War in Tethyr (6 page)

It was still all but desolation to the northerly eyes of Zaranda's comrades.

Farlorn had his yarting unshipped and was playing and singing a song in a strange tongue as they rode. "The very words are music, O Bard," Father Pelletyr said. "What language is that?"

"Wild Elvish," Farlorn said. He had a distant, dreamy expression on his face. "The language of my mother's people. Do you know much Elvish, Father?"

The cleric shook his balding head. "Alas, I do not. I am only a poor priest of Ilmater, blessings to his name. It has never been my calling to minister to the folk of the woods."

Farlorn laughed, not unkindly. "You've saved much breath in that wise, Father. The Green Elves have small use for the religions of man. Or any other of their works, or aught to do with them at all."

"They must have
some
use for humans," Goldie remarked, "else where did you come from?"

It seemed to Zaranda that the bard colored slightly, but he ignored the mare, continuing to address Father Pelletyr: "Small matter at all events, for the wild elf tongue is strange even to elven ears, though all the People can with effort comprehend it. And you have spoken wisely, for of all the tongues of Faerun, Wild Elvish is the closest to music pure."

"And what is this beauteous song about, good bard?" the cleric asked, taking a bite from a plum he'd bought from an urchin up the road.

"An elvish maiden sits by a pool in the wood, watching her tears mingle with the clear crystal waters. She has just learned that her lover has been taken and tortured to death by orcs. Soon she will open the veins of her wrist, and she sings of how she will be joined once again with her love, when her lifeblood stains the water like wine."

The cleric swallowed. "Delightful, I'm sure," he said weakly.

Farlorn urged his gray knee-to-knee with Zaranda's mare, favoring Zaranda with a wink. "It's really a set of bawdy limericks I heard in Teshwave," he told her in Elvish. "They do sound pretty translated into my own tongue, don't they?"

Zaranda just shook her head. Farlorn flashed her a quick grin, and she felt a tug at her heart, like fingers plucking her sleeve. No, she told herself firmly. All that's between you and him is business. Leave it thus.

Farlorn struck a fresh cord on his yarting.

Riding about twenty yards ahead of Zaranda, Stillhawk suddenly held up a hand.

"What is it?" Zaranda called softly.

Fighting,
Stillhawk signed.
Up ahead.

Zaranda sighed.
Well,
'tis
Tethyr. What can you expect?
She wasn't yet ready to fall into lockstep behind this baron in Zazesspur, but she did have to admit something needed to be done about the bandits.

After having passed the halfling barricade, the caravan had encountered little trouble. Occasionally it had been shadowed by furtive watchers. Zaranda lacked the wild-craft of her two companions, inborn in the case of Farlorn, gained through painstaking training in Stillhawk's case, but as a veteran campaigner, she had seen her share of reconnoitering and ambush. The covert surveillance had never gone long undetected. In the cases in which it persisted, Stillhawk had slipped off to discourage it-puzzled by his friend and employer's insistence that he take no life unless he was offered violence.

On two occasions Stillhawk detected skulkers actually lying in ambush, and these he dealt with in summary fashion, leaving no survivors to learn new lessons in the need for stealth.

Several larger armed parties with no obvious business had likewise been encountered, including a score of men on horseback, warriors with ill-kept weapons and ragged cloaks. But Zaranda had assembled her caravan with care. To the observer the caravan looked neither unduly large nor prosperous, and while well guarded, was not so much so as to indicate the richness of the pickings. In truth it was formidably guarded indeed: the crossbow-and-halberd guards were all hand-picked fighters, tough and well seasoned, their morale stiffened by good pay, decent treatment, and the prospect of fighting side-by-side with warriors of the ilk of Farlorn, Stillhawk, and Zaranda herself.

The menace it did present to the world was sufficient. Across a turbulent life, Zaranda had observed that predators, whether two-legged or four or more, preferred prey that could be taken with a minimum of risk. Though there were a few tense heartbeats during which Zaranda palmed one of the resinous pellets used in her fireball spell, the large mounted party had scrutinized the caravan with some care and then ridden away.

At least half a dozen times they saw to left or right tall spires of smoke rising into the pale sky. On occasion, Zaranda clamped her jaw shut and set her eyes on the road ahead. She hated those who preyed on intelligent beings, but there was nothing she could do.

Until now, with trouble lying athwart her path. Goldie had pricked up her long, pointy, well-shaped ears, of which she was exceptionally vain. "Louts," she said with authority. "Perhaps a score. Half a mile along the road. From their yelping it seems they harry someone-or
thing
-like a pack of hounds, not quite daring to close."

Father Pelletyr looked skeptical. "Now, Golden Dawn, dear, prevarication is a sin. How can you tell so much more than our seasoned scout?"

