"Of course not," Goldie said in a honeyed tone that instantly made Zaranda's eyes narrow. "But still, I can-net help thinking of the burden on your poor mount's legs."
Father Pelletyr's face collapsed like a souffle in an oven around which an ettin has just commenced a drunken clog dance. He began to fiddle with his beads and cast guilty downward looks at his ass. In so doing he neglected to keep switching at her flanks with the little fir bough he carried for the purpose, and the beast fell behind the longer-legged mare. "Goldie!" Zaranda said sotto voce. "Now you've made the poor man feel guilty."
"Can I help it if he's oversensitive?" The priest caught them up again. The trail had begun to wend downward. Ahead, it bent right, around a knee of granite with a twisted scrub-cedar perched on its top.
"Was it really needful," he asked in mournful tones, "to take such a strange and circuitous route? Surely there are easier roads into Tethyr."
It was a fair question. The secret path through the mountains had bееn rife with precipices and rockslides. At a higher elevation, an avalanche had swept two mules and their packs away, but no men had been lost, and the loss of goods had been minimal. Withal, the mountain crossing had been much easier than what Zaranda and her companions had gone through to get the most valuable of the goods they carried.
"Surely there are," she replied, "and in consequence they're better attended by bandits and marauders of every stripe. I'm a merchant, Father. Trading away danger for discomfort strikes me as a favorable bargain."
"But surely-oh, dear."
This last was directed down the trail. Zaranda and the Ilmater priest had come around the granite knee to where they could see the end of the narrow defile, opening onto foothills rolling quickly away to the flat green landscape of Tethyr.
The way was blocked by heaps of boulders, one to each side, and between them a dead fir sapling lay across the path as a barricade. Behind the barrier several polearms could be seen waving tentatively, like metal-tipped branches.
"Oh, no," Goldie said. "Not another adventure."
Reins and fir branch alike dropped from Father Pelletyr's hands. Like most of Ilmater's ilk, he was no fighting priest. With plump fingers, he began to fumble at his medallion.
"O Holy Ilmater, О Crying God, Succorer of Tyr the Blinded God, who suffered for us upon the rack, friend to the oppressed, aid us your children now-"
From behind his little ass came the crunch of weighty hooves on granite pebbles. The little beast scrambled to the side of the path with an agility that belied its burden to avoid being shouldered out of the way by a rangy blood-bay gelding.
The gelding's rider, like the horse itself, was tall and spare, with long muscles that seemed to have been carved of oak and weathered dark. He wore a leather tunic laced up the front with a rawhide thong, trousers of muted leaf-green, knee-high boots of soft doeskin with fringed tops turned down. Across his back was slung a quiver and a strung longbow. His right forearm was encased in a leather armlet. Guiding his horse with his knees, the tall man touched the priest's arm gently with his left hand, while his right traced the elven signs for Bide, Father. Father Pelletyr nodded, swallowed, and interrupted his prayer. The newcomer gave him a grim smile.
It was the only kind of smile he was equipped for. He was handsome in a heavy-browed, brooding way, with long black hair bound at his nape, a broad jaw shadowed with stubble the sharpest razor could prune but never clear, brown eyes dark as the woods around the Standing Stone of the Dalelands. He carried the twin messages of serenity and menace.
With the silent man at her elbow, Zaranda rode to the barricade and stopped. Goldie tossed her head and danced a bit to let her rider know she was not happy. Ignoring her, Zaranda dismounted and strode forward, glad of the chance to stretch her longs legs; unlike most folk who, like Father Pelletyr, favored their ease, Zaranda preferred to be in motion, working the muscles of her lithe, pantherish body. The tall dark man followed, unslinging his longbow.
Zaranda stopped ten feet shy of the abatis and stood to her full height, which was considerable-greater than that of most human men of Faerun. The wind off the Tethyr plains stirred in her hair, which was dark, a brown that was almost black save for a blaze of white over her right brow. It was a heavy, unruly mane, currently caught up in a simple bun in back and hanging square-cut before. The white hairs of the blaze refused to be tamed and tended to stand up in a lick. She had a long-boned athletic frame that spoke of power, grace, and resilience, much in the way of the yew longbow her ranger companion carried.
Her face she would have called handsome and most others beautiful despite the broken nose. Her beauty was of the worn sort that resulted from seeing more of the world than was good for her.
For a span of heartbeats she simply stood. From behind the barrier came a twitter of small voices.
With a certain ostentation, she adjusted the saber she wore across her back, hilt projecting above her right shoulder for easy access, then dropped hands to hips. At last she deigned to speak.
"Who dares impede the return of the Countess Morninggold to her home?" she called in a clear voice.
The whispering from beyond the barricade rose to a crescendo. A commotion came from the branches of the tree, and with a certain amount of crackling and rustling, a small figure appeared, crawling between dead branches. Once clear it paused to haul forth a glaive-guisarme fully thrice its own length, then hopped erect with more swagger than conviction to confront Zaranda.
"We represent an autonomous collective of demihumans of diminutive stature," the apparition announced in the deepest voice it could muster. It was a halfling male, no more than three feet tall, wearing a morion helmet easily three sizes too large and a brigandine corselet that came down almost to the hair on the tops of his feet. "We demand toll of all who would pass this way."
The morion spoiled the effect by slipping abruptly down, covering his face to his snub nose. Goldie pawed the earth and whickered laughter. The halfling pushed up the helmet and looked aggrieved.
A half dozen other halflings had clambered up in the branches on the abatis's far side, or onto the piles of boulders, to observe the proceedings from relative safety. Like the spokesman, they were all got up in a parody of brigands.
"Do you maintain this road?" Zaranda asked.
Carefully holding his helmet in place, the halfling blinked innocent blue eyes at her. "No," he admitted.
"Then by what right do you demand toll?"
This provoked another flurry of conversation in the piping halfling tongue instead of the accented Common the spokesman used with Zaranda; though most humanoids in Tethyr spoke Common, few would consent to do so without a heavy dose of regional or racial accent, to prove they weren't that familiar with it. Zaranda had a smattering of Halfling, and could have followed the conversation had she chosen to do so.
"Because we're an autonomous collective," one of the onlookers finally said. The spokesman turned back to her with renewed purpose.
"Because we're an autonomous collective," he said.
"So?" Goldie asked.
The halfling goggled at her. "It talks!"
"Bites, too." Goldie stretched her fine arched neck and with a considerable display of teeth pulled up a clump of tough trail grass. "Best mind your manners," she added, munching significantly.
Zaranda noted that the watchers in the gallery kept casting covert glances to the sheer heights above; the cliffs dropped a hundred sheer feet before they gave way abruptly to foothills.