The Paladin

Prologue

They were haunted hills. The villagers of Mon said that, trying to warn the young traveler. They warned of vengeful ghosts who would lead a boy astray, demons which could appear as foxes and owls, and dragons which could take human form. Most persuasive in their estimation—the boy's quest was useless: the master took no students. Rich men's sons had come to beg to be Saukendar's disciples, and come down from Saukendar's mountain again, refusing to speak to the villagers or to linger there. Lords' messengers had come to see Master Saukendar to plead causes with him, and returned unhappy and unanswered. Monks had come to ask the swordmaster for his secrets, and left unenlightened, for the master turned all inquiries away. Twice each year a boy from the village would go up to the cabin on the mountain to bring the salt and the tea and the small things that the master needed and to take the master's request for rice and straw which they would leave at the appointed place. The village gave those things, with small gifts as well, fruit in season, a few good apples or pears, or fresh vegetables, because the fear of the master drove away the bandits. This was the only converse the master allowed himself with the world.

Emphatically, the master took no students... and certainly no students as ragged as this—so small and so starved and so evidently some yeoman farmer's son, no different than any of their own.

The traveler wore a quilted coat that had been blue once; black rough-spun breeches flapped ragged ends about his skinned knees; a red, healing scar ran from cheek to chin to neck and down beneath the grimy collar. He carried a badly made longbow for a walking-staff, and had a quiver of white-feathered arrows slung at his side, the kind of weapons a farmer might legally carry on the road against bandits and brigands.

There were troubles in the east. In a hoarse, low voice the traveler told them news from the heart of the Empire; told of farms burned in Hua province and Yijang; of livestock slaughtered; of whole families murdered, his own among them.

But all that was far away, the village assured the boy. It was safe here. The bandits who lived over the hills in Hoisan province stayed out of this valley safely within the borders of Hoishi, under the rule of good lord Reidi; and the beneficent gods and fear of the master kept the troubles far from the village of Mon.

"I have a place on my floor for a pallet," widower Gori said wistfully. Gori had all daughters, six of them. "I have a garden to keep. I could find a permanent place for an honest boy who'd work for his keep."

But the traveler—he could hardly have been sixteen—who squatted barefoot in the shade by the well and drank an offered cup of water, thanked the widower in a low voice and gave back the cup, then tied his reed hat under his chin, thrust his arms again through the woven-rush ropes that held the barrel-sized basket, struggled up with the unstrung bow for a staff and walked away, ant-like under his ungainly burden, virtually obscured by the hat, the towering basket. Only the legs showed beneath, ragged breeches, skinny calves, dust-caked.

The villagers shook their heads, especially Gori.

"He'll be back," Gori's neighbor said.

The road that had been broad and friendly and sunlit down in the valley, dwindled to a track and finally to a narrow slot among the rounded boulders and the tree-roots of the forest, and wound in steeper and steeper climbs into the hills.

The ragged young traveler hitched the pack up against the rake of branches and the angle of the trail and kept going, using the bowstaff for balance in the climb.

It would have been wiser, perhaps, to have slept in the hedgerows another night, and attempt the hill path by morning; but Taizu was beyond fear of ghosts and demons, and the only dragons Taizu thought worth fearing always walked in human form.

The sun sank below the hills now, throwing the path beneath the trees into deep shade. Not far, the villagers had said; but if that estimation was wrong, then Taizu reckoned the villagers were right in at least one thing, these woods were safe from bandits: the bandit was a fool, who would hunt on Saukendar's mountain.

And that was greater safety than Taizu had known in weeks.

So Taizu climbed in the forest shadow, struggling with the basket-pack in the clutch of branches, until the scent of smoke and horse came on the wind; until the shape of rustic buildings showed in the twilight: pen and pasture and a sun-edged shape of a man carrying water to a bay horse whose coat shone brilliant red in a sudden glimpse of sunset. There was a storm passing to the north, clouds like a slate-gray wall above the hills. Red light from the waning sun edged everything in fire; the horse, the edges of the buildings, the man.

Taizu did not breathe for a moment. Saukendar seemed less real in that moment than he had been all the weeks since Hua province—less real and more godlike. But a man who had renounced the world could not be reckoned like other men. Saukendar had turned his back on the court, his great wealth and high station, and escaped the Regent and the Emperor who had betrayed him. He had come here, beyond the limits of the kingdom, to perfect his art and to perfect his soul in the solitude of the mountains. Saukendar had come close as any man to that perfection when he was in the world—the old Emperor's right hand, the one honest man in a court increasingly corrupt and full of wicked men. Saukendar had defended the law and the old Emperor, upheld the poor against the rich, and upheld the honest lords against the flatterers while the old Emperor grew weaker and died.

But Saukendar had not been able to stand against the foolishness of the boy-heir Beijun, who had allied himself with lord Ghita of Angen province and accused his father's appointed Regent lord Heisu of conspiracy and adultery with his wife.

That was how lord Ghita of Angen came to stand behind the throne, and how lord Heisu and the Empress Meiya both went under the axe, and how five hundred men of the Imperial Guard had hunted Saukendar to kill him; but Saukendar had killed twenty of them on his way to the border, and, they said, no few after, until he had gone into retirement in these hills just outside Hoishi province and lord Ghita and his men had understood it was far wiser to let him stay there unmolested.

That was Saukendar. And if he had renounced the world and decided to seek his own perfection, then perhaps he had succeeded in that too and the gods cast a special light about him.

But a second glance showed this man limped; and the light went out when he passed the barn and when the horse moved toward the rail fence: it was not lord Saukendar himself, then—only some servant. Taizu felt somewhat the fool: of course the weapons-master, the Emperor's bodyguard and champion, would have had at least one menial to go with him, or he would have taken a servant from the village below... someone to cook his meals and tend the ordinary things. Saukendar had been a great lord, with lands and servants. Even as an ascetic he would not change that.

So Taizu walked out into the twilight, out into the open, disappointed, but braver in the failure of a miracle.