“A quarrel between thieves, I’d say,” said Lusk. “Perhaps these stole from their clan, or cheated their partners or employer. Perhaps someone wanted to make an example of them.”
“No,” said Lakini. “Look. He’s not been robbed.” She pointed, and Lusk nudged the bulging pouch at the halfling’s belt with the tip of his boot. “Any thief worth his salt might kill, but quickly, without all this fuss,”
she said. “And certainly a thief would not have left coin behind.”
“Not fellow thieves, then,” Lusk conceded. He gestured at the shambles in the clearing. Sunlight slanted golden through the tops of the trees, and birds twittered and warbled in the growth above. It would have been a peaceful scene if not for the butchered bodies and the incessant buzz of the flies.
“Rangers would be stealthy enough. Or”-he pointed at the fire-“they cut wood. Druids, perhaps?”
“We have to alert the Vashtun and warn the travelers to be alert. Tell them to make sure they have double lookouts and not let them get distracted.” Lakini set her jaw. In her many lifetimes she had seen many tragedies, and brutality beyond imagination. This was not the worst thing one person had done to another, and it wouldn’t be the last in the great weave of time. “And we have to tend to the bodies. The sooner they have a decent burial, the better.”
She drew her dagger and bent to cut the rope that bound hair and hands together. To her relief, Lusk went to free the gutted halfling from his crucifixion. She didn’t think she could bear to touch that rope, thick with clotted blood.
They laid out the bodies as best they could and started back to the sanctuary. In the morning, acolytes from Shadrun-of-the-Snows would return, bury the bodies, and perform the proper rites, assuming the scavengers of night left anything to bury.
Halfway home, something occurred to Lakini, something Lusk had said before, that at the time had only just registered.
“Thieves,” she said. “You mentioned fellow thieves. How do you know they were thieves, and not simply pilgrims, or friends in search of adventure?”
The deva shrugged. “It’s a logical assumption. Halflings incline toward thievery, whether as a profession or a hobby. Or so I’ve always found.”
Lakini didn’t reply. Halflings made clever thieves, certainly, but it seemed to her a sweeping statement to make about an entire people.
When had Lusk become capable of thinking such things about an entire race? There was a time when he would have wept at the sight of such injustice.
Lusk was similarly silent until they reached the stones and pounded the earth of the established road.
“Nasty little creatures,” he said, glancing up over his shoulder at the green impassivity of the forest behind him.
Startled by the venom in his words, Lakini stifled a reply. The sight of the butchery in the clearing above them, in woods that were supposed to be sacred, must have upset him more than she thought.
Lusk glanced at her, concern as well as amusement roiling over his striped features.
“I shock you,” he said, baldly.
“A little,” she replied.
“Lakini,” he said, “do you regret destroying the barghest?”
She concentrated on the path and didn’t reply.
“And the werewolves of Wolfhelm, so many years ago,” he continued. “Should we have allowed them to live?”
“Of course not,” she snapped.
“Those lying dead beyond,” he said, pointing at the path behind him, “were thieves. Few halflings aren’t. Why else would they camp so close to the sanctuary without making themselves known? They intended to prey on the pilgrims. They chose their path, and met the consequences of their actions. Like the werewolves. Like the pirates on the Orcsblood.”
Lakini had a sudden, vivid memory of the baffled look of the barghest she’d killed a year ago, staring down at its dead, half-lupine mate, with Lusk’s arrow in her throat. She still felt a primal revulsion at the nature of the goblinoid’s lycanthropy and their need not only to rend their prey but to destroy all hope and joy within them. But now she felt a disconcerting, almost illogical pity.
Pity. The only hope of mortals in a world where divine forces held sway was the pity of the supremely powerful for those who could not oppose them. Pity made the gods protect the mortals who bound themselves to them, and compassion had caused them to create the deva race, souls of angels in fleshly form, sent to protect the innocent and pursue justice.
“Where is the justice in killing them, even if they are thieves?” she whispered.
Lusk’s sharp ears caught her question, and he laughed bitterly. “Tell the good folk of Wolfhelm about justice,” he said. “Those that died before we got there, those whose fathers and sisters and children were eaten. Should we have had mercy on their killers?”
She stopped, and he turned to face her, a mocking look on his face. Shocked at herself, she had to stifle an impulse to slap it off.
This wasn’t what she was supposed to be, or what they were supposed to be.
“That’s not the same thing,” she managed.
“No?” he said. “Explain that to Jonhan Smith. Explain it to his donkey.”
Suddenly she couldn’t look at him. She walked on, faster and faster until she was running, her breathing heavy in her ears as she left Lusk behind her on the path.
That night while she meditated in her rooms, she remembered Wolfhelm, a village in one of the remote Erlkazar baronies, nestled in the foothills between the Thornwood and the Cloven Mountains. Built on the ruins of some ancient town more prominent in its time, it was a pleasant place, trading the lavender from the sun-warmed fields around it to the bigger baronies.
But Wolfhelm, as its name suggested, was founded where lycanthropes once claimed their territory and bayed beneath the moon. And one season, while the lavender ripened and children were sent into the fields to harvest it, the werewolves came back.
Jonhan Smith and his donkey.
She and Lusk had mustered out the inhabitants of the village, arming them with any weapon that could be found and sharpened with Jonhan Smith’s skill. They knew the community’s only hope lay in driving the lycanthropes back, mercilessly, until they had killed them all.
Lakini and Lusk, needing little sleep, were on patrol. For the last two nights the weres had howled unrelentingly, from sunset to dawn, at the very gates of Wolfhelm, and the villagers had huddled awake, unable to rest and without anything tangible to attack. The devas knew the lycanthropes were softening up their victims for the kill.
Lusk held his bow at the ready, an arrow to the string. The village had three gates: north, south, and west, and a tall wall that was unreliably warded by old spells that the local priest of Chauntea did his best to maintain. As they approached the west gate, they spotted a figure, still and pale in the moonlight. Lusk had raised his bow and Lakini had her knife in her hand before they heard the chanting and realized it was the priest, trying to weave the wards back together.
He turned when he saw them and lowered his hands, looking abashed.
“It’s dangerous out here,” said Lusk, gesturing past the gate to the hills visible beyond. “If you’re alone, a were could take you and we would never know.”
“The wards used to be so strong,” said the priest. “But now I haven’t the strength-”
His words were drowned by another howl and the sharp tearing sound of an animal screaming.
The cold silver moonlight bathed the village, making everything light and shadow. Here and there lights flickered on behind shuttered windows. The screaming was coming from the north gate, and Lakini tore the sword from its sheath as she ran, sensing Lusk close at her heels.