She’s probably going south to Gwynned to stay with her
brother until she gets things sorted out.”
I felt bad for her having to leave town, but I also felt
bad for myself and everyone else, since she had the only
good bakery. Jarvis went on about there being a lot of
confusion as they were trying to put out the fire, but when
Woose tried to get people organized, no one would listen to
him, because he was rich or a dwarf or both, so the whole
place burned up and took the tailor’s shop with it. Jarvis said
a lot of things about certain people that I should probably
not put down here, because I think he was just angry, and I
doubt he would really know if those people were as much in
love with their barn animals as he implied they were.
Magistrate Jarvis stopped and rubbed his face and then
looked at me and said, “By the way, where did you get
those?” and he pointed at my gray robes, so I said, “Ark
made me his official recorder this morning, and these are
my official recorder’s robes, and this is my official Palanthas
paper, and this is my steel scribing pen, and this is my
once-holy symbol,” and I showed him my silver necklace
that has the tiny silver open book with the tiny little
scribbles in it that you can’t read no matter how close you
hold it to your eye, which I did once when I was smaller but
poked myself in the eyeball and couldn’t see for two days,
so I don’t do it now.
Magistrate Jarvis snorted and said, “Arkie’d be better off
sticking to his shoe business. People don’t have a need to
read or write all that much. A little bit of knowledge goes a
long way.”
I was going to ask what he meant by that, but he looked
at my satchel and asked about that, too, and I said it was just
to hold all my papers.
Jarvis sighed and said, “You’d better be getting on out
now. Try not to get yourself killed before nightfall,” and I
promised, and he let me go.
I was almost out the door when I remembered what you
wanted, so I turned around and said, “Can I ask just one
question?”
Jarvis was heading back to bed, but he groaned and
said, “If it means I can get to sleep afterward, sure,
anything.”
So I took out my papers and my pen and tried to
remember the question, and I asked him, “Do you think the
gods did right when they sank Istar to preserve the balance
of the world and to protect the freedoms of will, thought,
and action among all beings?”
Jarvis stood real still for a while, which made me a bit
uneasy, and I slowly began to roll up my papers in case I
had to run for it. His face got old and white, and his black
moustache looked droopy and dark, but he only said, “Why
would you ask me such a damned foolish question as that?
By the Abyss and its dragons, no, that wasn’t good at all.
The gods ruined everything for us. Istar had evil on the run.
We had those goblins and minotaurs and other scum in our
grip, and we were smashing down the wizards’ towers right
and left. We could have had a golden age here on our
world, the first true age of freedom ever, but the gods broke
Istar and turned their backs on us. I was a soldier for Istar
before the fall. I was out here in Ergoth hunting down
blood-crazed barbarians when the sky lit up to the east and
the mountain fell on my homeland. Then the earthquakes
and windstorms came, and there was suffering and
starvation for all of us who were left, every damn one. That
was twenty-two years ago, and I remember every moment
of it, every single thing, just like it was yesterday. The gods
did us wrong. The good gods turned evil and sold us out.
They sold us into a pit of serpents like the lowest goblin