Out of Character:
He even looked different now.
Inpu stared moodily at the reflection in his glass of water and sighed. His face seemed thinner, his eyes more haggard than before. His golden ankh earrings had lost their luster. His robes, usually a pristine white, looked rumpled and dirty. And that was just the outside. He knew only too well how much he had changed on the inside.
He sat alone at a table in the Tinker’s Dance. It was much like any other inn in Underwood: the ceiling hung low over the multitude of round, wooden tables, and a number of candles struggled to push back the smoke and shadows. The air filled with the smell of cooking meat and the sound of a room full of chattering patrons. His dinner, a well-prepared leg of mutton, had been picked at and then pushed to one side. He took no particular joy in eating; it simply turned to ashes in his mouth. Porridge or steak, it made no difference to him now that he lived in this world.
This world. Althanas, they called it. It could have been Hell itself, for all the former gatekeeper cared. It wasn’t his home, and that simple fact was all that mattered. He’d been sent to a hostile land. He had no friends, no status here. The average Althanian cast a jaundiced eye over his foreign garb and viewed him with hostility thereafter. His only possessions were the clothes on his back and the staff that rested in his lap.
"How can I help, kind sir?" The words came to Inpu’s ears. “My name’s Iryn, and this is the Tinker’s Dance.” The big man frowned. Her welcome sounded a little too nice, a little too courteous. And why did she go out of her way to greet this newcomer, when she’d said hardly a word to anybody else that night?
The gatekeeper stole a long glance back over his shoulder at the pair while they made their arrangements. The man looked unremarkable enough, save for his cloak; the garment seemed somehow to absorb the candlelight, blending into the wooden background almost seamlessly. The silvery roots of the thin woman’s hair betrayed her age, and she wore a white apron over nondescript clothing. Her face bore a smile that was just a bit too wide. At that, Inpu became certain: something was amiss.
Two successive thuds of metal on wood roused the gatekeeper from his fitful rest. Awake in an instant, Inpu rolled from his bed and grabbed his staff in one motion. He didn’t even need to hear the angry voices to know who they were: the middle-aged woman and the newcomer from the night before. He bounded from his room and down the steps in time to see the pair vanish into the kitchen, the man’s sword at the innkeeper’s throat.
He followed, cautious and alert now at the sight of the steely blade. The big man stopped just outside the entrance to the stable and cocked an ear to listen.
“Get him saddled, and if you think you can escape or attack, you’d be mistaken, woman.”
The woman complied, unaware that he lurked only a short distance away. After a moment, she spoke. “There. He’s ready. The owner will likely kill me, but he named the horse Fleet.” Once again, the tone of her voice said more than the words themselves. Inpu had once barred the way to the afterlife. He had once filtered away the wicked and sinful from paradise. Such sorry creatures tried any means possible to be granted passage to the great beyond, and as a result the judge had become very skilled at reading a person’s demeanor for those subtle clues that indicated truth or deceit.
To read this woman’s tone of voice, then, was second nature to the big man. She didn’t sound scared, but rather confident. She was not the prey. She was the predator. Still, something didn’t add up. The man could kill her on a whim. Why, then, did she seem so sure of herself?
“Open the door.”
As soon as the big wooden door opened to the cool night air, the man bolted in a flurry of the horse’s footfalls. The lady shouted at his back. “You’ll not live the night, Warder! Not this night!”
Inpu’s eyes widened as the answer to his question hit him square in the face. Of course she was confident; she wasn’t the only threat to the man’s life. He had escaped one demise, only to run headlong into another. The gatekeeper sprang into action. Moving at a speed that belied his bulk, he darted into the stable and up to the nearest horse. As he put one hand on the startled animal’s flank, he grappled momentarily with his conscience.
Two choices. Steal the horse, or allow a man to be murdered. Inpu quickly chose the lesser of the two evils, swinging up onto the unsaddled horse and spurring it into action with kicks to its sides. He shot by the bewildered woman and out into the street, in hot pursuit of the fleeing figure.
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