Stillhawk was going from darkling to darkling with a clip-bladed huntsman's knife in hand, "making sure" of fallen foes in the grim fashion of the Elven Woods. Zaranda was glad Father Pelletyr wasn't alive to see it; it would have distressed his good and kindly heart, though even he could not deny the necessity for it. The ranger's features were set in sterner lines than usual, and when he knelt by the small pointy-toothed creature whose skull Zaranda had split, he gestured his comrades near.
"What have we here, brave huntsman?" murmured Farlorn, who still had his rapier out. His eyes were bright, and his cheeks flushed; it appeared the killing had put him back in high spirits.
The ranger signed one word: duergar.
"A dark dwarf?" exclaimed Farlorn. "Ha! Impossible. Never do they venture up out of the Underdark."
"I certainly didn't bring the thing back in my pack from a dungeon crawl, Farlorn Half-Elven," Zaranda said. "I struck it down where now it lies, and though I've had the ill-fortune to see but one or two of that kindred before, there's no doubt Stillhawk has the right of it."
"But what can this mean?" Farlorn asked, shaking his head.
The darklings come from below, Stillhawk signed. Why your surprise? "
"Because I myself slew a female Moon Elf," Farlorn said. "Rare enough to find an elfin company with a true dwarf. But one of the People leagued with a duergar?"
He shook his head, as if even he could find no words to match the strangeness.
"An orc and a hobgoblin lie slain with them, and likewise three who look as human as I," Zaranda said. "Curious company indeed."
"There are many mysteries in the city," said Shield in his basso growl.
Farlorn looked at him standing there with the cowl of his white cloak thrown back and twin crescent blades clutched in taloned hands, and laughed. "Indeed there are! And now I think on it, is this lot of darklings truly any more bizarre than to find a ranger and a half-elf fighting alongside a great orc?"
Zaranda looked up and down the street. It was still deserted. "We'd best be off," she said, "lest the guard find us and fine us for slaying darklings without a license."
The shrouded body of Father Pelletyr lay in the gutter a block away. The bearers hired from the Smiling Centaur had fled as the distraught mother's first cries reached them, knowing they meant darklings were about.
"We'll make no rapid going," Farlorn said. "The good Father's taste for good living has made him in death less bearable."
Shield of Innocence sheathed his swords and drew his cowl back over his head again. Then he walked back to the white bundle, stooped, and hoisted it over one broad shoulder.
"I shall carry the holy man," he said.
"So be it," Zaranda Star said; and so it was.
The chief cleric of the Order of Ilmater Brothers was a tall, gaunt man with a head shaped like a doorknob, a resemblance his surrounding fringe of gray hair did nothing to detract from. He still had sleep in his sunken, sad-looking gray eyes.
"So you have brought one of our own back to us," he intoned after the bundle had been deposited on a marble examining table in the healing chamber and the shroud was pulled back from Father Pelletyr's face.
"How did he die?"
"He died trying to prevent bloodshed, Excellency," Zaranda said, crossing her fingers behind her back. It wasn't actually a lie; the hapless father might have been trying to intervene when he keeled over. She couldn't know and chose to give her comrade the benefit of the doubt.
Examining the body, the cleric looked up beneath a bushy, upraised brow. "No need to call me 'excellency;' we are all humble brothers in Ilmater," he said. "He appears to have been stricken with an infarct to the myocardium. I see no signs of violence."
"Still, he was attempting to interpose himself between the combatants when death struck him down," said Zaranda, stretching the truth as far as it would go. It appeared to satisfy the archpriest, who nodded gravely.
"Long and well has our brother served Ilmater, and now the Crying God has called him home," he intoned.
Zaranda thrust a hand in her pouch and brought forth a handful of gems and rich broaches, sparkling in the light of the single lantern hung by a hook above the slab. "Here's what wealth I have remaining, Excel-ah, Father. I don't know whether it's enough to cover resurrection, but if not, perhaps we can make arrangements."
But the cleric shook his head. "Ah, my child, but you forget-" he began, wagging an admonitory finger.
"No terms on healing," Zaranda said, sagging. The gods of Toril were a cash-on-the-barrelhead lot. Given the uncertainty of fortune in that world, it was probably wise.
But the archpriest was still shaking his head. "Our brother Pelletyr forswore resurrection from death when he took our orders. He subjected his will to Ilmater's. Now Our Martyred Father has seen fit to call him home, and he has gone to stay."
"So be it," rumbled from the hooded hulk of Shield, who stood behind Zaranda. The cleric cast him a curious look, but said nothing.
Zaranda's eyes squeezed shut. Father Pelletyr had been neither the oldest nor the best of her friends, but he had been a comrade of unflagging loyalty and great heart. A single tear ran down her cheek.
He's the first of us claimed by the evil that lies upon Zazesspur, she thought irrationally but with profound conviction. How many more?
Out on the street before the chapter house, Farlorn paused with hands on hips and swelled his chest with a deep draught of night air. Because it was spring, the nights were cool, not sultry as they would be when summer arrived in the Empires of the Sands. Soft lantern light shone through stained glass that showed Il-mater's bound hands on a field of butter yellow and made colorful play on the back of his doublet.
"And there you have it," he declared. "Poor Father P. eschews resurrection in order to lend meaning to his eventual martyrdom. And then what befalls him? He pops an A. and dies a death entirely meaningless. Who says the Crying God has no sense of humor?"
Zaranda turned, frowning, toward him, intending to take him to task for his callousness. Instead, she found herself breaking into laughter that she quickly had to stifle, for fear of scandalizing the inhabitants of the chapter house.
"Life is a witch, and then you die," she said, giggling like a schoolgirl. "Now there's a fine Ilmaterish touch for you!"
And she thrust her elbows out from her sides, so that Stillhawk and Farlorn put their arms through hers, and walked away down the street with Shield following in silence. And once they were around the corner from the Ilmater chapter house, Zaranda let her laughter boom forth full throated.
Because if she could not laugh at Death, how could she face it when her time came?
That night in her bed Zaranda did not laugh.
She had engaged rooms at the Winsome Repose, an inn of good if not preeminent quality. She still had treasure of her own, though far from enough to cover her debts, and saw no reason to stint herself. Stillhawk and Shield were bedded down in the stables, where Goldie could speak to the other horses in words they understood and gentle them to the smell of the orog-and where Stillhawk could keep the mare from gambling with the grooms and cheating them, which was bound to draw undue attention. Zaranda had a chamber to herself, as, to his disgruntlement, did bard Farlorn.
Though the night had grown near-chill, she found herself unbearably hot, stiflingly hot, and could bear neither clothes nor covers. And as she tossed and sweated in a state that could be called sleep only because she was palpably not awake, it seemed to her that she heard the voices of lost children crying out to her, helpless and doomed, as black whips drove them in ranks toward black galleys, far below in the city's stone bowels.