The Reign Of Istar (12 page)

“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 patch 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.”

*****

“We really should go back and bury the human at some point,” the kender said, kicking
through a big pile of brown leaves. “I mean because of the wild dogs and wolves and things. And the smell, too. I
don't live here, so it wouldn't bother me much, but I have some pits here, after all, and
there are always humans about, you know. I wonder if anyone will miss him - the man, I
mean. No one ever seems to miss us, people like you and me. The humans have each other to
look after. We have no one. We just have to stay alive when the humans come. That's the
way it's always been, hasn't it? My parents told me it wasn't, but I learned different.
They said some humans were nice. I never saw the nice ones. Maybe my parents were telling
me a story, right? They always used to tell me stories about heroes and dragons and ghosts
and elves. They told some good ones. Do you know some stories to tell? I bet you do, the
way you handled your sword. I was sure glad to see you, even if I had the pit ready. You
never know what might happen. I found a wolf in one of my pits once and I nearly fell in
looking at him. The wolf was almost dead, and I felt sorry for him, so I had to kill him.
I forgot that other things besides humans might fall into the pits. It would have been ...
um ... i-ron-ic if I had fallen in. My father taught me that word. He was good with words.
What's your name?”

The goblin hesitated. The kender's chatter was more than a little annoying and was bound
to grow worse, but playing along with the charade of friendship would keep the kender off
guard for now. Kender were supposed to be trusting, if unbearably nosy. “Do not have one,”
he said stiffly.

“No kidding? No name at all? I've never heard of that before. Didn't your parents call you
anything?”

The goblin had never known his parents, having been sold into slavery as an infant and
having escaped in his teens. He had been called many things by the human thugs who had
also worked for the moneylender, but none of the names were worth remembering.

“Eh,” the goblin said at last. “Do not know why.”

“How strange,” the kender said. “I thought everyone had a name. Mine is ...” The kender
stopped, then looked down in sudden embarrassment as he walked. “Well,” he finished
quickly, “what's important is that we're alive, and that's what counts. My father always
said that. He was smart.”

The deer carcass lay on a hillside among a pile of leaves. A broken arrow shaft protruded from the space behind the deer's front left
shoulder; a bow leaned against a nearby tree. The deer had been cut half open, and flies
swarmed about the entrails. The kender searched in the leaves for a moment, bent down to
pick up a long-bladed knife with a bone handle. The goblin tensed, but the kender merely
sat down by the deer to finish dressing it.

The kender continued talking throughout the whole process. His easy patter about the
forest and its secrets were of more than passing interest to the goblin, who suspected
that he might have to live in the wilderness for some time to come. The kender had
obviously lived here long and had learned much.

In the back of his mind, the goblin knew that one of these days it might be necessary to
kill the kender, particularly if food became too scarce to be shared. Until then, he would
listen and learn, and would watch his back just in case the kender's syrupy friendship
turned out to be as false as a human's.

The goblin watched his back, and the kender talked and talked. The kender borrowed the
goblin's things, and the goblin took them away again. Three weeks flew by. The winter
rains were now six weeks away.

*****

The minotaur had fallen into a stagnant pool of cold water and red leaves, where it lay
unconscious. Its breath rasped slowly and heavily as the leaves endlessly rustled around
it and flies feasted on the open, filthy wounds across its back and shoulders. The
twenty-foot length of mud-choked iron chain, linked to the manacles on its wrists, had
gotten snagged on a log, which the weakened minotaur had been unable to pull loose before
collapsing.

The goblin caught the kender by the arm as the latter approached the huge brown figure.
“Damn, you crazy!” he growled. “What you do, eh? One bite, we all bones.” He hefted the
boar spear in a muscular red fist. “I finish it and sleep good.”