by Victor Milán
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 moon-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 Crackletongue 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 to 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 elf in 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.”
The shrouded body of Father Pelletyr lay in the gutter a block away. The bearers hired from the Smiling Centaur had fled as the distraught mother’s first cries reached them, knowing they meant darklings were about.
“We’ll make no rapid going,” Farlorn said. “The good Father’s taste for good living has made him in death less bearable.”
Shield of Innocence sheathed his swords and drew his cowl back over his head again. Then he walked back to the white bundle, stooped, and hoisted it over one broad shoulder.
“I shall carry the holy man,” he said.
“So be it,” Zaranda Star said; and so it was.
The chief cleric of the Order of Ilmater Brothers was a tall, gaunt man with a head shaped like a doorknob, a resemblance his surrounding fringe of gray hair did nothing to detract from. He still had sleep in his sunken, sad-looking gray eyes.
“So you have brought one of our own back to us,” he intoned after the bundle had been deposited on a marble examining table in the healing chamber and the shroud was pulled back from Father Pelletyr’s face. “How did he die?”
“He died trying to prevent bloodshed, Excellency,” Zaranda said, crossing her fingers behind her back. It wasn’t actually a lie; the hapless father might have been trying to intervene when he keeled over. She couldn’t know and chose to give her comrade the benefit of the doubt.
Examining the body, the cleric looked up beneath a bushy, upraised brow. “No need to call me ‘excellency;’ we are all humble brothers in Ilmater,” he said. “He appears to have been stricken with an infarct to the myocardium. I see no signs of violence.”
“Still, he was attempting to interpose himself between the combatants when death struck him down,” said Zaranda, stretching the truth as far as it would go. It appeared to satisfy the archpriest, who nodded gravely.
“Long and well has our brother served Ilmater, and now the Crying God has called him home,” he intoned.
Zaranda thrust a hand in her pouch and brought forth a handful of gems and rich broaches, sparkling in the light of the single lantern hung by a hook above the slab. “Here’s what wealth I have remaining, Excel—ah, Father. I don’t know whether it’s enough to cover resurrection, but if not, perhaps we can make arrangements.”
But the cleric shook his head. “Ah, my child, but you forget—” he began, wagging an admonitory finger.
“No terms on healing,” Zaranda said, sagging. The gods of Toril were a cash-on-the-barrelhead lot. Given the uncertainty of fortune in that world, it was probably wise.
But the archpriest was still shaking his head. “Our brother Pelletyr forswore resurrection from death when he took our orders. He subjected his will to Ilmater’s. Now Our Martyred Father has seen fit to call him home, and he has gone to stay.”
“So be it,” rumbled from the hooded hulk of Shield, who stood behind Zaranda. The cleric cast him a curious look, but said nothing.
Zaranda’s eyes squeezed shut. Father Pelletyr had been neither the oldest nor the best of her friends, but he had been a comrade of unflagging loyalty and great heart. A single tear ran down her cheek.
He’s the first of us claimed by the evil that lies upon Zazesspur, she thought irrationally but with profound conviction. How many more?
Out on the street before the chapter house, Farlorn paused with hands on hips and swelled his chest with a deep draught of night air. Because it was spring, the nights were cool, not sultry as they would be when summer arrived in the Empires of the Sands. Soft lantern light shone through stained glass that showed Ilmater’s bound hands on a field of butter yellow and made colorful play on the back of his doublet.
“And there you have it,” he declared. “Poor Father P. eschews resurrection in order to lend meaning to his eventual martyrdom. And then what befalls him? He pops an A. and dies a death entirely meaningless. Who says the Crying God has no sense of humor?”
Zaranda turned, frowning, toward him, intending to take him to task for his callousness. Instead, she found herself breaking into laughter that she quickly had to stifle, for fear of scandalizing the inhabitants of the chapter house.
“Life is a witch, and then you die,” she said, giggling like a schoolgirl. “Now there’s a fine Ilmaterish touch for you!”
And she thrust her elbows out from her sides, so that Stillhawk and Farlorn put their arms through hers, and walked away down the street with Shield following in silence. And once they were around the corner from the Ilmater chapter house, Zaranda let her laughter boom forth full throated.
Because if she could not laugh at Death, how could she face it when her time came?
That night in her bed Zaranda did not laugh.
She had engaged rooms at the Winsome Repose, an inn of good if not preeminent quality. She still had treasure of her own, though far from enough to cover her debts, and saw no reason to stint herself. Stillhawk and Shield were bedded down in the stables, where Goldie could speak to the other horses in words they understood and gentle them to the smell of the orog—and where Stillhawk could keep the mare from gambling with the grooms and cheating them, which was bound to draw undue attention. Zaranda had a chamber to herself, as, to his disgruntlement, did bard Farlorn.
