Her fellow-scholar was a plump little priest of Anathei of the Purifying Flame. He was certainly a full priest, and might even (from his cultured accent) be a higher prelate, yet he wore only the same soft, dark brown, unornamented robes of the least of his order's acolytes. He was clean-shaven and quite bald, and his cheerful brown eyes seemed to regard everything and everyone with the openhearted joy of an unspoiled child. No straitlaced ascetic, he -- he and Tarma had been trading rounds of good wine; tonight reds, last night whites.
Tarma looked even more out of place seated across from him than she did with her sorceress-partner. She towered over him by a head, her every movement proclaiming she knew very well how to manage that sword slung on her back, her hawklike face and ice-blue eyes holding a controlled intensity that could easily have been frightening or intimidating to a stranger. With every article of her weaponry and earth-brown clothing so precisely arranged that what she wore might almost have been some kind of uniform, and her coarse black hair braided and coiled with militant neatness, she looked as much the priest or more than he -- half-barbarian priest of some warlike order, that is. She hardly looked as if she could have anything in common with the scholarly little priest.
She hardly looked literate. Certainly no one would expect erudite philosophy from her lips, not with the warlike accoutrements she bore; yet she had been quoting fully as many learned tomes as the priest -- to his evident delight and Kethry's mild surprise. It would appear that service as a Sworn One did not exclude knowledge as a possible arena of combat. Kethry had long known that Tarma was literate, and in more than one language, but she had never before guessed that her partner was so erudite.
Kethry herself was staying out of the conversation for the moment. This evening she and her partner had had an argument, the first serious disagreement of their association. She wanted to give Tarma a chance to cool down -- and to mull over what she'd said.
Because while it had been unpleasant, it was also, unfortunately, nothing less than the truth.
"You're not going out there alone, are you?" Tarma had asked doubtfully, when Kethry had voiced her intention to prowl the rather dubious quarter that housed the gypsy-mages. Kethry had heard that one of her old classmates had taken up with the wanderers, and was looking for news of him.
"Why not?" she asked, a little more sharply than she had intended.
"Because it's no place for a woman alone."
"Dammit, Tarma, I'm not just any woman! I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself!"
"Look -- even I can get taken out by a gang of street toughs."
"In the name of the gods, Tarma, leave me alone for once! You're smothering me! I can't go anywhere or do anything without you rushing to wrap me in gauze, like a piece of china -- "
She'd stopped then, appalled by the stricken look on her partner's face.
Then, like lightning, the expression changed. "You're imagining things," Tarma replied flatly.
"All right -- have it your way." Kethry was too tired to fight with her. "You will anyway. Any time you hear something you don't like, you deny it and shut down on me -- just like you're doing now."
And she had turned on her heel and led the way into the inn's common room, ignoring the fact that Tarma looked as if the sorceress had just slapped her.
The voice of the little priest penetrated her musing.
"Nay," he said. "Nay, I cannot agree. Our teaching is that evil is not a thing of itself; it is simply good that has not been brought to see the truth. We hold that even a demon can be redeemed -- that even the most vile of such creatures could become a blessed spirit if someone with time and patience were to give him the proper redirection."
"Always supposing your proselytizer managed to keep from being devoured or ripped to shreds before he got a single word out," Tarma croaked wryly, draping herself more comfortably over the edge of the worn wooden table. "He'd better be either agile or one damned powerful mage! No, I can't agree with you, my friend. Aside from what Magister Tenavril has to say about them, I've dealt with a few demons up close and on a quite personal basis. I have to side with the Twin Suns school; the demonic beings must have been created purely of evil forces. It isn't just the Abyssal dwellers that are bad clear through, either; I've known a few humans who could pass for demons. Evil is real and a reality in and of itself. It likes being that way. It wouldn't choose to be anything else. And it has to be destroyed whenever a body gets the chance, or it'll spread. Evil is easier to follow than good, and we humans like the easy path."
"I cannot agree. Those who are evil simply don't know what good is."
"Oh, they know, all right; and they reject it to follow pure selfishness."
"I -- " the little priest blinked in the candlelight.
"Can you give me even one instance of great evil turned to good once good has been pointed out to it?"
"Uh -- " he thought hard for a moment, then smiled triumphantly. "The Great Demon-Wolf of Hastandell!"
"Oh, that's too easy. Warrl!"
A shadow in a corner of the hearth uncoiled itself, and proved to be no shadow at all, but the kyree, whose shoulder came nearly as high as Tarma's waist. Closer inspection would reveal that Warrl's body was more like that of one of the great huntingcats of the plains than a lupine, built for climbing and short bursts of high speed, not the endurance of a true wolf. But the fur and head and tail were sufficiently wolflike that this was how Tarma generally thought of him.
He padded over to the table and benches shared by the ill-assorted trio. The conversation of all the other occupants of the inn died for a moment as he moved, but soon picked back up again. After three days, the patrons of the inn were growing a little more accustomed to the monster beast in their midst. Tarma had helped that along by coaxing him to demean himself with a few tricks to entertain them the first night of their stay. Now, while the sight of him still unsettled a few of them, they had come to regard him as harmless. They had no notion of his true nature; Tarma and Kethry had tactfully refrained from revealing that he was just as intelligent as any of them -- and quite probably could beat any one of them at chess.
"Here's your Demon-Wolf -- one of his kin, rather." Tarma cocked her head to one side, her eyes far away as if she was listening. "Kyree is what they call themselves; they come from the Pelagir Hills. Warrl says to tell you that he knows that story -- that Ourra didn't know the sheep he'd been feeding on belonged to anyone; when he prowled the village at night he was just being curious. Warrl says Ourra had never seen humans before that lot moved in and settled; he thought they were just odd beasts and that the houses were some kind of dead growths -- believe me, I have seen some of what grows naturally in the Pelagirs -- it isn't stretching the imagination to think that huts could grow of themselves once you've seen some of the bushes and trees. Well, Warrl wants you to know that when the priestess went out and gave Ourra a royal tongue-lashing for eating the stock, Ourra was quite embarrassed. Without there being someone like me or Kethry, with the kind of mind that he could talk to, there wasn't much he could do by way of apology, but he did his best to make it up to the village.
His people have a very high sense of honor. Sorry, little man -- Qurra is disqualified."