So they walked, talked, and settled on both of them being Nirmathi. Tantaerra would be a slave escaped from longtime Molthuni captivity in Canorate seeking to find kin she'd long been sundered from, and who'd just days ago found them gone from their farm near the border, their stead burned and abandoned, but was told by surviving neighbors that they'd fled deeper into Nirmathas. The Masked would purport to be a Nirmathi whose family fled the country when he was but a child, and who'd wandered Golarion trying his hand at many a living before freeing Tantaerra in Molthune and was helping her to find her kin. The mask they'd explain as covering a terrible burn suffered in childhood, when Molthuni soldiers burned down his parents homestead.
These tales were accepted with sympathy by the few Nirmathi who gave the travelers a chance to share it. More often, they received arrows instead.
The Masked couldn't really blame them, but took some comfort in the fact that most of the real aid he and Tantaerra received was from the Molthuni armies, who'd mounted an unexpectedly bold foray deep into this backcountry. Their attacks and movements time and again interrupted and distracted Nirmathi from the business of eliminating small and unlooked-for travelers, including a masked man and a halfling.
One Nirmathi wanted to know if The Masked was a slaver, snatching small children like the one with him.
Tantaerra had eyed the man balefully. "I'm a halfling, man. We're born small, and we die small. I'm not a little girl, and I'm neither younger than you nor less experienced. I'm probably older than your mother. I certainly possess better judgment than she obviously did, and I've hired this masked man as my guide and bodyguard. So keep your distance from my body, or it'll go ill for you."
Muttering, the Nirmathi had gone for his bow, so The Masked and Tantaerra had taken their nearest escape route-but not before relieving the man's untended smokehouse of a large and well-smoked goat carcass they both knew they were going to get tired of before they saw the Shattered Tomb.
If they ever saw the Shattered Tomb.
There came a time when the trees thinned and they were looking out across a broad, shallow river valley that flooded often enough to drown large trees. The reeds were many and tall, but real cover was scant. The watercourse looped in muddy bends, and the open valley stretched for miles. They were going to have to cross it in the open, and all that water and the likelihood of sucking bogs or great stretches of quicksand meant that doing it in darkness would be far more rash than crossing when the sun was high.
The Masked looked at Tantaerra, and she looked back at him. They sighed, shrugged, took good note of a leaning tree they could use as a landmark on the far side, and clambered down into the valley to start across.
Any Nirmathi within miles would see them, and they couldn't outrun arrows. They also knew that Voyvik was likely lurking somewhere near, but there wasn't much of anything either of them could do about that, either. So they started their crossing, keeping low and not talking so they might have some slender chance of hearing the hiss of approaching arrows before they felt any actual arrowheads.
They'd made it along one loop of the river and were trying to decide on the best place to swim across it when the first arrows tore past them. They flung themselves flat, noses to the nearby water, and twisted to try to see where the archers might be.
They turned just in time to see uniformed soldiers of Molthune burst out of the trees to hack at the Nirmathi bowmen, who were clustered atop a knoll where they could look down on several riverbends.
"Now might be a good time," Tantaerra murmured. "Both sides look a little busy for feathering us with arrows, just now."
The Masked nodded and waded into the water, keeping to a crouch. "Climb up my back," he ordered.
"So I can play pincushion for arrows?"
"So you won't have to swim, and we can be across and into cover faster, O Princess of Thieves." There was no time for debate or hesitation. Those Nirmathi back there would either have fled or be dead very soon now.
Tantaerra evidently reached that same conclusion, for she turned and hurriedly climbed his back without another word, and he launched himself into the river.
It was far shallower and slower than the Inkwater, but not much warmer. Tarram clenched his teeth and swam hard, trying to get to where his feet could find bottom again before he was entirely numb and his strength started to go, at which point the current would start winning the battle for where he was headed.
The cold wormed its way up his arms and legs, and he snarled and fought the water harder, trying-
His knee banged an unseen rock, and then he was crawling in foul-smelling mud, up the far bank and stumbling toward the all-gods-blessed trees.
With a sudden hail of plashings right behind him in the water: Molthuni crossbow bolts hitting the river as they reached the end of their range. It seemed the soldiers back on that side of the river didn't want anyone alive in Nirmathas right now who didn't wear the blood red of Molthune. Or just the red of their own spilling blood.
The Masked crashed through a tangle of branches and into a thicket of saplings and tall grass, mud wallows, and untidy clumps of bright wildflowers. He was halfway across when Tantaerra's weight suddenly vanished from his back, overbalancing him into a near fall. He heard grass rustling behind him, heading back, and whirled around.
The waving grass started to calm, then stirred anew, dancing and swaying as it disgorged Tantaerra.
"They're crossing the river," she told him glumly. "Let's move."
They moved, The Masked taking the running, branch-snapping lead and the halfling scuttling after him. Around this tree, under the boughs of the next, across a little hollow of tallgrass, up a little bank, and on …
"Still coming after us," Tantaerra informed him tersely, landing with a crash. She'd climbed up one of the trees in his wake, to look back.
"My," he told her, between pants, "this is like…having my very own …bard. Commenting, as the…adventure unfolds. There'll be a …dragon, next."
"Bite your tongue, masked man!"
Tarram found he had wind enough left to chuckle. Then he ducked under a leaning tree that was fairly armored in shelf fungus, and found himself facing a steep uphill climb, into darker, denser trees. They had crossed the valley.
They were in too much of a hurry to go looking for landmarks, with these Molthuni after them. Just when would the soldiers start to think plunging into thick forest in a land of foes was too foolhardy to continue with?
An arrow whined out of the trees like an angry hornet, heading not at The Masked, but back whence he'd come.
Suddenly the air was full of a whistling, singing volley.
Well, that answered that question.
Which didn't mean these unseen Nirmathi archers wouldn't decide to take care of a running man in a mask and a halfling. Tarram kept right on sprinting, Tantaerra at his heels and sometimes beside him.
They raced over a gentle wooded ridge, and into older, deeper trees whose leaves hid the sun, where bushes were few but toadstools more numerous, and tiny pairs of eyes stared at the running intruders and then scattered. And on, down a slope where the trees thinned and The Masked had a good glimpse of distant mountains that probably weren't all in Nirmathas, ere the trees closed in again and-
The ground suddenly gave way under his hurrying boots, and he was falling, landing heels-first with a jolt on rocks, then sliding on his back on loose stones and rolling dirt, a high voice spewing curses above him that he recognized was Tantaerra about the time he came to a stop, amid dust and a sporadic but painful hail of small stones.