"As a friend. Listen to this." Marshal Kory picked up one of the scrolls, and began to read. "'—and in fact, Ansuli, I had to tell the great oaf to quit swinging his staff around overhead like a young demon. I feared he would hit me, but soon that great laugh burst out and he thanked me for stopping him. If he has a fault, it is that liking for ale, which makes him fight sometimes whether we have need or no.' And that's Luap talking of Gird at a tavern in eastern Fintha. I'm not sure where; he doesn't name the town."

Paks was startled. "Gird—drunk?"

"It was after their first big victory. I've always suspected that the reason several of the articles in the Code of Gird dealt with drunkenness is that Gird had personal knowledge of it." He laid that scroll down and touched another with his fingertip. "We have had the copyists working on these every day. It is the greatest treasure of the age—you cannot know, Paksenarrion, how it lifts our hearts to find something so close to Gird himself. Even when it's things like that letter—that just makes him more human, more real to us. And to have in Luap's own words the last battle—incredible! Besides that, we now have a way to prove whether or not these scrolls are genuine. Have you ever heard of Luap's Stronghold?"

Paks shook her head. "I had not heard of Luap until I came here, sir."

"There's been a legend for a long time that Luap left the Honnorgat Valley and traveled west, to take Gird's Code to distant lands. For a time, it was believed, he had established a stronghold, a fortress, in the far mountains, and some reports had Girdsmen traveling back and forth. But no one has come from the west with any reports of him for hundreds of years, so most scholars now think it was just a legend. But in one of these scrolls, sent back, he says, at the request of the Marshal-General of that day, he gives the location of that stronghold. If someone were to go there, and see it, that would prove that these are, indeed, the scrolls of Luap."

Paks thought of it, suddenly excited. "What are the western lands like?"

"All we have are caravan reports. Dry grassland for some days travel, then rock and sand, then deep gouges in the rocks, with swift-running rivers in the depths. Then mountains—but they don't go that way, skirting them on the south, to come to a crossways. North along that route is a kingdom called Kaelifet; I know nothing about it. Southward is more desert, and finally a sea."

Paks tried to imagine those strange lands, and failed. "Will you go, then, Marshal Kory?"