War in Tethyr

6

"Stand back!" the orog roared in guttural but clear Common. At the crown of his pumpkin-shaped head, he wore a steel skullcap polished to a mirror finish. "Can you not see that I serve Torm?" With the taloned thumb of his left hand, which still clutched his scimitar, he: hooked a chain hung around his neck and drew forth a great golden amulet. On it, the upraised gauntlet of the: god was clearly visible.

"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 Grog'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 preju-dice."

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 Туr 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 dose 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. If 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."

"What?" Zaranda said.

He raised his hideous face. Tears glistened in his eyes. "You have been sent to me by Torm," he said. "You are the one I must serve."