Though the night had grown near-chill, she found herself unbearably hot, stiflingly hot, and could bear neither clothes nor covers. And as she tossed and sweated in a state that could be called sleep only because she was palpably not awake, it seemed to her that she heard the voices of lost children crying out to her, helpless and doomed, as black whips drove them in ranks toward black galleys, far below in the city’s stone bowels.
And another voice spoke to her, whispering, at once infinitely repellent and infinitely seductive, saying:
Zaranda.
Join us.
Why fight it?
You know you shall come to us …
Soon.
“If you would know the source of your troubles,” the amplified voice shouted, piping-shrill yet bearing authority, “look to the wealthy. It is because they are rich that you are poor!”
Outside the yellow brick smithy, a crowd roared approval. Artalos the armorer rubbed an oily hand on the front of his leathern apron, which was dotted with tiny char spots from the sparks that flew from his forge. “They can go on like that for hours,” he said with something resembling admiration. “There may be aught in what they say; I lack the wisdom to know. I do know that when they speak of the rich, they include artisans and craft-folk like me. And if I’m rich, why do I sweat the daylight hours away, and still fall short when it comes time to pay my bills? Not to mention the taxes the city council exacts, and the dues the syndics demand.”
Zaranda went to stand in the doorway. It opened on a yard in which there stood an anvil, a quenching tub, and piles of rusting ironmongery ranging from old plowshares to broken swords. A gate stood open in the high wall, into the top of which were set old sword tips, points upward like the leaves of a hedge, which surrounded the smithy yard. Through it she could see a small figure standing on a nail keg in the bed of a wagon parked where two streets crossed, addressing a large, rough-dressed crowd.
“Does every madman in Zazesspur possess a speaking tube?” she asked.
“And an audience,” Artalos agreed grimly. “So it is coming to pass.”
“Who’s our diminutive orator?”
The armorer came forward, scratching his grizzle-bristled chin with his right hand, which at the moment was a black iron hook that he used to grasp the handles of melting pots. He had quite an assortment of cleverly wrought implements he could substitute for his hand, which had gone missing to a Tuigan sword during the nomad invasion years before. Likewise, the smallest two fingers of his left hand were gone, though he had not bothered to replace those.
“That would be Toby, or to put it formally, Tobiworth Hedgeblossom, of the noted Hedgeblossom brothers.”
“ ‘Noted’?”
“Noted indeed. Toby and his brother Putomas—called Poot by the vulgar, which of course includes most of his followers—are among the foremost of our local rabble-rousers. They lead the Social Justice League, which is among the foremost of our local rabbles.”
“Rather in the fashion of Earl Ravenak?”
Artalos turned and spat with great accuracy into the open mouth of his forge, eliciting a hiss of steam. “Not quite. They don’t preach outright murder—yet, though I fear their wild talk will lead them to that, inevitably, as rivers seek the sea. That carrion-breathed raver Ravenak not only preaches it—his minions practice it with a will.”
He shrugged and went back inside. “Ill times have overtaken Zaz of late. Our own guild masters, the syndics, treat us more as chattel than craft-brothers—and I think we armorers and swordsmiths get off lightly since so many of us are veteran fighters and not to be imposed upon.”
But will you act to defend your rig
hts, any more than the weavers or soapmakers? Zaranda wondered. She forbore to ask since Artalos was an old comrade, and she wanted further information from him.
Feeling the need for more information as to how the land lay in Zazesspur, she had gone abroad to talk with some of her long-standing contacts. She did so alone. Shield of Innocence and Stillhawk remained in one another’s care back at the Winsome Repose, since they would be uncomfortable and conspicuous among the Zaz throngs. Stillhawk yet hated the orog as a crow hates an owl, but he would neither harm Shield nor suffer harm to come to him unless the supposed paladin acted treacherously; such was Stillhawk’s devotion to Zaranda.
Farlorn was off on business of his own. Since they were back in civilization and his sporadic attempts to resume matters with Zaranda had been rebuffed, said business probably entailed seducing human women, a passion with him almost as great as his love for music and strife. Zaranda was just as happy for lack of his company. He had been a friend for a long time, and a fine companion on the road, but sometimes his dual nature bore down heavily on him, making him difficult to be around.
Toby Hedgeblossom’s impassioned rhetoric followed Zaranda and Artalos into the shadowed forge.
“Likely one or the other of the Hedgeblossoms will get himself elected, and then they’ll lose interest in redistributing wealth, save into their own pockets,” the armorer said, working a bellows with a treadle. The glare from the open forge changed from orange to yellow. “Meanwhile, have you heard the latest tidings? It’s said that the city council is considering making it illegal to bear weapons larger than daggers within the city walls—unless, of course, you happen to belong to the civic guard, or are some councilman’s personal bravo.”
“Will the folk of Zazesspur stand for that?” Zaranda asked.
The armorer shrugged again. “Ill times beset us. If it wasn’t for the cogs and caravels plying in and out of the harbor we’d be as poor as the country wretches. People are saying something must be done.” He shook his head. “Why they think that means doing just anything will help, though, is more than my poor head can puzzle out.”
