by Victor Milán
Valides was himself no native Tethyrian, but he plowed on before Zaranda had a chance to point that out. "We'll see a change when this Baron Hardisty comes to power," he declared. "Right now he claims to disdain Ravenak, to assuage the hoity-toity who lack the stomach for doing what must be done, if you get my drift. But mark my words-there's steel beneath that lace and frippery! This Hardisty has steel where he needs it. Hell back the Earl when the time comes."
The baron may have steel where he needs it, but he's got muck in his brainpan if he has aught to do with that green slime Ravenak," Zaranda said. "Even in Tethyr it's a wonder he's not been hanged, noble or not."
Valides's drunk face began to cloud over.
"Now, Zaranda," Father Pelletyr said. He sat at Zaranda's left, where he had been occupied addressing himself to a leg of mutton. Restored, he took an interest in the conversation. Tour friend is entitled to his opinions."
"And I to mine," Zaranda said, leaning against the back of her chair and crossing her arms. The serving maid came back and set a fresh-filled jack before the mercenary. He glowered from her to Zaranda, cast a handful of coppers to her. She scooped up the empty vessel and scuttled away.
Valides swilled deeply, then glared about him. His eye fell upon a bulky figure stacked in the corner behind Zaranda, swaddled head to toe in a cloak. It was Shield of Innocence. Zazesspur was basically a tolerant town, though Valides's talk made Zaranda wonder what it was coming to, but there were few places in Faerun in which an orog warrior would be made welcome. The Smiling Centaur attracted a lot of demihuman custom, and patrons of all races largely forbore to inquire into their fellows' antecedents, in the interest of avoiding scrutiny of their own. Zaranda had hoped he would attract less attention here than out on the street.
But Valides, though Zaranda's sometime comrade-in-arms, was one of those types with a gift for doing the least welcome thing. "What have we here?" he asked, heaving his somewhat squat form up from his stool and lurching toward the silent cowled figure.
Stillhawk stood up, too. With the closeness and clamor threatening to overwhelm his wilderness-honed senses, he would take neither wine nor spirit, and had been sitting quietly by Shield with a flagon of water and a platter of beef. Even here in the south, few would dare chafe a ranger of the Dales for abstaining from strong drink; it wasn't the sort of behavior one got a chance to repeat.
Though he hated and mistrusted the great orc, Still-hawk kept watch over him as a service to Zaranda. He moved to bar the inebriated mercenary's way.
But Farlorn Half-Elven reached out and caught his oak-hard forearm, staying him. "Bide, my friend," he said in his silken baritone. "Our comrade merely wishes words with our silent one. Wouldst offend a warrior true?"
Stillhawk blinked; Farlorn's words had a way of confusing him. Valides shouldered past him. "Hey, there, fellow," he rasped at Shield. "What breed are you? You're a big one-is it giant blood runs in your veins, or ogre?"
He put back his head and laughed uproariously at his own wit. Zaranda was standing now. "Vander," she said softly, using the ranger's rarely heard given name for emphasis.
The ranger nodded, turned. But now Farlorn stood between him and Valides. The bard's moods were like a pendulum, though without the predictability; from this morning's near-giddiness, he had swung into black despair. Unlike the others-Father Pelletyr's thirst was far less exigent than his hunger, though over the whole course of the evening he might acquire a pleasant illumination-Farlorn had drunk with single-minded concentration, fury almost, since arriving at the tavern. His exotically handsome face was flushed, and his eyes were red. He was laughing, but his laugh had a jagged, nasty edge, like a Shadow Thief s stiletto.
"What's the matter with you, fellow?" Valides demanded. "Too good to drink with us normal-sized folk? Show us your misshapen face, then, you great uppity oaf!"
He reached for the cowl of Shield's cloak. Zaranda prepared a spell that would, she hoped, douse all lights in the tavern, and for safety's sake tossed back her own cloak to clear Crackletongue. For all his elf-trained quickness, Stillhawk could not get past Farlorn in time to stop the drunken mercenary, and once Shield's tusked orc face was revealed, there would be a riot. And as ever, if blood must flow, Zaranda intended to be the spiller, not the spillee.
