“Cellars, is my guess,” Ned said.
His brother nodded. “If it was Men, I’d say tops of the towers. But orcs and Dark Lords, they think subterranean. Got your stuff?”
Ned guffawed. The nun’s robe made packing throwing-daggers, poison needles, fine mail gauntlets (for trying traps) and lock-picks easier than doublet and hose. Slits cut in the cloth under the arms aided easy access to them.
“Let’s hit the shadows,” Ned said.
A sudden clatter of feet interrupted. Bare, hard feet. Torchlight glimmered first from the passage at their left, then from the passage on their right. Six or seven orcs piled into the tower entrance’s narrow antichamber.
“Ah,” Ned exclaimed. “Good brother priest William, here are more souls who have yet to hear the word of our Mission.”
The orc in the lead growled, “Oh, we’ve heard him. Promising the great last crusade against the Forces of Evil, your elf is. Says he’ll field another Army of Light against the Horde of Darkness.”
Ned saw his brother momentarily squeeze his eyes shut, then open them, smiling a wide smile.
“Perhaps I can interest you gentlemen,” Will Brandiman said, “in contributing to the Holy Prayer Wheel Fund of the Mission of Light? Now, you’re fighting orcs, I can see that, and the object of the Prayer Wheel is to heal all wounds caused in battle—no matter upon which side the fighter fought.”
“‘S not right,” the leading orc protested.
The Reverend Brandiman and the good Abbess Edwina exchanged glances. Neither benefited.
“Of course, if you don’t wish to make a contribution to the Holy One’s prayer wheel,” Will oozed. “Should you be so poor that you cannot afford a copper piece, a button, a shred, a bone…why then, you may take these—ah—these prayer-beads, for free. But search your heart, brother orc, and see if you can afford to deprive the world (for it will be you doing the depriving) of the benefits of the Son of Light’s Holy Prayer Wheel.”
The orc’s heavy brows lowered. He looked to have Agaku stock in him, Ned considered: a magnificent specimen of orc-hood some six feet high, with hulkingly muscled shoulders, and wearing nothing over his leathery green skin but a loincloth.
“He’s war-mongering,” the orc accused. “Your Holy One is. Promoting a war which serves only the interests of the Dark and Light Commands and not those of the orc in the Pit.”
Ned gaped at the orc. The group of five or six other orcs crowded round, some brown- and some grey-skinned, all wearing the odd scrap of mail or plate or nail-studded padded jerkins. Prick-ears flattened, and tusks and talons glinted.
“I’m sure you gentlemen have your point of view,” Ned said, a little breathlessly.
The leader orc loomed over Will Brandiman, reached down, and prodded him between two doublet buttons.
“I’m an official representative, me. I represent the Orc Pacifist Movement.” The orc waved a taloned hand. “Us here, we’re a OPM protest. We’re protesting against your Paladin coming in here and telling us to fight. He don’t go out with the foot soldiers, do he?”
The other orcs shook their heads in unison. Their leader continued:
“He don’t have to trail a poleaxe over hill and dale, out of this lovely mucky land, and go down south where it’s green. He don’t get his balls shot off by some trigger-happy crossbowelf. Not your Paladin! He don’t end up hacking some poor Light sod to shreds just because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and it’s him or you.”
Behind the large orc, his fellows began a guttural chant of “Dark, no! We won’t go! We won’t fight—”
“GRAZHDNAG!” an orcish yell interrupted from outside the tower. “Get your filthy, worm-eating scum down here or I’ll flay you alive!”
The leading orc, Grazhdnag, cowered. His followers whimpered. They slunk past the halflings (ignoring Will Brandiman’s outstretched hand, which still contained a string of Mission beads) and shambled out into the courtyard, whence the sound of bone-cracking blows echoed.
“I’ll teach you, you lazy scum—!”
Ned and Will listened briefly to the Agaku’s voice, grinned, and split up, the better to cover more of the Blasted Redoubt’s cellars in the available time.
On his fifth trip back—choosy now, the wagon’s false bottom almost full of the more portable items from the Redoubt’s treasury—Ned Brandiman found himself climbing a narrow, winding stone stair. He climbed until his calf muscles ached. At last he heard, through as-yet-invisible windows, the voice of Amarynth rising to a peroration in that one of the outer courtyards that, by experience, Ned had found to be merely a tiny satellite of the vast atriums, pits, coliseum, and air-shafts that pierced the mass of the Blasted Redoubt.
He reached the top of the steps and started down a corridor. Here there were torches, meaning concealing shadows, and he stayed in them by instinct.
An interior portcullis slammed down behind him. Ned leaped forward, grazing the back of his bare heel. He froze, listening, checked the trap-mechanism and discovered it to be ancient but well oiled, decided that it had only cut him off from cellars already looted, and continued on.
Loud footsteps echoed down the corridor ahead.
An approaching shadow danced on the walls, distorted by the light from the black cressets and growing larger, taller, much taller than a halfling—
“Good lord,” Ned Brandiman observed, “the press really do get everywhere.”
A female elf walking in the shadows of the Blasted Redoubt’s black masonry halted, staring.
When Ned had last seen the elf she had been wearing the same leather bodice and thonged leather trousers, high boots, and cloak; her dark braids had been tied around her brow with a strip of red cloth. A badge pinned on her vest over the upper slope of one breast now read “Warrior of Fortune.”
Perdita del Verro regarded Ned Brandiman with suspicion. “Don’t I know you, mistress?”
Ned himself had been stark naked at the time of their last meeting and not known to be the owner of a Little Sisters of Mortification red habit. He removed his fingers from where they rested, through slit cloth, on a throwing-dagger, and pitched his voice melodiously higher. “I doubt we’ve met, my child, but we are all Sisters in the Light.”
“I must have seen you with the Holy One.” The elf narrowed her eyes. Her flyaway brows dipped, the frown accentuating the old scar on her left cheek. “I’d like an interview—get to see him close up. Seems to me the Light candidate needs all the good press he can get in this election.”
Ned led her down from the tower and out into the courtyard. He kicked the back of the Mission wagon with his hirsute foot. “Your Holiness, an elf of the press is here to interview you. Is it convenient?”
Amarynth, bent over and clutching the wagon’s wooden frame with both hands, looked up irritatedly and gestured the attendant knight-priest to cease scourging the Holy back.
“Oh…very well.” Pulling up his monk’s habit and slipping his arms into the sleeves, the Holy One looked at the female elf.
“Lord Amarynth? Paladin, it is you, isn’t it! By the Light!” The elf blinked. “Your campaign speech—I was too far away to tell—”
Regally, the dark elf stated, “We were Amarynth, called Firehand, and are now the Son of the Lady on earth.”