Thief By Knight
PROLOGUE
One night some years
ago, I found myself in a dimly light, smoke-filled tavern in Geston. I´d
gone there to recruit adventurers to help me find my twin sister Teela,
who´d vanished after helping my friend Lisha win the Great Hurvan Games.
Needless to say, I was not in the best of moods.
To cheer myself, I
found an empty corner table and began sampling the establishment´s best
vintages. I was halfway through my second bottle of wine when an old man in
ragged clothes shuffled over to my table. He awkwardly collapsed into the chair
across from me and proceeded to cough and hack.
"Do you want
something?" I asked when his fit had subsided.
The old man eyed my
bottle greedily. "Don´ suppose ye´d be willing to share a dram or
two with an old man."
I frowned. I
wasn´t in the mood to be generous. "I don´t suppose I would."
"I can pay ye
for it."
"If you can pay,
then why don´t you get your own bottle from the inn keep? Off with you,
old man. It´s been a long day and I´m in a foul mood."
The man ignored my
insult. "Barkeep won´t be interested in the coin I have to offer. But
ye´re a bard. And a good one, I´ve heard. I think ye´ll be very
interested in what I can offer ye."
I put down the
bottle and leaned towards the man. Could he perhaps know of a magic bard song?
Surely not this old geezer.
"What is
it?" I asked, intrigued despite my doubts.
"It´s a
story. One you´ve not heard before, I expect. It was told to me
personally by a fella name of Grantaire. I expect you´ll know the
name."
"Wasn´t he
a friend of St. Enjolras?" I asked. I´d once befriended (though not by
choice), a paladin named Rhavin who´d told me all about Enjolras, founder
of the order of Paragons. I had to admit, though not to his face, that Rhavin
was a pretty good story teller for a paladin. This Enjolras had been a
mysterious character for a saint -- to this day, nobody knew where he´d
come from.
"Aye," said
the old man. "That´d be the one."
I swiped an empty
cup from the next table and poured the old man some of my burgundy. He drank heartily.
"All right, tell
me the story."
"First, ye ought
to know that Saint Enjolras and Grantaire, they weren´t from around here.
From a different world they were. But the gods had noticed them. Across the
worlds, whenever a spell was cast by one who summoned heroes to fight for a
cause the gods favored, often-times Enjolras and his companions would appear.
They got to be quite the world travelers."
"I know a little
bit about that myself. Though I haven't traveled to any worlds you´d want
to visit, mind you." I shuddered, thinking of the horrors of Ravenloft.
"Just where was Saint Enjolras from?"
"Well, now,
I´ll be telling ya. For this story happened in the world of their birth.
Grantaire himself told it to me, in a tavern like this, when I was a lad younger
than yourself. It´s a story of saints and heroes, it is. But it starts,
believe it or not, with a theft..."
Chapter One