"Because she has ears like the lateen rig on an Amnian fishing felucca," supplied Farlorn. "She ought be able to hear a fly fart at that range."

Goldie cast him an aggrieved look.

Stillhawk signed,
She's right.
He had his bow across the pommel of his saddle, but hadn't taken an arrow from his quiver. He seemed satisfied that, whatever the disturbance was, it wasn't coming their way.

Zaranda ordered Balmeric and Eogast to get the beasts off the road and into a defensive circle in a field of yellow and white spring flowers. Before she could hear their complaints at the exertion, she wheeled Goldie and was trotting forward again. "Let's go see what transpires."

"Must you always rush headlong into potential peril, Zaranda?" the cleric asked despairingly.

"Yes," she said. "Besides, some poor soul may need our help."

"Oh," he said. "Oh." And he twitched the flanks of his ass with a little green-leafed twig he'd picked up for the purpose, urging the creature to follow Zaranda, who'd set Goldie into a rolling lope.

"That was manipulative, Randi," said Goldie, who wasn't really exerting herself at this pace. "And you say
I'm
bad."

Zaranda frowned briefly, then shrugged and laughed. "It was easier than debating with him," she admitted. "At least this way I'll know where he is."

Their only contact with the Zazesspur road had been Zaranda's side trip into Ithmong. As one of only two major east-west routes through Tethyr, it was well maintained and relatively easy faring. For that reason it also attracted much attention from brigands. Zaranda therefore kept her train to the back roads, despite the fact some were scarce better than wagon ruts or goat tracks.

They were on a somewhat better stretch of road here, a country lane that showed signs of having been improved in the past by being metaled with streambed gravel. Still-hawk rode protectively thirty paces in the lead, longbow ready in his hand. Then came Zaranda, with Farlorn to her left, and finally Father Pelletyr, ass trotting furiously to keep up, cleric and beast alike grunting softly in time to the impacts of its sharp little hooves.

A round mound of hill rose to their left. A lone pecan tree sprang from the top, its roots gripping earth just on the far side of the crest. As the road bent around the hill's base, the clamor of excited voices grew louder, and then the riders beheld a crowd of angry peasants wielding sticks, farming tools, and the odd wolf-spear, confronting a lone figure that stood at the base of the lordly pecan.

Powerfully built, with short bandy legs, the lone figure wore a gray cowled cloak despite the day's warmth. In either hand it clutched a short, heavily curved blade. With these it was fending off the halfhearted thrusts and blows of such mob members as sporadically worked up the nerve to close with it.

"Slay the beast!" peasant voices urged from the back of the mob. "Slay the vile thing!"

Stillhawk slipped from the saddle and let his reins drop. Well trained, his bay would not move from where it stood unless it were threatened or summoned. He nocked an arrow. Farlorn frowned.

"Something about that shape I mislike," the bard murmured. His yarting was slung across his back. "And the cast of those blades-"

The cowl fell back to reveal the hideous tusked face of a great orc-an orog.

"Lies!" the peasants cried, their voices like raven calls. "Deceit! It's a trick! Kill! Kill!"

By reflex Stillhawk drew back his string. "No!" Zaranda screamed.

The ranger loosed. The arrow hummed to strike the tree a mere handsbreadth above the orc's sloped skull.

The impact rang as loud as a hammer blow. The crowd fell abruptly silent, staring upward at the black-fletched shaft as it vibrated with a musical hum in slow diminuendo.

The orog's small bloodshot eyes never wavered. He seemed to be gazing raptly at the Torm medallion.

"The unsanctified beast!" Father Pelletyr said in a shocked whisper. "Amazing his claw doesn't burst into flame from contact with a holy object! Of course, Torm is a most warlike god. Perhaps he has less sense of the niceties…"

"And perhaps we oughtn't leap at conclusions, Father," Zaranda murmured, "lest we find them illusions, concealing an abyss." She nudged Goldie forward with the gentle pressure of her knee.

The crowd turned their heads to stare as one at the newcomers, as if they comprised some great mechanical toy. The throng's leader, a thickset gold-bearded peasant with a hooded orange mantle and no left arm, brandished the rust-spotted sword he held in his remaining hand.

"What mean you interfering thus, strangers?"

"What exactly are we interfering in?" Zaranda asked, reining Goldie to a halt just shy of the edge of the crowd. The peasants muttered ill-humoredly but edged back away from her.

The bearded swordsman's brows twitched, as if he found it unseemly to have his question answered with another. But the intruder was an imposing woman, who did not give the impression that
her
sword blade would show any rust at all.

"We have caught this monster attempting to cross our lands," he said. "We're in the process of extirpating it. And that's our right as human-born servants of the good and lawful!" He finished his little speech as a peroration to the crowd, turning and holding high his sword to shouts of acclaim.

