by Victor Milán
“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 wal
ked up the hill toward the tree. Yellowbeard 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.”
“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.”
“Tell me,” Farlorn said. The light of the campfire shone in his eyes and his fingers played like glum children on the strings of his yarting. The great orc stared at him with dog fixity. “You say the god Torm named you Shield of Innocence and set you to protect the innocents of this world from unjust attack.”
The great tusked head nodded.
They were camped, with the owner’s permission, in an olive grove half a day’s journey at a pack mule’s plod from the walls of Zazesspur. They might have pressed on and arrived after dark; there was traditionally little effort made to seal the city after sunset, and anyway the outer walls had suffered many breaches after the fall of the royal house.
But the travelers they met on the high road from Ithmong had shadow-haunted eyes and unsettling tales of nighttime Zazesspur. Zaranda could not have said why she, who had faced the darkest magic and hordes of undead in Thay, should be so fearful. The darklings were fearsome enough to normal folk, but by all accounts, nothing she and her comrades could not handle—though they were said to be growing stronger in nature as well as numbers. But the dreams kept coming, and they were getting worse. Zaranda decided not to drive weary men and mules on to their destination, and that was the end of it.
She had chosen the grove for poor Stillhawk, who languished in cities as a free spirit might in a cell. He could use a final night beneath sky and trees. Also, camping off the road rather than staying at an inn would give strangers small scope to look at the cloaked figure of the warrior who bore two curved swords across his back.
Now Stillhawk sat as far away from the orog as he could, across one of the two fires they had built—the other being for the muleteers and guards, who were given to muttering darkly and keeping hands near hilts when Shield of Innocence was around. Father Pelletyr sat on Zaranda’s far side from Shield, protectively near, though whether to shelter her or be sheltered by her in the event of trouble Zaranda could not say. For once he showed small interest in his food.
Farlorn, though, sat near the orog, strumming his yarting and plying him with questions. His tone was feather-light, deceptively so.
“Ah, yes,” the bard said with an air of satisfaction that put Zaranda instantly on guard. “Did it never then occur to you that, when those villagers beset you, you were the innocent one, suffering wrongful persecution?”
The orog’s heavy brows beetled until his shocking water-blue eyes nearly disappeared. He sat staring in silence into the flame-dance. Finally he shook his great head.
“No,” he said. “I did not think of that. If I had, I would have had to kill them.”
The bard flipped his hands in the air like copper-colored birds taking flight. “And there you have it! The beast’s not to be trusted, I tell you.”
Zaranda scowled. “You led him into a trap with your wordplay,” she said. “I can scarcely condemn him for that.”
“If his intellect were the world’s brightest light,” said Goldie from just outside the firelight, “we’d all be learning to navigate by sound like bats.”
“You certainly have the advantage on the rest of us in that department,” Farlorn said cheerfully.
Goldie pinned her ears at him, seeking some retort.
“Weren’t you eating your oats, dear?” Zaranda asked.
“I finished them. Such a paltry handful.” She sniffed.
“They’re all I dare give you,” Zaranda said, “You’re getting fat.”
The mare sniffed, turned away, and flounced off into the night—the effect Zaranda desired. In serious counsel, the mare offered sound advice, but her contributions were rarely helpful in debates of this nature.
“He’s a monster, Zaranda,” Farlorn said, quietly intense, gesturing at the orog, who squatted impassive as an idol with clawed hands resting on his thighs. “No matter what he claims. And if he’s had a religious revelation, what of it? His nature will get the better of him in the end. He’ll work us harm; you’ll see.”
Shield showed no sign of response. It struck Zaranda as heartless to be discussing him as if he weren’t there. But she’d long learned she had to bet the dice according to the spots they showed.
She looked to Stillhawk. The ranger had little taste for argument. But when she would not look away, he signed, He is a creature of evil. Once an evil creature, always one. And he rose and stalked away into the night.
“And what of you, Father?” asked Zaranda in resignation.
The cleric frowned, almost as if in pain. “I have been praying for guidance in this matter,” he said. “He seems sincere, and his bearing is that of a paladin—even I cannot deny that.”
Farlorn snorted and waved a hand in disgust.
“Yet I cannot bring myself to accept that what he says is true,” Father Pelletyr went on. “It comes to me, though, that I might make use of the power holy Ilmater has vouchsafed me, whereby I may divine where his heart really lies, for good or ill.”
“No!” Zaranda was on her feet with cheeks flushed. “I’ll have none of that!”
“I am willing to submit to any examination, Zaranda,” the great orc said, “if it will help me continue to serve you.”
“I’m not willing! A man’s thoughts are his most private possessions—an orog’s, too. It’s obscene to pry them from him with magic. And I don’t want you serving me.”
The orog sat unmoving. Father Pelletyr looked pained.
“But child, such powers o
f divination are granted by my god. They must be good.”
“Can’t a cleric use such powers for ill if he chooses?”
The cleric nodded, but his eyes were boiled pearl onions of shock. Zaranda dropped her gaze and raised a conciliatory hand.
“I’m not accusing you, Father. I’m merely trying to point out such powers are not intrinsically good nor bad, no matter whence they spring. I’m not sure that I buy that a thing can be considered good just because a god does it, anyway. If that’s the case, why aren’t we all votaries of Bane?”
“B-Because he’s dead?” squeaked the cleric.
“Cyric then. I’m just saying I’ve had it to my eyebrows with gods and powers, whatever their ilk. I don’t get my destiny from the stars, and I don’t get my values from them.”
“So you’re saying you won’t drive the fell creature from our midst?” demanded Farlorn in a voice like a yarting string frayed to the point of breaking.
“Indeed,” Zaranda said. “And I must say it does my heart good to hear genuine emotion in your voice, Farlorn. Even if it is anger.”
The bard made an inarticulate sound, jumped to his feet, and huffed off into the dark. A few moments later Zaranda heard an equine snort and a flurry of hoofbeats as the half-elf rode his dapple gray away.
“He’ll be back,” Zaranda said, massaging her temples. She wondered whom she was reassuring. Probably me.
She glanced at the cleric, who was still staring at her as if she’d cast off her clothes and started turning handsprings. “Everyone else is going off to sulk,” she said. “To save you the trouble, I’m going, too.”
She marched into her tent, dropping the flap behind her. As she began to disrobe, she heard a soft rustle outside. She froze, her mind instantly recalling exactly where her sundry weapons were at the moment. Then came a huffing exhalation of breath, and she realized that Shield of Innocence had seated himself like a watchdog outside her tent.
That brought a grim smile to her lips. Won’t that cheer Farlorn when he comes back from his nocturnal pout.
“Don’t stop undressing on my account,” the brazen head said from the camp stool on which she’d placed it.
