Dark Vengeance by Ed Greenwood Read Free Book Online Page B

Yet I need you to help me now, too: to track the Nifl who fled, back to whatever caves they came from.”
    Orivon settled his two best swords in their scabbards, made sure his favorite daggers were sheathed where he wanted them, smilingly accepted a skin of water and a hastily proffered haunch of roast boar, rolled them into the blanket he used when sleeping beside the forge, and looked at the door.
    Then he turned back to the softly weeping Larane, and gave her a firm handclasp and the words, “I will do my best to bring your lost ones home. This I swear.”
    Before she could choke aside her grief to reply, he was striding away, back out into the night, the hunters closing in around him.
    â€œI . . .I wish I was going with him,” Larane whispered at last, tremulously.
    Old beak-nosed Meljarra looked at her sternly. “No, you don’t. You’d not last ten breaths before fear froze your heart. Since when did you learn how to see in the dark, anyway? The nightskins have some sort of spell they put on their slaves, but the rest of us’d be fair blind. Even Harkon would come running back mewling, if you tried to take him down into the caves.”
    She plucked at Larane’s sleeve, got a good grip, and started towing the forlorn cloth-dyer across the smithy by main force, her beak of a nose parting the crowd of women as if by magic. “Now stop talking such foolishness and come and help me make soup. He’ll have your little ones back as soon as he can, and it’ll help them none if you’ve pined away for lack of them, and left them motherless!”
    Harmund the weaver was careful to make sure Meljarra was a good few hurrying strides outside the smithy before he told its ceiling thoughtfully, “Now if you could
nag
nightskins to death, you’d want Meljarra Sharptongue at your side, to be sure. I can’t see Orivon Firefist or anyone else managing to creep past anything with ears if they have Meljarra along.”
    Bryard and a few of the older men chuckled at that—but only after they’d peered swiftly about to see if any women of the village were listening.
    Â 
    The hunters said little, which was just as Orivon wanted it.
    If the Niflghar raiders were going to attack the human who’d just slain so many of their fellows, he wanted enough warning to get himself set, with sword and dagger ready.
    They were well into the higher ground, now, where the rocks were many and the trees gnarled, many-rooted things. Harkon came back to him, pointing repeatedly and silently into the night until he nodded to show he’d understood. They’d found the cave mouth.
    Orivon went forward until he could see the hunters standing uneasily on either side of it, and then turned, clasped Harkon’s hand, and waved him back toward Orlkettle.
    Thankfully the hunters slipped away, most of them clasping his hand on their way.
    They were happy to be leaving him, and Orivon was happy to see them go. Even if they all turned out to be braver and quieter than he’d judged them to be, they’d be as useless as witless men, blinded by their lack of darksight. If every one of them groaned along under more than his own weight in prepared torches, they’d not have light enough to reach Talonnorn—to say nothing of the fatal foolhardiness of striding through the Wild Dark bearing bright light to signal your presence to everything that lurked and watched . . . or carrying torches when you should be carrying food.
    Oondaunt raiders could be waiting inside the gaping darkness in the rock, but Orivon doubted it. Once they fled, they’d move far and fast, either hurrying deep into the Dark, seeking Talonnorn as swiftly as they could, or moving well away, to raid for Hairy Ones elsewhere.
    Hairy Ones . . . well, beware
this
Hairy One.
    Orivon watched the last of the hunters slip around the rocky shoulder of a hillside, heading back home. Then he gazed up at