War In Tethys

9

"We know the face of our enemy," a voice echoed down the darkened streets of Zazesspur's Wainwright Dis-trict, "and we shall grind it beneath our bootheels!"

A many-throated growl of approval answered him. Zaranda scowled and forced her hand away from Crackletongue'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 advan-tage 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 re-proachful look at the half-elf. "Water?" he asked plain-tively.

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," mut-tered 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 be-neath 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 cata-combs 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 oc-curred 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 try-ing 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 appar-ent 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 in-fant 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 disen-gaged 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 Inno-cence 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 scis-sors 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 com-rades. 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 ap-proach. 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 Dis-trict. The citizens of Zazesspur had learned that the cu-rious 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 com-rades 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 de-serted. "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 mar-ble 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 ap-pears to have been stricken with an infarct to the my-ocardium. I see no signs of violence."

"Still, he was attempting to interpose himself be-tween 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 resur-rection, 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 proba-bly 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 curi-ous 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 lan-tern light shone through stained glass that showed Il-mater'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 trea-sure 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 under-stood 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 her-self 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 pal-pably 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.