"Is that what you're doing?" asked Farlorn in his ringing baritone. "You look more like a pack of starveling curs trying to work up the nerve to snatch food from a chained bear. Still-" he shrugged "-don't let me stay your hands."

"But I intend to," Zaranda said, quietly but clearly. "At least until I get to the bottom of this."

That brought angry catcalls from the mob. "By what right?" Yellowbeard demanded.

"By my right as a human-born person who intends to go on behaving as one."

"Do you threaten us?" asked a skinny man with a missing front tooth and wild black hair that continued without interruption down around his jaw in an unkempt beard. He was in the middle of the pack, safely behind the front rank.

"I'll not sit idly by and watch injustice done."

The crowd's noise level was beginning to rise; so, visibly, was its collective blood pressure. It is a fascinating sight to watch, Zaranda thought in a detached way. Like a pot of water about to come to a boil. Farlorn's remark had been explicitly insulting, but so vast was his charm and so disarming the manner in which he uttered it, the crowd had not been able to take offense… with
him.
Now their wrath was about to burst out at a different target.

The black-bearded man stooped and seized a chunk of basalt as big as two fists. "You cannot drop us all!" he screamed, cocking a twig-skinny arm to throw.

Zaranda brought her left fist to her hip, palm up, then thrust it toward him. As her arm reached full extension she rolled her hand over and flung it, as if pushing him with her palm from twenty feet away.

The man doubled over with all his breath gusting out his mouth. He flew backward several feet and fell in a moaning ball of misery.

The crowd grew very still. "And there's a lesson about the making of assumptions," Zaranda said. "Which will have no lasting ill effects-if he behaves himself. It boils my blood to see one beset by many."

"Even when that one is evil?" a subdued but surly voice said from the back of the crowd.

"What
really
angers me," Zaranda continued, "is to see one condemned not for what he does, but for what he is. I prefer to reckon on the basis of deeds, not prejudice."

She gestured at the great orc, who had allowed his medallion to hang before his chest, glinting in the sun. He held his scimitars slanted downward toward the grass at his feet, in a posture implying readiness but no threat.

"He carries the sign of the god Torm. Would a base creature do that?"

The mob looked at its one-armed leader, who had grown quite ashen behind his blond beard-an unpleasant blend of colors, Zaranda thought. He chewed his underlip and frowned in concentration.

Zaranda took a quick look around. Stillhawk's obsidian-flake eyes were fixed on the orog, and his expression was dead grim. Of course, his expression was
always
grim, but none other of her acquaintance had half the reason for hating evil things in general and orcs in particular as the mute ranger did. For Farlorn, hating orcs was a part of the natural environment in which he'd been raised, like woods and air and song. Yet his Wild Elven kinfolk held scarcely a better opinion of men than orcs, so the bard had some experience in keeping his prejudices on a tight rein. His flawless features were set in a half-smile that Zaranda knew well, and not altogether fondly, as his neutral look, behind which any feelings might lie coiled.

Father Pelletyr was a study in perplexity. The muscles of his face were working beneath his pink skin like fruits and vegetables shifting in a market bag. He had given life and soul to Ilmater, who, while a gentle god, was a fixed and formidable foe of evil. And orcs in his experience-and everybody else's-took to evil as a salamander to fire.

But there, unmistakable, on the great orc's breast shone the gauntlet of Torm. No normal orc would dare display that symbol in such a way, even as a trophy, for fear of retribution from his own dark and jealous god, or even Torm himself. Torm was a lesser power, far less potent than his rival battle-gods Helm or Tempus or his own master Tyr Grimjaws, the Lord of Justice. But for that reason he was reputed to take a far more immediate and personal interest in the doings of his worshipers than other gods, if only because he wasn't spread so thin.

And Torm was a god of Law and Good, even as was martyred Ilmater himself. Father Pelletyr did not serve him, but must honor him. A true servant of Torm was the cleric's brother, not so close as a devotee of Ilmater or another member of his own order, but a brother withal.

The father, who was a good man but not unduly sophisticated, was visibly having difficulty reconciling himself to the notion of clasping a giant snaggle-toothed orog to his breast.

"But what does it
want
with us?" a voice asked plaintively from somewhere in the throng, whose individual components were now doing their best to blend into an undifferentiated mass behind their leader. The one-armed man was clearly discomfited by his position now.

"Why don't you ask him?" asked Goldie, around a mouthful of grass she chomped.

The peasants stared at her with saucer eyes.

Thanks, Goldie, Zaranda thought. That's just what we needed-new strangeness to tweak the raw nerve-ends of these folk.

The mare, who could not really read Zaranda's thoughts but often seemed to, swiveled her ears briefly back to bear on her rider in her own equine equivalent of a wink.

