"Get back, you fool!" roars the lady in the armor, cleaving a zombie's head from its shoulders as another, unable to stand but still moving, gnaws on her boot with an awful teeth-on-metal sound. She staves in its skull with the blunt end of her swordstaff, nearly but not quite too slowly to interrupt one that nearly grabbed the griffin's tail.

"I'm done," she says, wiping her blade off on the nearest un-zombie-gooked patch of grass. "Where did you come from?"

"The town of Yellowford, near the city of Skyridge. I'm Judge Theod Linberg, newly on the rural circuit. As for how, I have very little idea."

"Well, I've no explanation either. You're not a mage? Were you near one?"

"Mage isn't an archetype I've heard of, and I'm a Judge, as I said. Something magic was involved, but other than a sense of space shattering and a quip the man gave, I don't know what he was channeling."

"About six leagues out from Little Brookshield, twenty from Andivar. ...In the country of Talpath."

"Which I've never heard of. Great. What the void happened to me?"

"I couldn't say. You weren't near a mage at the time? Do you know what the order of paladins nearest you is called?"

"'Paladin' isn't a term I've heard used. There are Knights, but they don't have," he gestures toward the griffin, "winged hybrid beasts. I think I've heard of winged horses, but it sounded more like a myth than anything either god might have left in the world."

"...Ragnar is a griffin. Winged horses are also real. And you must be from astoundingly far away if you have no paladins - or even if they are simply called something else - and know of only two gods."

"I mean, you could say that the Lights aren't gods, but then you have zero gods, not two."

"Where I was born, there is the Lonely God, who broke themself into pieces to make the world and the people in it, and the Jealous God, who was the Lonely God's first creation and resented them for creating more. They've come to earth in many forms, and left legacies like the Order of Judges and the Great Library, and occasionally there is a cult worshipping one incarnation specifically, but there is no record of any magic ever happening that was not, traceably if indirectly, their doing."

"...Well, here there are the Lights, mine being the Winter Light, and they do not have this infighting problem."

"It's not as bad as you might think. Everyone can choose any legacy to carry on, in theory, but the legacies tend to fall out in the good guy's favor, since we can cooperate much more effectively. And you do still seem to have nasty things such as those walking corpses. Speaking of which, could we be somewhere not downwind of a bunch of oozing corpses?"

"Yes. Are you afraid of heights?"

"Not so much that I'll turn down a ride on a griffin, if you're offering."

"Well, the alternative is walking, and it's hilly." She gets on her own griffin, tells him "Calm," and then offers the newcomer her hand. "I'm Kaja di Ragnar. What's your name?"

She's really strong; she basically half-lifts him onto the creature. "Hold on," she advises, and when she has held on she whistles to the griffin and he takes off.

"Some forty thousand people, I think."

"Large enough. I should be able to find somewhere I can be useful. Though it might be harder if my judge's gifts don't work here, I suppose I shouldn't take that for granted."

"What are a judge's gifts?"

"A few things. If someone promises to tell the truth to me in a clearly-marked way, I have an unerring sense of whether they tell me the truth or lie, and can generally pick apart where the lie sits in the sentence. This also works if someone is unambiguously in my custody. I can gaze into someone's eyes to determine what they would see as a serious punishment or deterrent to future offenses. There is also a certain way of carrying myself that makes people around me feel a strong sense that I should be respected and they should calm down; that's mostly good for calming down brawls or making an entrance."

"...Interesting. Hmm. Here, hold this." She takes off a pendant necklace she's wearing and hands it to him.

"Sure, why?"

When he's touched it, she looks over her shoulder at his hand. It is not hissing and blistering. "Just checking." She takes it back. "Your powers sound useful if wielded well."

Kaja considers this for a moment, then says, "I promise to answer your next three questions truthfully."

"Wait, I should have done this the other way around. Um, suggest a few questions; I'll want a true answer to one, a false answer to another, and an ambiguous answer to the third. And I shouldn't know the answers already, ideally, so not just 'What is your name?'"

