all. The Oath is four words, the Measure thirty-seven threehundred-page volumes. Which is more important?"
"The Measure," Tarli said firmly, then added, just as firmly, "unless it's the Oath."
Moran pointed a single finger at the boy. "Est Sularus Oth Mithas. My honor is my life."
Tarli looked at him blankly. "Isn't everybody's?"
Moran stared at him a long time to be sure he wasn't joking. Rakiel regarded them both with amusement, which he didn't bother to hide.
"Put your gear in the barracks downstairs, Tarli," Moran said. "Classes begin tomorrow."
"Yes." Tarli added quickly, "Sire." He bowed, bumping the writing desk and bouncing the Draconniel pieces. As he headed toward the door, he gave Rakiel a nasty whack with the duffel.
Tarli," Moran began.
The boy whirled, knocking over a candlestick. In picking up the candlestick, he shattered the water jug on the dresser.
Moran regarded him gravely. "The book."
"Oh. Right." Tarli handed it over. "I'd like to read it."
They could hear his dragged duffel bump behind him all the way down the stairs.
Rakiel stared at Moran in amazement and disgust. "Surely you're not admitting him?"
"He admitted himself."
Rakiel laughed, a nasty noise. "Are the knights as desperate as all that?"
Moran was looking down the stairs. "The knights choose first for honor, and second for noble family." It hadn't always been true.
"But you don't even know his father." The cleric's lip curled. "HE may not even know his father."
"Then I'll judge the boy and not his family."
Rakiel sniffed. "It's insupportable. He's not only common, he's probably a bastard."
"Not nearly as much as a cleric I could name," Moran muttered, well beneath his breath.
Rakiel was ranting on. "And so short. He hardly looks human. Do you suppose he's…"
Moran, staring out the window, said absently, "Loraine was very short."
It was the hottest summer anyone could remember. All the travelers who had Tarps put them up and were lying under them. The others trudged as far as the city walls and lay in the narrow midday shadows.
Only Moran rode on, a thin, tired knight pulling a cart that held a sword, a shield, and a corpse. the body had been reverently wrapped in a blanket.
Moran had kept it cool with water from his precious travel ration. He passed the obelisk at the edge of town, glanced at the final line on it: The Gods reward us in the grace of our home .
He turned away.
Moran rode past the nearly completed temple of Mishakal.
Several wanderers gawked at it, all of them more impressed with the stonework than a single dusty knight of solamnia. He knocked at a shabby wooden building. Itsstone rear wall was a side wall of the entrance gate for the staircase called "The paths of the dead."
A young girl answered.
"I'm looking for Alwyn the Graver," said Moran.
"He's bought into his own wares," the girl said simply. "The business is mine now. I'm Loraine."
Moran looked at her and thought at first, "Nothingbut a child."
He looked at her eyes and quickly realized that she was a woman — just grown shorter than most. Loraine couldn't see over the cart sides. She climbed one of the wheels, Stared in, then gasped at the sight of the sword and shield.
"Who is it?" she was like a child at a puppet show, waiting for the next surprise. Her shining red hair spilled over her shoulders as she leaned in, watching Moran unwrap the body: Talisin, his black moustache even blacker against his icewhite skin. The back of his helm was split in half.
Moran said dully, "The greatest swordsman since Brightblade, killed by a thrown axe."
He turned on her, shamed by the sting of tears in his eyes.
"Mend the robe, patch the cape, give him new leggings — everything. He'll be entombed with his family; he's noble, and a hero, and the best — " Moran couldn't talk anymore.
Loraine, surprisingly strong, rolled the cart inside by herself. She quickly measured the body and figured cloth and labor costs while Moran stood by, empty with grief.
"Come back in two days," she said. As he turned to go, she laid her hand on his arm. "And come back often after that."
He noticed how clear her eyes were, how soft her voice could be.
"You'll need to talk, and I — " She looked suddenly embarrassed and straightened her gown, patted her hair over her ears. "You're like no one I've met. I love strange places and strange men."
As he left, he heard her singing, in a clear, young voice, " 'Return his soul to huma's breast…'
" Moran had sung the song himself, in a voice cracked with grief, two days ago. To his surprise, he came back to see her within a week after the funeral.
On the front wall of the classroom hung a tapestry (on loan from the permanent gallery of the city fathers) picturing knights riding silver and gold dragons, aiming lances at red dragons and riders. The dragons, woven in metal thread, glittered disturbingly in the grim gray hall.
The novices were excited. Two of them were leaping benches in mock swordplay, and almost all of the rest were ringed around the term's first fight: two boys, rolling on the floor.
Moran strode into the room, carrying two breastplates. The boys froze in place, then drifted to seats. Tarli's lower lip was bleeding. Another novice — Saliak, Moran noted — had bloody knuckles.