The man with one arm was clearly on point, here, with no graceful way to weasel out. He looked down at the rusty broadsword in his hand as if unsure how it came to be there, thrust it through his leather belt, provoking a twitch at the corner of Zaranda's eye at the heedless way he put various of his parts at risk. Then he turned to the orog and cleared his throat.

"Uh, pardon me, ahh-" a sidelong glance at Zaranda "-Sir Orog, and would you mind telling us what business you have coming into our country?"

The orog turned his two small bloodshot eyes to bear on him. The blond-bearded man quailed but held his ground.

The orog thrust his swords into gleaming bronze scabbards crossed over his back and threw back his cloak. The crowd gasped. Beneath he wore a steel breastplate, enameled white, with the sign of Torm worked upon it in gold.

"Passing through it, nothing more," he said in a voice like a blacksmith's file on a horse's hoof. "I am a simple pilgrim on a holy quest. I ask nothing of you save that you let me walk in peace."

"Who are you… pilgrim?" Zaranda asked. She found the word fit strangely on her tongue, and was shamed.

"I hight Shield of Innocence," the orog said.

Farlorn cocked a sardonic brow. "And were you born with that name, friend?" The word
friend
dripped sarcasm as a Shadow Thief's knife dripped poison.

The great orc shook his bulldog head. "What I was called before is of no consequence," he said, his speech slow and measured as if somehow painful. "The god remade me when he called me into his service. I am Shield of Innocence now. I am Torm's paladin."

Paladin!
The crowd gasped again-an effect Zaranda was getting mightily sick of. Father Pelletyr gasped as well and clutched at his Ilmater medal. Stillhawk made no sound, showed no reaction in face or posture, but the knuckles that gripped his bow showed white through his boot-leather-dark skin.

"Oh, really," said Farlorn with acid sweetness. "And here all this time I thought only true men could be paladins."

"I know little of such things," Shield of Innocence declared. "I was unworthy-all are unworthy. Yet the god chose me. His hand lifted me up and remade me. Perhaps because I was unworthiest of all. I cannot question the will of Torm, praised be his name."

The crowd found articulate speech again, or at least as close as mobs get:

"Lies!"

"A trick!"

"The monster seeks to deceive us!"

"Blasphemy!"

The gold-bearded man stood taller, more from swelling with outrage than straightening with courage. "The only meet penalty for falsely claiming to be a paladin," he declared in a choked voice, "is death."

"If it is Torm's will that I die," the orog said, "I die. I will not raise my hand to smite you."

Zaranda swung down off her mare.

"Are you leading with your chin again, Randi Star?" Goldie asked.

"My nose," the warrior woman said. "That's how it got broken the first time." She patted her steed on the neck and walked up the hill toward the tree. Yellow-beard stared at her with eyes bugged as she walked within arm's reach of him, but made no move to stop her. The crowd shifted uneasily behind him.

Zaranda stopped a pace away from the orog and stood facing him. Though she kept her face calm, inside she was vibrating like Stillhawk's arrow after it struck the tree. It was easy for her to talk about tolerance and forbearance, but she had had extensive dealings with orcs, none of them pleasant. Now she stood near enough to the great orc to smell his breath, and her impulses were to vomit, flee, or run him through.

So what are you, Zaranda? she asked herself. Animal or woman? Do you follow your instincts heedlessly, or do you follow where your reason leads?

There was a time to be ruled by instinct, she knew, and had survived tight situations accordingly. But now was the time she must master herself, or lose all form.

She forced herself to look the orog in the eye. They were blue and surprisingly clear. Like a pig's eyes-but no. And a pig was no evil thing, nor unclean left to its own devices… but these were not the eyes of an animal. Nor were they the eyes of a creature of filth and darkness. They seemed to shine with inner purpose.

Can you really read a soul through such windows? she wondered. You know better, Zaranda.

His carriage, though erect, was not orc-chieftain haughty. Rather it seemed… noble. His breath, surprisingly, was not foul. It was as clean as any man's, likely cleaner than any of his tormentors'. She raised a hand to his face.

And stopped, as if an invisible shield repelled her. His skin was orc's skin, gray-green and coarse, almost pebbled in texture, although it was scrubbed cleaner than the skin of any orc she'd seen. Her fingers trembled like small frightened animals longing to flee.

The question now isn't what he is. It's what you are.

She touched his cheek.

The crowd gasped a third time. "Zaranda!" Father Pelletyr exclaimed.

"Zaranda," Farlorn said, in tones suspended between regret and disgust.

With mongoose abruptness the creature caught her hand in both his claws. Now you've done it! she thought as her free hand darted to her dagger-hilt. She could feel Stillhawk drawing his elf-bow behind her.

The orog dropped to his knees, still clinging to her hand. The great head hung.

"You are my mistress," he said. "I shall serve you."