"Sweet Ilmater!" The tavern din had fallen low with anticipation. The choked outcry cut across the pregnant stillness like a full-throated scream.
Father Pelletyr had lurched upward from his chair. His face was suffused with blood and contorted as with agony. "My arm!" he gasped, clutching his bosom. "My chest! The pain-"
He collapsed, upsetting the chair he had occupied. His flailing hand struck his flagon, and the wine stained his white robe like blood. Zaranda leapt toward him but could not catch him before he struck the rush-covered floor.
In a flash, Berdak was kneeling by the stricken man's side. Small for a centaur, the publican was solidly built, and with four legs for traction he cut through the mob like an Amnian racing dromond. He knelt beside the cleric and reached to feel his throat.
Then he looked up and shook his head. "His heart has given out," he said. This man is dead."
9
"We know the face of our enemy," a voice echoed down the darkened streets of Zazesspur's Wainwright District, "and we shall grind it beneath our bootheels!"
A many-throated growl of approval answered him. Zaranda scowled and forced her hand away from Crackle-tongue's hilt. "What's that noise?"
Stillhawk stood at the corner ahead. He gestured right, toward the center of town. It comes from this direction.
She stalked forward and peered around the hip of a brick wall surrounding a wagonmaker's yard. Several blocks away a forest of torches upheld by a multitude of hands illuminated a mob below and a man above, standing on the pedestal of an equestrian statue that had somehow escaped the iconoclastic fervor of the Troubles, in the midst of a square. Even at this range the mob members looked shaggy and unkempt, and a questing breeze brought a whiff of stale clothing and unwashed flesh to Zaranda's nostrils.
"What is this?" she asked.
The four bravos she had hired from the tavern to convey poor Father Pelletyr's body, wrapped in a piece of canvas, to the chapter house of his sect took advantage of the pause to lower their burden-gently, with Shield of Innocence's still-cowled bulk looming over them-to the paving stones. One of them wiped his forehead of sweat with the back of his hand.
"From the sound of it, that's Earl Ravenak addressing his hairheads," he said. "This is thirsty work, milady."
Farlorn undipped a canteen from his belt and tossed it to the man. The man uncapped it, swigged, cast a reproachful look at the half-elf. "Water?" he asked plaintively.
The cleric's death had dropped the bard into a stony-sullen depression. He gave the man a look. The body-bearer hurriedly drank. Zaranda had scrupulously avoided bringing wine along, and made sure her hirelings hadn't. She didn't want them growing antic with poor Father Pelletyr.
"What's wrong with his followers?" Zaranda said. "They look like a passel of Uthgardt Beast Cultists coming off a half-moon binge. And smell worse."
A second bearer drank and passed the bottle on. "Hairheads," he said. "Ravenak's followers. They've vowed never to cut their hair nor wash until all foreign elements are purged from Zazesspur."
"Gnomish blood shall spurt under the knife!" the mad earl's voice raved, magnified by a speaking-tube. The crowd howled like banshees at a chariot race.
"May the black galleys carry off the lot of 'em," muttered the first man.
"Black galleys?" Zaranda asked.
"Zhentarim slave ships," the bearer said, then spat again, more lustily still. "They ply the harbor by night. I hear they put in at docks down in the catacombs beneath the city, to carry kidnapped children away into slavery."
"Mush-head," the third bearer said. "You believe anything you hear."
"It's true, may the sahuagin eat your guts! My Uncle Alvo saw them his own self.
"
"And what was your Uncle Alvo doing in the catacombs of a midnight?" inquired the fourth bearer.
The first man studied his sandaled toes. "Well… he fell down a manhole. He'd had a bit to drink, all right? He's still as truthful a man as ever drew a breath of Zazesspurian air."
"Which means he's a liar approved," the second man said. The other two hooted laughter.
"Come on," Zaranda said, "before the Zhentarim dogs carry us all away." The bearers stooped to grab the corners of Pelletyr's winding sheet again. As they hoisted him to their shoulders with a soft grunt, it occurred to her she didn't know exactly who it was the bearer wished the black galleys to carry off: Ravenak and his fanatics-or the "foreigners" they inveighed against.