"Oh, I just agreed because I don't actually know anything I mustn't say. But all right. Ask me what the pendant was and how many siblings I have and what I had for breakfast."

"It seems to still work. I'll have to confirm the rest, but they're probably all usable. Just to check, the sigil is what you said, you didn't have potatoes or cauliflower for breakfast, and it wouldn't be entirely truthful to say you have one sibling?"

"I had one, but she died when I was a baby. And yes, you got them all right."

"It is. But the orphanage affiliated with the Winter Light brought me up and then I entered the Order as a novice and I believe I have done all right."

"There are other Orders, yes, all over the world. Our nearest brothers and sisters are the Order of the Moonlight, and in the other direction a bit farther is the Order of the Golden Light. Different Orders have different mounts - Winter Light is griffins and winged horses, and one unicorn rider detached from Moonlight. And different orders require different vows and have different ways of life, but the ultimate nature of paladins is similar everywhere."

"Can anyone join, if they are willing to be trained and... ride around and fight corpses and such?"

"Yes, if they'll take the vows, but usually one starts when one is ten, and older novices tend to find it awkward."

"I wasn't particularly thinking I would. But I'm a little skeptical of orders that only pull from particular social groups, even when they have high ideals. That happened a century or two ago in an order of Knights not far from Skyridge, and their idea of what was evil and needed smiting drifted disturbingly quickly."

"I see. The Lights don't brook such shifts in our commitments."

"Before that happened, we didn't think our god would, either. Not to say you're wrong, necessarily. What do the vows look like?"

"In my order it's obedience, piety, chastity, and service."

"We actually don't have any magic for finding dark things; we have to do that ourselves. And non-paladins may have sigils of the Winter Light as long as there are enough to go around. But yes, a full paladin gets a mount and the powers of the Winter Light."

"What do the powers do, then? I don't think you've said."

"Paladins are stronger and faster, we can heal ourselves and our mounts of injuries, we are immune to the taint of dark things, and we can speak to anyone we meet."

"Sounds useful. Do all dark things have that taint? Oh, and you mentioned mages, are they dark as well?"

"Not all mages are dark. Liches are, but some mages are good or just ordinary people. Not all dark things can ordinarily pass on a taint, although we are also resistant to things like the whisper of a woke shadow. Oh, and we bless our weapons, it would be very hard to destroy the shadows otherwise."

"If a dark thing can't pass taint on, how do you know it's dark?"

"If it burns on contact with a sigil."

"Ah. Nice, clear-cut and difficult to fake. I can see why you're confident the orders won't drift away from the original purpose."

"And violation of vows means losing our powers."

"That's no bad thing either, though I certainly won't be joining. For all that I am technically in a religious order, piety and obedience are not my strong points."

"What does your religious order involve, then?"

"Following in the footsteps of the Incarnation of the judge, using her gifts to keep peace and to discourage violence and oathbreakers. There's a hierarchy, but it's mainly based on experience and used to ensure that judges get practice in smaller towns before they're responsible for larger ones or cities. And while using the gift for justice and peace is, strictly speaking, a devotional act, and we read some of her words for advice, it's all very pragmatic."

"You keep mentioning incarnations but I don't know what that means."

"Interesting. And you can adopt these powers by - what's the procedure exactly?"

"Usually there are relics and some line of office. For the judges, there are a few; the ones I know about are a set of scales and a statue. Someone with the gift who touches them gains the ability to give it to others. Generally, each city's top one to three judges will have that, and they give it to new members after we've gone through some training to show good judgment and responsibility."

"...and that's not too vulnerable to skewing the goals of the order?"

"The idea in our case is that the gift can't be corrupted too easily. It can't do that much outside the intended use. Some, if you're clever, but you can't compel anything; I'll probably be much less effective without the social capital of the institution behind me. Some other orders are more stringent, but I don't know the details of why the Knights fell apart in that city, and other things haven't. Also, though this gets into slightly mythical territory I don't quite trust, new incarnations usually appear when something big and important has gone off track."

"But some incarnations are things like thieves, so..."

