Dark Warrior Rising by Ed Greenwood Page A

go unheeded by city rulers mindful of the cost. Yet we stand no longer in the shadow of mighty Talonnorn, fast rising to be powerful enough to seriously threaten Ouvahlor with conquest. Rather, we hold the dominance, and the riches to come.”
    â€œâ€˜Riches to come’?”
    By the Ice, but the youngling was a simpleton! “A weakened Talonnorn will see its rivals close around it in the Dark, rivals they’ve given
ample cause to hate them. They will fear these rivals, and seek to rebuild their defenses and their trade. So they’ll turn to the same Forgerift and ores that enrich them now, and enrich us by offering payment in magic and weapons and coin for the slaves, food, and goods our traders will offer them, purporting to be risking much by doing so illicitly, and therefore demanding much higher prices! Then we shall have Ouvahlor on high, and Talonnorn in its shadow.”
    â€œSo will they not scheme and plot in turn attack us, and win back their dominance?”
    â€œYes,” Luelldar said sweetly. “Yet we shall work to delay that attack for as long as possible. First, our attack will fall most heavily on the foremost ruling House of Talonnorn, the Evendooms. If they are nigh—but not quite—eradicated, the struggle among the various Houses to establish a new local order will occupy the Talonar for the longest time we can hope to cause. This delay will be aided by specific damages we seek to inflict in this attack: the magic we seize, the crones we slay—and the eradication of the Hunt of Talonnorn. Those are the true goals of this strife we’re launching: the slaughter of as many crones and darkwings as we can manage. All else is adornment.”
    â€œAdornment?”
    â€œA little less incredulous disgust, please. Remember, you are a Watcher of Ouvahlor, and a Watcher—”
    â€œHas no use for incredulity, yes,” Aloun said heavily. “I remember that lesson.”
    Luelldar smiled. “Well,” he said gently, turning back to the watch-whorl, “that’s something.”
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    Grunt Tusks lurched past again, but Orivon kept his eyes on the red-hot bar he was hammering, raining swift blows along its edges to flatten it out into what would soon be another blade. You’d think every last Nifl in all Niflheim would have a dozen swords by now, but someone kept buying them from Talonnorn’s traders, so perhaps Nifl were “numberless in their rightful might,” as that longest chant of Olone claimed.
    Well, all the more to slay, then. Starting with those hated most: the Nifl of House Evendoom, the she-elf who thought of him as her pet first of all. It would be a pleasure to dismember her slowly, listening to her screams and smashing her down whenever she tried to struggle.
    He might well have to slaughter a lot of other Nifl first, though, to
win himself leisure enough to make Taerune the Whipping Bitch’s death slow and fittingly painful. And she might well use that time to flee, or gather magic to use against him that he’d have no shield against. So perhaps she needed to lose her hands and feet as swiftly as he could manage it—oh, and her tongue, too, to keep her from snarling out spells—so she’d have no choice but to just lie there and bleed while he dealt with the rest of House Evendoom.
    Not that he’d take all that much delight in maiming a female—even a female Nifl. Nor, come to think of it, would he enjoy striking down the heir of the house, the one who laughed so much—Jalandral, that was his name, aye. Though he tasted no whips, and sweated over no Rift, he felt as trapped as Orivon Firefist, Taerune’s pet Hairy One. Or so he’d seemed, at least, on every one of the handful of occasions when Orivon had seen him in the Eventowers.
    â€œOh, aye, that one prowls as restlessly as I do,” Orivon told the nascent blade he was hammering so deftly, as his sweat rained down