What's happening in Zazesspur? she wondered.
"My baby!" the woman wailed in a voice shorn of hope. "Give me my baby!"
The shuttered windows and blank-faced buildings around caught her words and tossed them, mocking, back at her. The short, twisted creature who had wrested her infant daughter from her showed her a smile full of teeth filed to points. The woman screamed and fought against the hands that gripped her arms, but it was fruitless.
She knew she should not have been abroad on the streets by night, but she had no choice. Her husband had been dead four months, innocent victim of a street fight between members of rival political factions. Since then, she had worked at a lamp-seller's stall in the Old Market to feed her infant. The merchant did not roll up his rug and bring in his wares until the sun sank into the harbor, and she had to finish sweeping up before she could go collect her child from her sister's house. Then she faced a long walk home through darkened, near-deserted streets. But she had always preferred the chance of an encounter with darklings to the certainty of slow starvation.
Until tonight. She had been within three blocks of the collapsing tenement where she rented a closet-sized room, and her steps had begun to quicken with the nearness of home, such as it was. Between that and trying to soothe her baby, who had awakened and begun to cry, the first she had known of her peril was when she fetched up against the broad, leather-armored chest of a vast being with a face as much beast as man.
By then she was surrounded.
The grinning horror examined her baby with apparent curiosity, as if unsure what it was. "Please," the woman begged, "don't hurt her. Don't hurt my baby!"
The thing looked at the child, shrugged, and tossed it to a snouted being about her own size. She had never seen such a creature before, but from the stories her grandmother had told her when she was young, she thought with sick terror that it must be an orc.
The orc caught the infant, held it up to peer at it in the cold, impersonal light of the stars overhead. The baby struck out with tiny fists and squalled. The orc tipped back its head, opened wide-tusked jaws to bite…
With a sound like a huge insect being stepped on, two handspans of curved sword tip jutted abruptly from its breast. Its caw of agony was drowned by a sizzling crackle as white sparks cascaded from the blade.
In its death spasm, the orc launched the child high in the air. Twenty feet away, a gaunt, pointy-eared woman who could only be an elf of legend drew a slim long sword and held it up to spit the infant. As the infant started down its arc the mother uttered a final, soul-lost scream, and fainted.
A hard brown hand reached up, caught the baby by one leg, and hauled it in. The elven woman uttered an inarticulate shriek of rage and lunged forward, raising her long sword to cut at the back of the impertinent man who had deprived her of her prey. Stillhawk tucked a shoulder, rolled with the baby clutched protectively against his muscular breast, and came up drawing his own sword.
Too late. She launched a cut that would split open the back of his skull-only to have her weapon ring against a slimmer blade that was hastily interposed.
Over the crossed blades, the tall, pale elf woman locked eyes with the fathomless brown eyes of Farlorn the Handsome. Then he snarled an Elvish phrase that meant traitors die. And suddenly his blade had disengaged and transfixed her narrow throat.
All this had occupied no more than three beats of a danger-sped heart. Zaranda tore Crackletongue from the back of the orc she'd spitted, making it seem the creature bled white fire. She spun to face a stunted thing that plucked a short-hafted hammer from its belt and a sword-wielding human with wild, long hair.
From the corner of her eye she saw Shield of Innocence confront a hobgoblin as tall and great-chested as he. The creature raised a battle-axe both-handed above its bat-eared head.
The orog carried his twin scimitars, Justice and Mercy, slung across his back, with hilts jutting above either shoulder. He grasped these now, whipped the mоon-curved blades up and out, and then across each other before him, severing both the hobgoblin's arms a span from the shoulders. Then he slashed backhanded with both blades at once so that they closed like scissors on the hobgoblin's thick neck. The creature's head sprang from his shoulders and went bouncing away over the cobbles.
"Neat trick," observed Farlorn, who was warding savage sword strokes from a bearded man as casually as if he were playing pat-a-cake with a halfling child. "I've not seen that one before."
Zaranda's human foe rushed her with an overhand cut then, and she had no attention to spare her comrades. She threw Crackletongue up to parry the blow, stepping into the man at the same time. He was big and strong and might have beat her guard down had she only met strength with strength. Instead she turned and moved to her right, drawing her saber blade along his broadsword as if trying to cut it, so that the straight blade slid with a shrill song along its length to flash harmlessly downward past the hip.