"Yeah, the Jealous God gets his time to shine just as often. Luckily for society, magically-good thieves and tyrants work together less well than judges and knights, so we hold up pretty well."

"...Wouldn't an effective tyrant have a lot of other people subordinate to them, even if those other people were not magical at anything?"

"Tyrants are definitely one of the scariest. When one shows up, there is usually a war, and he's effective and threatening, but has a hard time finding allies. And then we try to lock the relics away for another century or three, but eventually a thief or something retrieves them."

"What magic powers do magic tyrants have, anyway?"

"You know, I couldn't tell you? The last one was at the other end of the Old Kingdom from my hometown, and he was defeated when my parents were young. I think they're persuasive and good at finding dissent, or something, but people don't talk up the virtues of the nasty paths much."

"I suppose that makes sense."

"Everyone hears about some of them; kids who think they're rebels all crow about the Thief, thieves can go silent and hard to notice, and skilled ones can pass through spaces they shouldn't be able to fit in, which all makes it hard to keep them out or in. But for the scariest ones, there's a decent lid kept on it."

Kaja nods. "We don't allow people to publish information on how to summon up the sort of dark things who need to be summoned," she says. "Just in case someone who wants to doesn't already know how."

"Yeah, as much as censoring information is a little morally dubious, there are things everyone recognizes it's better to keep secret."

They're approaching a city-looking thing now. "Andivar," she says, pointing at it. "But non-paladins won't be able to speak or understand your language."

"Right. That's inconvenient; I expect I can't make any kind of living until I learn the local language. Do you think I could get magical help?"

"The Winter Light tells me what words in your language mean what I want to say, but I can ignore it and just speak Cirth - most of the time full paladins are busy, though, so ideally you would do a lot of self-study once you had the alphabet and a few words."

"I'll try not to impose. Though if I can stay in your compound for a couple weeks, that would be very helpful. I'll help however I can."

"We can probably accommodate you for a while in the novices' dormitory."

"That would be great, thanks. And like I said, my judge's gift will be at your disposal if it's useful to you all."

"It might be, depending on what we come across. Every now and then we have to track down someone who's waking shadows or trying to become a lich, and we have no special advantages there."

And now they are on the ground!

"If you're not in a hurry I'd like to get out of my armor, and of course see to Ragnar, who has had a long day."

"I have nowhere to be. Go ahead."

"I'm sorry. I've never heard of a mage pulling people from between worlds, but it's not impossible you could eventually find one who can put you back."

"I'll look into it. Or even see about learning magery myself. But I'm plopped in a foreign world without warning, and going through my first couple official judge circuits have been more excitement than I was used to. It's going to take a while to adjust to the shock."

"Well," says Kaja, "at least you haven't been eaten by zombies?"

"Yes, this way. Call her Sister - just call any paladins you see Brother or Sister if you don't know them, but her especially - and be polite and I think that's all the important formal protocol."

"Can do."

"My initial plan is to learn the local language, and see whether my judge's gifts - lie detection, a sense of appropriate punishments, and an aura of calm and respect, all very limited - are as useful here as they were where I grew up. Kaja mentioned you might let me stay in the novice's dormitories for some short time, until I can communicate with ordinary people. I would appreciate that very much."

"Hm," says the Bright Sister. "Well, you can stay. It's possible we'd have a use for you here, even, depending on how limited and whether you prefer to live your life in a way compatible with the Winter Light's wishes for its paladins."

"I'd certainly be happy to help; your work seems valuable, and I owe Kaja my life, so I do feel a certain debt. But I expect I'll be more at home in the town, once I can communicate there."

"It went fine. She doesn't usually give people a hard time without cause. Do you read?"

"Yes, though presumably not in - Cirth, was it?"

"Cirth," she nods. "But if you do read you may find it easiest to start with the alphabet and someone who did not have any alphabets already might not."

"True. I presume you do, as well?"

"Yes; in our order all paladins can."

"Sensible. Judges are all expected to learn as well. It makes it easier to learn from old examples. Especially unusual situations that no living judge has encountered; I imagine you'd read about recognizing unusual dark things sometimes."

