disturbance was, it wasn't coming their way. Zaranda ordered Balmeric and Eogast to get the beasts off the road and into a defensive circle in a field of yellow and white spring flowers. Before she could hear their complaints at the exertion, she wheeled Goldie and was trotting forward again. 'Let's go see what transpires.'
'Must you always rush headlong into potential peril, Zaranda?' the cleric asked despairingly.
'Yes,' she said. 'Besides, some poor soul may need our help.'
'Oh,' he said. 'Oh.' And he twitched the flanks of his ass with a little green-leafed twig he'd picked up for the purpose, urging the creature to follow Zaranda, who'd set Goldie into a rolling lope.
'That was manipulative, Randi,' said Goldie, who wasn't really exerting herself at this pace. 'And you say I'm bad.'
Zaranda frowned briefly, then shrugged an laughed. 'It was easier than debating with him,' she admitted. 'At least this way I'll know where he is.'
Their only contact with the Zazesspur road had been Zaranda's side trip into Ithmong. As one of only two major east-west routes through Tethyr, it was well maintained and relatively easy faring. For that reason it also attracted much attention from brigands. Zaranda therefore kept her train to the back roads, despite the fact some were scarce better than wagon ruts or goat tracks.
They were on a somewhat better stretch of road here, a country lane that showed signs of having been improved in the past by being metaled with streambed gravel. Still-hawk rode protectively thirty paces in the lead, longbow ready in his hand. Then came Zaranda, with Farlorn to her left, and finally Father Pelletyr, ass trotting furiously to keep up, cleric and beast alike grunting softly in time to the impacts of its sharp little hooves.
A round mound of hill rose to their left. A lone pecan tree sprang from the top, its roots gripping earth just on the far side of the crest. As the road bent around the hill's base, the clamor of excited voices grew louder, and then the riders beheld a crowd of angry peasants wielding sticks, farming tools, and the odd wolf-spear, confronting a lone figure that stood at the base of the lordly pecan.
Powerfully built, with short bandy legs, the lone figure wore a gray cowled cloak despite the day's warmth. In either hand it clutched a short, heavily curved blade. With these it was fending off the half-hearted thrusts and blows of such mob members as sporadically worked up the nerve to close with it.
'Slay the beast!' peasant voices urged from the back of the mob. 'Slay the vile thing!'
Stillhawk slipped from the saddle and let his reins drop. Well trained, his bay would not move from where it stood unless it were threatened or summoned. He nocked an arrow. Farlorn frowned.
'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