She continued her pirouette-and her cut. Charging what he thought would be her unprotected back, the diminutive hammer-bearer ran right into a stroke that split his misshapen skull.
The human howled in a voice more like an angry wraith's than a man's, swung at her with a mighty two-handed blow that could easily have cleft her at the waist.
But such a stroke required so much windup that he might as well have sent a letter by post-rider warning it was coming. She danced back as the blade moaned by, sucking in her flat belly so that the sharp tip missed by inches. Then Crackletongue lashed out in a counterstroke that laid the swordsman's right forearm open to bone.
The man howled again, but didn't lose his sword. He kept his grip with his left hand and raised the weapon to strike.
Zaranda spitted him through the chest. He uttered a final shriek, contorted face hideously underlit by the sparks leaping from the saber blade, and slumped.
Zaranda put her foot in his belly to tear Crackle-tongue free, then spun, the still-sparking saber held ready before her. It was no longer necessary. Farlorn had dropped his second adversary, and Stillhawk had slain a darkling as well, still cradling the infant against his chest.
He walked up now to the mother, who had been flung aside by her captors when Zaranda slew the orc. She had spent the battle cowering against a wall. Now she stood with hands outspread on the masonry behind her, as if held at bay and ready to flee the ranger's approach. In his habitual silence he held out the baby, which had ceased to cry. She brushed a lock of dark hair from her features and stared from her infant up to Stillhawk's grim face. As though struck as mute as he, she reached up, touched lightly on his leathery cheek. Then she snatched her child and ran away along the lane.
The street was eerily quiet. No shutters opened; no inquisitive heads poked forth. That was unsettling in itself. Usually Zazesspurians would be hanging their heads out their windows at the sound of a street fight, cheering, jeering, and shouting advice like spectators at a sporting match. Of course, afterward when the city police came calling, no one would have seen anything.
But nothing happened. The whole affray might as well have happened in the derelict Notch-Tooth District. The citizens of Zazesspur had learned that the curious had more to fear than official inquisitiveness.
Stillhawk was going from darkling t
o darkling with a clip-bladed huntsman's knife in hand, "making sure" of fallen foes in the grim fashion of the Elven Woods. Zaranda was glad Father Pelletyr wasn't alive to see it; it would have distressed his good and kindly heart, though even he could not deny the necessity for it. The ranger's features were set in sterner lines than usual, and when he knelt by the small pointy-toothed creature whose skull Zaranda had split, he gestured his comrades near.
"What have we here, brave huntsman?" murmured Farlorn, who still had his rapier out. His eyes were bright, and his cheeks flushed; it appeared the killing had put him back in high spirits.
The ranger signed one word: duergar.
"A dark dwarf?" exclaimed Farlorn. "Ha! Impossible. Never do they venture up out of the Underdark."
"I certainly didn't bring the thing back in my pack from a dungeon crawl, Farlorn Half-Elven," Zaranda said. "I struck it down where now it lies, and though I've had the ill-fortune to see but one or two of that kindred before, there's no doubt Stillhawk has the right of it."
"But what can this mean?" Farlorn asked, shaking his head.
The darklings come from below, Stillhawk signed. Why your surprise? "
"Because I myself slew a female Moon Elf," Farlorn said. "Rare enough to find an elfin company with a true dwarf. But one of the People leagued with a duergar?"
He shook his head, as if even he could find no words to match the strangeness.
"An orc and a hobgoblin lie slain with them, and likewise three who look as human as I," Zaranda said. "Curious company indeed."
"There are many mysteries in the city," said Shield in his basso growl.
Farlorn looked at him standing there with the cowl of his white cloak thrown back and twin crescent blades clutched in taloned hands, and laughed. "Indeed there are! And now I think on it, is this lot of darklings truly any more bizarre than to find a ranger and a half-elf fighting alongside a great orc?"
Zaranda looked up and down the street. It was still deserted. "We'd best be off," she said, "lest the guard find us and fine us for slaying darklings without a license."