"There aren't any dark things so obscure that we won't see them in our lifetimes, but yes, the novices read about them rather than go into the field with only hearsay."

"What kinds of dark thing exist? I saw the zombies, but I don't know what I'll want to be on the lookout for."

"There are zombies, imps, liches, woken shadows, tainted beasts - sometimes tainted people too - wraiths and banshees and ghouls."

"If I stick to relatively civilized areas, which ones am I most likely to need to run away from?"

"The shadows. They're good at hiding. Maybe imps, but not because they're common, just because the shadows - running doesn't work."

"Void. I was hoping shadows wouldn't be one of the ones you mentioned."

"Mm?"

"Monstrous things are not pleasant, but there are a lot of shadows anywhere there are people. If some of them are 'woken'... well, I suspect you have more paranoids than home does."

"If you are plagued by a woke shadow it is more likely to hide in your ear than under your bed."

"I don't think that sounds much better."

"It isn't, but perhaps it will make ordinary shadows seem less threatening."

"Oh, probably. Are they rare, at least?"

"Most people wouldn't make them and many people who would can't, but when someone knows how they can make huge numbers before we track them down at the source."

"Well, I will be extremely happy to help you with that tracking."

"It would be very useful if we could simply lie-detect people who might have been manufacturing them," Kaja nods.

He smiles. "The judge gift is very useful. On a previous topic, was there a library or something where I should find materials for learning the alphabet?"

"I was going to just write out the alphabet for you and then have an initiate who could use the practice with their language gift help you with the rest."

"That sounds better," he agrees.

They arrive at the dorm, where someone finds a spare room for Theod and Kaja gets a piece of paper to write out the Cirth alphabet. It's thirty-eight letters. "I can't use my gift in writing, so I'll just tell you what sounds they make and you can write down whatever will help you remember that -" And then she lists the sounds.

"You're welcome. I'll go find you an initiate."

"I'll be here, settling in a bit."

"I am, yes. I sort of appeared on Kaja while she was fighting zombies. You're going to help translate and teach me some basics?"

"Yeah. Um, what do you... want me to translate... first?"

"I think we should start with basic conversational things. Like, things one might say going to the store."

"Okay." The initiate produces reasonable generic store-related sentences in Cirth, and translates them haltingly, and writes them down.

Yup. The initiate has apparently been assigned to him for the next week and is also supposed to escort him to the cafeteria.

The cafeteria will probably be useful practice as well!

The cafeteria certainly contains a lot of people talking in Cirth! The kids between the ages of ten and sixteen can't even use the Winter Light's gift to lapse into Theod's language in a pinch, so there's some nonnegotiable immersion if he wants to talk to children.

By the end of this week, he will probably be basically competent!

There is always a retired paladin at the gate to take messages and receive information about where there are dark things, so that's someone.

The justice system, if he asks around, appears to be skimpy on trials per se, but includes evidence-gatherers and has certain standards before someone can be brought to formal legal attention beyond just those sniffing around. There are police, who deal with more immediate and physical threats than the evidence-gatherers, do patrols, perform arrests, and so on. There are judges, who may throw out cases if there are procedural issues or the entire thing is frivolous, or assign sentences; judges usually work in pairs unless the caseload is enormous. Apparently paladins have some extrajudicial powers which only apply if they can demonstrate after the fact that they have kept all their powers (thereby proving that they have not disobeyed their Order superiors or the Winter Light's dictates) and only if there are dark things involved.

Well, there's no clear equivalent for his accustomed role. But he should probably talk to a judge first, and arrange a demonstration of his value.

The judges have a block of offices over there. They share a clerk. The clerk wants to know who the dark is he.

The clerk blinks at him, taking in the imposingness of his revised aura. "...Will you wish to see a committee of all judges or make an appointment with one or a pair?"

"The mayor is responsible for appointing new judges."

