DragonKnight - Donita K. Paul [108]
“Words are powerful weapons, Squire Bardon. False philosophy can be killed with the right weapon. And the weapon is words. And the right words are truth.”
Bardon stopped. Regidor paced ahead, then halted his course to turn and tilt his head at his friend.
Bardon pointed back to the main camp. “If what you say is true, Reg, we should go back to Bromptotterpindosset and expose his lies with principles. We should be shouting our opposition.”
Regidor grinned. “No, no. I don’t believe that’s the correct course for this dilemma. You cannot attack a bad idea as you would a savage beast. You don’t reason with a bull who charges. You don’t shoot arrows at men with ideas.” Regidor signaled with his forefoot for Bardon to follow and started off again to the dragon field. “Sittiponder has already raised the flag of truth. Tomorrow we shall discuss Bromptotterpindosset’s stories. We will kill the false teachings of an ignorant man. Because…we shall allow each person to wrestle through his or her thinking to reach a personal conclusion. Their decisions will come from within.”
“There are men with bad ideas who do shoot arrows at us. What of them, Regidor? Do we reason then?”
“Thinking of Crim Cropper and Burner Stox?”
“Among others.”
“Because they wish to kill us, then by all means, let us shoot back. Those we do not kill, we shall capture. Then we can talk their ideas to death, once we have their arrows safely in our hands.”
They found Captain Anton sitting between the front legs of his dragon. He held a small, stringed instrument in his hands and played a melody commonly heard in Amara’s music halls. He stood immediately as Bardon and Regidor approached. The squire explained the problem with the mapmaker. If the captain thought the solution a bit extreme, he said nothing, merely agreeing to fulfill the orders given to him by his superior.
Bardon chose to sleep beneath the stars that night. He spent a great deal of time talking to Wulder in hopes that a clear answer to his unsettled feeling would emerge.
The problem of the Wizards’ Plume advancing across the sky could not be ignored. It hung at about forty degrees above the southwestern horizon. In the north sky the Eye of the North looked down from its ninety-degree position. It seemed that as the Wizards’ Plume gained height, it also gained speed. Bardon could do nothing to slow the comet’s progress. He spent time staring at the heavenly lights and wondering why Wulder allowed this particular clock to tick away the time. And he pondered an old question. Why did Wulder put each star and planet in intricate synchronization with one another, yet never bothered to send a follower just one clear-cut answer to a simple question?
Have I made the right decision regarding the mapmaker?
In the morning it didn’t matter. Bardon got up from his pallet, rolled it and stored it with his gear, and went to tell the tumanhofer he was returning to Dormenae.
Bromptotterpindosset was gone.
37
BOOTS
The young o’rant Ahnek followed Bardon as they circled the area east of the camp, looking for evidence of how and why the missing mapmaker left. Others searched the perimeter as well. Regidor canvassed the north with two leecents. Captain Anton and two riders studied the ground on the west. The last rider and Holt covered the south. Granny Kye, N’Rae, Sittiponder, and Jue Seeno fixed the morning meal.
“How’d old Bromp get past the guards?” asked Ahnek. “Isn’t that what they’re posted for, to keep people and things from coming into or leaving camp?”
The squire gave his young companion a stern look. “You will refer to our lost tumanhofer with respect, Ahnek. He is Bromptotterpindosset unless he gives you permission to call him by a more familiar name. And that is highly unlikely.”
“Do you think he’s dead?
“No, I don’t think he’s dead.”
“Then why won’t he ever say I can call him Bromp?”
“He just doesn’t seem the type to want to be called in a familiar manner by a scrap of a boy.”
Rather than being insulted by Bardon’s description