'Something about that shape I mislike," the bard murmured. His yarting was slung across his back. "And the cast of those blades-"
The cowl fell back to reveal the hideous tusked face of a great orc-an orog.
6
"Stand back!" the orog roared in guttural but clear Common. At the crown of his pumpkin-shaped head, he wore a steel skullcap polished to a mirror finish. "Can you not see that I serve Torm?" With the taloned thumb of his left hand, which still clutched his scimitar, he: hooked a chain hung around his neck and drew forth a great golden amulet. On it, the upraised gauntlet of the: god was clearly visible.
"Lies!" the peasants cried, their voices like raven calls. "Deceit! It's a trick! Kill! Kill!"
By reflex Stillhawk drew back his string. "No!" Zaranda screamed.
The ranger loosed. The arrow hummed to strike the tree a mere handsbreadth above the orc's sloped skull.
The impact rang as loud as a hammer blow. The crowd fell abruptly silent, staring upward at the black-fletched shaft as it vibrated with a musical hum in slow diminuendo.
The Grog's small bloodshot eyes never wavered. He seemed to be gazing raptly at the Torm medallion.
The unsanctified beast!" Father Pelletyr said in a shocked whisper. "Amazing his claw doesn't burst into flame from contact with a holy object! Of course, Torm is a most warlike god. Perhaps he has less sense of the niceties-"
"And perhaps we oughtn't leap at conclusions, Father," Zaranda murmured, "lest we find them illusions, concealing an abyss." She nudged Goldie forward with the gentle pressure of her knee.
The crowd turned their heads to stare as one at the newcomers, as if they comprised some great mechanical toy. The throng's leader, a thickset gold-bearded peasant with a hooded orange mantle and no left arm, brandished the rust-spotted sword he held in his remaining hand.
"What mean you interfering thus, strangers?"
"What exactly are we interfering in?" Zaranda asked, reining Goldie to a halt just shy of the edge of the crowd. The peasants muttered ill-humoredly but edged back away from her.
The bearded swordsman's brows twitched, as if he found it unseemly to have his question answered with another. But the intruder was an imposing woman, who did not give the impression that her sword blade would show any rust at all.
"We have caught this monster attempting to cross our lands," he said. "We're in the process of extirpating it. And that*s our right as human-born servants of the good and lawful!" He finished his little speech as a peroration to the crowd, turning and holding high his sword to shouts of acclaim.
"Is that what you're doing?" asked Farlorn in his ringing baritone. "You look more like a pack of starveling curs trying to work up the nerve to snatch food from a chained bear. Still-" he shrugged "-don't let me stay your hands."
"But I intend to," Zaranda said, quietly but clearly. "At least until I get to the bottom of this." That brought angry catcalls from the mob. "By what right?" Yellowbeard demanded.
"By my right as a human-born person who intends to go on behaving as one."
"Do you threaten us?" asked a skinny man with a missing front tooth and wild black hair that continued without interruption down around his jaw in an unkempt beard. He was in the middle of the pack, safely behind the front rank.
"I'll not sit idly by and watch injustice done."
The crowd's noise level was beginning to rise; so, visibly, was its collective blood pressure. It is a fascinating sight to watch, Zaranda thought in a detached way. Like a pot of water about to come to a boil. Farlorn's remark had been explicitly insulting, but so vast was his charm and so disarming the manner in which he uttered it, the crowd had not been able to take offense… with him. Now their wrath was about to burst out at a different target.
The black-bearded man stooped and seized a chunk of basalt as big as two fists. "You cannot drop us all!" he screamed, cocking a twig-skinny arm to throw.
Zaranda brought her left fist to her hip, palm up, then thrust it toward him. As her arm reached full extension she rolled her hand over and flung it, as if pushing him with her palm from twenty feet away.
The man doubled over with all his breath gusting out his mouth. He flew backward several feet and fell in a moaning ball of misery.
The crowd grew very still. "And there's a lesson about the making of assumptions," Zaranda said. "Which will have no lasting ill effects-if he behaves himself. It boils my blood to see one beset by many."
"Even when that one is evil?" a subdued but surly voice said from the back of the crowd.
"What really angers me," Zaranda continued, "is to see one condemned not for what he does, but for what he is. I prefer to reckon on the basis of deeds, not preju-dice."
She gestured at the great orc, who had allowed his medallion to hang before his chest, glinting in the sun. He held his scimitars slanted downward toward the grass at his feet, in a posture implying readiness but no threat.
"He carries the sign of the god Torm. Would a base creature do that?"
The mob looked at its one-armed leader, who had grown quite ashen behind his blond beard-an unpleasant blend of colors, Zaranda thought. He chewed his underlip and frowned in concentration.
Zaranda took a quick look around. Stillhawk's obsidian-flake eyes were fixed on the orog, and his expression was dead grim. Of course, his expression was always grim, but none other of her acquaintance had half the reason for hating evil things in general and orcs in particular as the mute ranger did. For Farlorn, hating orcs was a part of the natural environment in which he'd been raised, like woods and air and song. Yet his Wild Elven kinfolk held scarcely a better opinion of men than orcs, So the bard had some experience in keeping his prejudices on a tight rein. His flawless features were set in a half-smile that Zaranda knew well, and not altogether fondly, as his neutral look, behind which any feelings might lie coiled.
Father Pelletyr was a study in perplexity. The muscles of his face were working beneath his pink skin like fruits and vegetables shifting in a market bag. He had given life and soul to Ilmater, who, while a gentle god, was a fixed and formidable foe of evil. And orcs in his experience-and everybody else's-took to evil as a salamander to fire.
But there, unmistakable, on the great orc's breast shone the gauntlet of Torm. No normal orc would dare display that symbol in such a way, even as a trophy, for fear of retribution from his own dark and jealous god, or even Torm himself. Torm was a lesser power, far less potent than his rival battle-gods Helm or Tempus or his own master Туr Grimjaws, the Lord of Justice. But for that reason he was reputed to take a far more immediate and personal interest in the doings of his worshipers than other gods, if only because he wasn't spread so thin.
And Torm was a god of Law and Good, even as was martyred Ilmater himself. Father Pelletyr did not serve him, but must honor him. A true servant of Torm was the cleric's brother, not so close as a devotee of Ilmater or another member of his own order, but a brother withal.
The father, who was a good man but not unduly sophisticated, was visibly having difficulty reconciling himself to the notion of clasping a giant snaggle-toothed orog to his breast.
"But what does it want with us?" a voice asked plaintively from somewhere in the throng, whose individual components were now doing their best to blend into an undifferentiated mass behind their leader. The one-armed man was clearly discomfited by his position now.
"Why don't you ask him?" asked Goldie, around a mouthful of grass she chomped.
The peasants stared at her with saucer eyes.
Thanks, Goldie, Zaranda thought. That's just what we needed-new strangeness to tweak the raw nerve-ends of these folk.