"I'm sure you're more familiar with the governmental structure here. I am uncertain whether I would be most useful as a judge giving sentences and evaluating testimony, in assisting evidence-gatherers by checking for false testimony in the field, or in some other peace-keeping role; where I come from, I would do all of these things regularly in the course of my duties. Who should I speak to who would be well-equipped to evaluate what I can do, and, if they are not the decision-maker themselves, will be listened to by those who do make the decisions?"

"...If I were you I'd want to talk to the mayor."

"Yes, well, I'll be sure to check which door is his before I walk in. I'm not used to having to do this to be taken seriously; the Order is well-established at home. Thank you for your help."

"You're welcome."

The mayor's secretary looks slightly imposed upon!

"...I. I can see if he's available."

"Please do."

"Not mages as you know them, exactly. I am a judge of the Order of Judges, which is not present in this city or this world. I can verify the truth of statements made to me, either in a context where someone is in my custody or by extracting a clear promise to be truthful. I can also determine appropriate and effective punishments that will be effective at discouraging further misconduct, including distinguishing offenders who are unlikely to stop short of death from others, and calm and intimidate suspect and unruly groups of people. This makes me unusually good at many tasks needed for securing peace and justice in the community, and I am told that you are the person I'd need to speak to about continuing that role here."

"Hmmm. Apart from the thing you're doing now, how can you verify these abilities?"

The mayor hmms. "I'll ask the sister about it. It would shorten some investigations if it works the way you say it does - what constitutes being in your custody, if it's intractable to get people to promise you honesty?"

"Generally, it's applied to prisoners already in custody; they are informed that a specific judge is now responsible for them, and once they are aware, that judge's truth sense applies. Refusing the oath for a specific matter is treated as evidence of complicity, so it's mostly come up with those already in jail or acting as witnesses in other matters in exchange for lenience. I'd be interested in investigating the limits."

"Refusing to agree to interact with strange magic here is not evidence of much," the mayor remarks.

"Yes, that's fair. We're the backbone of the justice system in most of the known world, there, so it's hardly strange magic. I'm not expecting it to be quite as smooth here."

"If people under arrest don't understand what you do, it may be that your power won't work that way either."

"No, on that count it's fine. There have been occasional cases of the suspect not knowing that the promise was made to a judge, and it stayed effective."

"By tomorrow morning I should have a statement from the Order about you and then we can try you on whoever's in lockup at the moment."

"All right. That would be a reasonably good opportunity to demonstrate the sentence-giving, as well."

"Do you have to pronounce that authoritatively to the prisoner in some way, or can you just relate it to someone else in another room?"

"I don't need to do it immediately at all; I could do it for several prisoners, and then relate my finding in the next room afterwards."

"Good. Not everyone who goes through lockup winds up being sentenced."

"Midday."

"Alright, then. Unless you have other things you'd like to discuss, I'll be going."

"Have a good afternoon."

Well, let's walk back to the compound, tell the person at the gate there will be a messenger, and then he should probably tell Kaja, too, if he can find her.

Kaja is doing swordstaff routines with some of her fellow paladins in the training yard. Apparently she can interrupt this to go see what Theod has to say when she spots him.

"Hi, Kaja. There's likely to be a messenger for you this afternoon. The mayor's office didn't let me demonstrate, and wanted your word for it first."

"Oh. All right, I can give them a sealed note. What in particular do they want me to verify?"

"The truth sense. I impressed him a bit already, but he's a politician and probably testy about his secrets."

"...He may just be worried that you're some kind of dark mage," she points out. "Paladins are immune to a lot of forms of darkness, so if I say you're all right that's another matter."

"That's probably more fair. Politicians always leave a bad taste in my mouth, so I'm probably being uncharitable."

"What's the matter with politicians?" wonders Kaja.

"They have a habit of weaseling around everything they say and do. They 'promise' everything, but never really promise anything. The one time I was ever present where one was an official witness, it was a long string of complicated ambiguous answers, even on things that didn't implicate him in any way. I'd swear it made my brain itch."

"...I think our mayor is a good mayor. Maybe there's something wrong with your politicians."

"He could be. Void, maybe Politician was an incarnation of the Jealous God at home. I don't think anyone would be all that surprised."

"Maybe! I wouldn't know."