Free War in Tethyr by Victor Milan, Walter (CON) Velez Page A

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 prejudice."
    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