'I may still be your guide,' he said slowly. 'Tell me, Tarli, where will you go from here?'
Tarli frowned, considering. 'No idea,' he said finally. 'Maybe to meet my mother's people again. I've been with them, and they're nice.' He frowned still more, and Moran was reminded forcibly of himself. 'But sometimes I think I ought to make something of myself.'
Moran took a deep breath and said carefully, 'Have you considered the clergy?'
From his blank expression, clearly Tarli never had.
The blankness turned to wonder. 'You know, you're right,' Tarli said excitedly. 'They're perfect. I'd have a wonderful time. The more I know of clerics, the more their code seems more like mine than the knights' does.' He looked up suddenly at Moran. 'No offense.'
'Oh, none.' Moran hid a smile.
'Tell me, do the clerics accept common — accept people like me?'
Ah, Tarli, Moran thought fondly, there ARE no other people like you. His hand closed in a fist around Rakiel's letters. It was hard, not killing a man for a debt of honor, but this way might be better.
'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
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.'
