The Lore Anthology: Lore of the Underlings: Episodes 1 - 5 Read Online Free PDF

but kept his back to the Finder behind him. He now stood just a torch’s length from John Cap, near enough to raise the failing flames he held to the young man’s face. He squinted hard at the stranger , studying him.
    John Ca p squeezed his hand into a fist but held still, steady as stone.
    From nearby came a voice. “No.” The voice was female, firm but calm. “I am the first.”
    Fyryx turned his torch to the sound and found another tall stranger, this one the narrow young woman with hair of wheaten gold and eyes the green of pom wine. He raised a red brow, the one on his right, then sidestepped left for a better look.
    From toe to top he measured her make, lingering longest on the timeless beauty of her face. Her clothes, like those of her two companions, were nothing uncommon. In keeping with the ways of old, they wore garments of limberwood peeled from young trunks in soft supple sheets, dyed in browns and greens, and sewn. She herself was dressed plainly in a maid’s cheesing frock, which appeared not to fit quite right, and a pair of weathered leg leathers that wrapped her feet as footings. But something in her look, her skin…
    Fyryx watched a lone drop of rain fall upon her high, smooth cheek, which glowed pale gray in the low light of the ironfire. The drop rolled down toward her perfect purple lips then vanished before it reached them.
    She opened her mouth, parting those lips to speak. But Bylo had a different plan.
    “Beware her trickling tongue!” he howled. “I warn you — dear, dear brother Treasuror — already did this one try to sow a seedy, weedy row.” In disgust, he stopped to cough up a thick ball of phlegm from his raspy throat, but it hung bloody black on his lip. So Bylo scooped the phlegm in the crook of his fetid finger and flung it flush at the young maid’s head, though it somehow misappeared behind her in the empty space the trio made. “Look how pretty they pose there. Foreign fakes. Even now they hide another, a toadstool that fouls the soil they shield…”
    “It is true,” avowed the elderwoman, crowing loud as a warnbird to be heard across the grassy gap. “Even my aged eyes see it. Lie upon lie upon lie. There is some filthy game afoot — a dark trick that they play on us in league with a devil of their doing, a beast of flesh that flies. And one of the unwanted too. The dirty waif of a leaver, you no doubt know the girl. She acts spellbound by this evil skin. One masks, the other mocks. These are the strangers we’ve long learned to fear. They honor neither the bile of the Finder nor the blood of your own family, embodied by your brother’s sons who alone stood bravely today. These are the strangers from without whom the Semperors said would come.”
    Fyryx had tired of the talk and raised his hand to silence them both. “And so, treasured ones…” he said in a voice cold with disappointment that seemed to be timed to a downfall of rain, “Why do they still live?”
    The elderwoman’s shoulders sank. Her face deflated to a jowlful of folds. She knew — how well she knew. Bylo too. Eyes down, he found the ground as engrossing as ever. And folk further back looked nervously about, pointing fingers at their neighbors.
    “Shame on you!”
    “You make me ill.”
    “Yellow-fellow!”
    “Spineless swill.”
    “You could have axed them, Ixit.”
    “Bloody Boxbo. Who’d you kill?”
    As his question hung on the air unanswered, Fyryx turned to walk away. With a flick of the wrist he summoned the nearest and most menacing of the Guard — a warrior clad in all of an armor well-waxed, black, and thick, and one who’d been watching like a bloodhawk from astride a great, brutish bull chevox.
    “Syar-ull! See to it.”
    They seemed as one these two, this team of animal and man, with eyes that flashed unworldly through the dark night’s rainy veil. The bull let out a thunderous snort and pounded the puddling ground hard using its wide front hoof.  The Guard mashed