Page 103 of Swordheart
Zale blinked at him. “Uh… I’m a lawyer. I serve the Rat, and yes, I’m ordained, but I’m not… ah… god-touched. You want justiciars for that sort of thing. That’s… um… our equivalent of paladins. I’m merely support staff.”
“There’s nothingmerelyabout it,” said Halla, with some asperity. “A paladin wouldn’t do me any good getting my inheritance back.”
“I suppose they could chop your relatives into tiny bits, but there would be repercussions. Anyway, justiciars don’t chop people up, except metaphorically and in court.”
Sarkis stared at them. “You… literally… have god-touched lawyers in your order?”
“Not many. We used to have more, but they’re really more of a frontier justice sort of thing. Once you have a legal system in place, you mostly need good clerks and people to make sure that the powerful don’t walk all over everyone.”
Brindle took matters into his own hands and tapped the goad across the ox’s back, clucking his tongue. The ox began to amble forward.
“I guess we’re going ahead,” said Halla.
“Better than talking, fish-lady.”
The path wound on around the hill, flanked by trees. They looked like oaks and maple, familiar enough to Halla, but these were only barely beginning to turn color. A few leaves spangled the hillside, but not many. It might be late autumn in the outer world, but in the Vagrant Hills, it was still the tail end of summer.
“What lives in these cursed Hills?” asked Sarkis. “Do you know?”
“Well, there are plenty of reports,” said Zale. “But you have to filter those reports based on the fact that people lie and exaggerate and scare themselves silly. I don’t think there’s dragons living in here, for example, or giants herding trees like sheep, or kraken.”
“Kraken in thewoods?”
“You see why we considered that report unreliable.”
Sarkis ground his teeth in frustration. It occurred to Halla that he probably didn’t have to worry about damaging his teeth, since he’d get a new set whenever he came out of the sword. She had not previously envied Sarkis’s imprisonment, but having had teeth drawn before… yes, all right, she could see the advantages.
Brindle sighed. “A gnole knows a few,” he admitted. “A gnole’s cousin went into Hills during a war.” He held up his left hand and counted them off on blunt claws. One claw. “Mandrake root. Little, throw rocks.” Second claw. “Big stone fish. Doesn’t do anything.” Third claw. “Rabbit. Talks.” Fourth claw. “Rune.”
“Brindle’s cousin may be more reliable than many of our sources,” said Zale. “The Many-Armed God’s dedicates report that there are, indeed, rune in the hills.”
“What’s a rune?” said Sarkis.
“Stag-men,” said Zale. “And women, presumably. An intelligentpeople, though there is no written form of their language, so we do not know much about them. Not necessarily hostile, though they seem to primarily wish to be left alone.”
“Do they wear green body paint and carry spears?” asked Sarkis.
Zale was intelligent enough to know what that meant. “Where do you see them?”
“There’s one up ahead, in the shadow of that split tree,” said Sarkis, jerking his chin forward.
“If you see one, there’s probably at least a dozen,” said Zale. “Make no sudden movements. Do not draw your weapons unless they attack.”
Sarkis, nerves already taut, did not like how this was going at all. He had only spotted the rune in front of him because the creature had flicked his ear. He looked like a deer-headed man, more or less, but with fine green hair feathering his lower legs, and hooved feet. His spear was taller than he was and had the look of a stabbing weapon rather than a throwing weapon.
A spear like that, in the proper hands, could be far more lethal than a sword, as Sarkis happened to know. One of the lower scars in the mass scribbled on his chest had been from the point of a spear like that. The wielder had used it like a staff, blocking Sarkis’s sword, and then jammed it directly up under his sternum so that Sarkis’s last moments had been spent being lifted several inches in the air, looking down the length of the shaft and feeling the sickening drag of metalthroughhim.
Then he’d died. Again. It wasn’t a pleasant memory, but at least it had been fast.
A bird trilled in the woods, then another. Sarkis did not know even a tenth of the southern birds, but he narrowed his eyes, watching the deer-headed man’s ears move to catch the sound.
His suspicions were confirmed a moment later when the rune lifted his head. His throat pulsed and Sarkis heard another high,twittering call. It was strangely incongruous compared to the size of the rune.
Then another, even larger one stepped out of the trees and onto the track ahead of them. He had a massive rack of antlers coated in soft velvet. Another sign that the seasons were running late in these hills, Sarkis thought, assuming that deer in the south were the same as other deer.
Although I do not believe I would call this gentleman a decadent southern deer.The rune was a good seven feet tall, and that was before counting the antlers. His shoulders were at least as broad as Sarkis’s, although his height made him appear almost delicate, with inhumanly narrow wrists and ankles.
He held up a hand, palm out. His fingers were stiff and strangely jointed, with thick, hoof-like nails. He whistled a high, imperious note.
