Dark Vengeance Read Online Free PDF Page A

heed:
always
cast a second whorl, hidden by your main one—and you must take care to keep it so—to do its own task . . . under your bidding, of course.”
    â€œSo this’ll let me spy on anyone I please?” Aloun’s grin was gleeful. “Even here in Ouvahlor?”
    The elder Watcher wasn’t smiling. “Yes. Though there are many who have the means to detect your scrutiny, and if they also have the suspicion to use it . . .”
    â€œSuch a whorl can betray me,” Aloun replied, nodding as his grin faded. “Still, this is a formidable tool, a weapon where I hadnone before. Have my thanks, Luell. For trusting me with this, too.”
    The elder Watcher bowed. “As I said, it is time for you to have it.
Not
as a plaything, to entertain you by your peerings-from-afar at unclad shes or the pratfalls of foes, but as something that just might let you save your own skin. Not from the foes of Ouvahlor, but from those of our city who wish us ill.”
    â€œThe Anointed of Coldheart.”
    â€œAnd others.”
    â€œThere are others?”
    Luelldar sighed, shook his head wearily, and told the whirling whorl around them, “I have considerably more work to do, I see.”
    Â 
    Before Ouvahlor’s armies had attacked Talonnorn, House Evendoom had stood apart from the rest of the city, behind its own high walls and forbiddingly magnificent gates, gardens that Nifl of the Araed could only glimpse from afar and dream of treading rising in gentle, slave-shaped slopes up to the soaring walls and towers of the Eventowers itself.
    Yet those armies had come, and their dung-worms with them, and much had been hurled down and despoiled. Now the space between the crowded, winding streets of the Araed and the doors of the shattered and hastily patched Eventowers was a vast, uneven forecourt of trodden dirt, bare cavern stone, and broken-stone paving, the largest open space within the city except for the jagged rock fringes around the edges of the vast cavern that held Talonnorn.
    Usually that forecourt was empty of all but a few wandering Nifl—and an ever-vigilant guard of Evendoom warblades, who advanced threateningly on anyone they deemed to not have a good reason for approaching the Eventowers; House Evendoom had no intention of allowing the Araed to expand to reach their very front doorstep.
    Just now, however, in the wake of the horn-calls, the forecourtwas filling up with Niflghar, with more converging on it from all over Talonnorn. In front of the Eventowers, warblades and servants wearing the Black Flame of Evendoom were standing seven or more deep, wearing weapons and looking sternly ready to use them. The guard that customarily swept unwanted arrivals back out of the forecourt seemed to have melted away, or receded back into this unprecedented wall of Evendoom livery.
    Their departure left the forecourt to a milling, ever-thickening crowd of Nifl who’d come to stare up at the podium House Evendoom slaves had recently erected at the Eventowers end of the forecourt: a towering, upswept stone staircase to nothing, which ended in a platform high above the forecourt. Jalandral Evendoom was wont to declaim thunderous speeches from it, denouncing all who disagreed with his dream of one lord to rule over all Talonnorn, and restore the city’s vaunted greatness. Though no one stood atop it now—and grim Evendoom warriors and spellrobes on its stairs kept matters that way—no one doubted that the horns meant Jalandral Evendoom intended to proclaim something important from it shortly.
    Tongues were busy speculating as to just what that announcement would be, but the owner of every last one of them knew what the eloquent Lord Evendoom was striving toward: establishing himself as ruler of Talonnorn, to rule the city as the fabled Yaundril had once lorded it over the lost Nifl city of Murkalandorn, or as Devaurre the Darkqueen had ruled the distant Niflghar