"Now, Zaranda," Father Pelletyr said. He sat at Zaranda's left, where he had been occupied addressing himself to a leg of mutton. Restored, he took an interest in the conversation. Tour friend is entitled to his opinions."
"And I to mine," Zaranda said, leaning against the back of her chair and crossing her arms. The serving maid came back and set a fresh-filled jack before the mercenary. He glowered from her to Zaranda, cast a handful of coppers to her. She scooped up the empty vessel and scuttled away.
Valides swilled deeply, then glared about him. His eye fell upon a bulky figure stacked in the corner behind Zaranda, swaddled head to toe in a cloak. It was Shield of Innocence. Zazesspur was basically a tolerant town, though Valides's talk made Zaranda wonder what it was coming to, but there were few places in Faerun in which an orog warrior would be made welcome. The Smiling Centaur attracted a lot of demihuman custom, and patrons of all races largely forbore to inquire into their fellows' antecedents, in the interest of avoiding scrutiny of their own. Zaranda had hoped he would attract less attention here than out on the street.
But Valides, though Zaranda's sometime comrade-in-arms, was one of those types with a gift for doing the least welcome thing. "What have we here?" he asked, heaving his somewhat squat form up from his stool and lurching toward the silent cowled figure.
Stillhawk stood up, too. With the closeness and clamor threatening to overwhelm his wilderness-honed senses, he would take neither wine nor spirit, and had been sitting quietly by Shield with a flagon of water and a platter of beef. Even here in the south, few would dare chafe a ranger of the Dales for abstaining from strong drink; it wasn't the sort of behavior one got a chance to repeat.
Though he hated and mistrusted the great orc, Still-hawk kept watch over him as a service to Zaranda. He moved to bar the inebriated mercenary's way.
But Farlorn Half-Elven reached out and caught his oak-hard forearm, staying him. "Bide, my friend," he said in his silken baritone. "Our comrade merely wishes words with our silent one. Wouldst offend a warrior true?"
Stillhawk blinked; Farlorn's words had a way of confusing him. Valides shouldered past him. "Hey, there, fellow," he rasped at Shield. "What breed are you? You're a big one-is it giant blood runs in your veins, or ogre?"
He put back his head and laughed uproariously at his own wit. Zaranda was standing now. "Vander," she said softly, using the ranger's rarely heard given name for emphasis.
The ranger nodded, turned. But now Farlorn stood between him and Valides. The bard's moods were like a pendulum, though without the predictability; from this morning's near-giddiness, he had swung into black despair. Unlike the others-Father Pelletyr's thirst was far less exigent than his hunger, though over the whole course of the evening he might acquire a pleasant illumination-Farlorn had drunk with single-minded concentration, fury almost, since arriving at the tavern. His exotically handsome face was flushed, and his eyes were red. He was laughing, but his laugh had a jagged, nasty edge, like a Shadow Thief s stiletto.
"What's the matter with you, fellow?" Valides demanded. "Too good to drink with us normal-sized folk? Show us your misshapen face, then, you great uppity oaf!"
He reached for the cowl of Shield's cloak. Zaranda prepared a spell that would, she hoped, douse all lights in the tavern, and for safety's sake tossed back her own cloak to clear Crackletongue. For all his elf-trained quickness, Stillhawk could not get past Farlorn in time to stop the drunken mercenary, and once Shield's tusked orc face was revealed, there would be a riot. And as ever, if blood must flow, Zaranda intended to be the spiller, not the spillee.
"Sweet Ilmater!" The tavern din had fallen low with anticipation. The choked outcry cut across the pregnant stillness like a full-throated scream.
Father Pelletyr had lurched upward from his chair. His face was suffused with blood and contorted as with agony. "My arm!" he gasped, clutching his bosom. "My chest! The pain-"
He collapsed, upsetting the chair he had occupied. His flailing hand struck his flagon, and the wine stained his white robe like blood. Zaranda leapt toward him but could not catch him before he struck the rush-covered floor.
In a flash, Berdak was kneeling by the stricken man's side. Small for a centaur, the publican was solidly built, and with four legs for traction he cut through the mob like an Amnian racing dromond. He knelt beside the cleric and reached to feel his throat.
Then he looked up and shook his head. "His heart has given out," he said. This man is dead."
9
"We know the face of our enemy," a voice echoed down the darkened streets of Zazesspur's Wainwright District, "and we shall grind it beneath our bootheels!"
A many-throated growl of approval answered him. Zaranda scowled and forced her hand away from Crackle-tongue's hilt. "What's that noise?"
Stillhawk stood at the corner ahead. He gestured right, toward the center of town. It comes from this direction.
She stalked forward and peered around the hip of a brick wall surrounding a wagonmaker's yard. Several blocks away a forest of torches upheld by a multitude of hands illuminated a mob below and a man above, standing on the pedestal of an equestrian statue that had somehow escaped the iconoclastic fervor of the Troubles, in the midst of a square. Even at this range the mob members looked shaggy and unkempt, and a questing breeze brought a whiff of stale clothing and unwashed flesh to Zaranda's nostrils.
"What is this?" she asked.
The four bravos she had hired from the tavern to convey poor Father Pelletyr's body, wrapped in a piece of canvas, to the chapter house of his sect took advantage of the pause to lower their burden-gently, with Shield of Innocence's still-cowled bulk looming over them-to the paving stones. One of them wiped his forehead of sweat with the back of his hand.
"From the sound of it, that's Earl Ravenak addressing his hairheads," he said. "This is thirsty work, milady."
Farlorn undipped a canteen from his belt and tossed it to the man. The man uncapped it, swigged, cast a reproachful look at the half-elf. "Water?" he asked plaintively.
The cleric's death had dropped the bard into a stony-sullen depression. He gave the man a look. The body-bearer hurriedly drank. Zaranda had scrupulously avoided bringing wine along, and made sure her hirelings hadn't. She didn't want them growing antic with poor Father Pelletyr.
"What's wrong with his followers?" Zaranda said. "They look like a passel of Uthgardt Beast Cultists coming off a half-moon binge. And smell worse."
A second bearer drank and passed the bottle on. "Hairheads," he said. "Ravenak's followers. They've vowed never to cut their hair nor wash until all foreign elements are purged from Zazesspur."
"Gnomish blood shall spurt under the knife!" the mad earl's voice raved, magnified by a speaking-tube. The crowd howled like banshees at a chariot race.
"May the black galleys carry off the lot of 'em," muttered the first man.
"Black galleys?" Zaranda asked.
"Zhentarim slave ships," the bearer said, then spat again, more lustily still. "They ply the harbor by night. I hear they put in at docks down in the catacombs beneath the city, to carry kidnapped children away into slavery."
"Mush-head," the third bearer said. "You believe anything you hear."
"It's true, may the sahuagin eat your guts! My Uncle Alvo saw them his own self."
"And what was your Uncle Alvo doing in the catacombs of a midnight?" inquired the fourth bearer.
The first man studied his sandaled toes. "Well… he fell down a manhole. He'd had a bit to drink, all right? He's still as truthful a man as ever drew a breath of Zazesspurian air."