The Patrimony Read Online Free PDF

of endless war to the west, but most recognized the necessity and inevitability of the advance of civilization against barbarism.
    The Undying would have preferred to gain the use of western lands through treaties of alliance, as they had done a generation back with the Ahrmehnee; but, unlike the tightknit Ahrmehnee
Stahn
, the mountaineers were for the most part crude, brutish and highly fractious among themselves, though they displayed a modicum of twisted honor in their internecine feudings—and some of the clans and tribes seemed to hate other clans and tribes nearly as much as they all hated the lowlanders—they seemed to feel that treaties with non-mountaineers were made to be broken as quickly as suited them. Further, their chiefs thought nothing of claiming and selling lands not their own, so the Undying had long ago reconciled themselves to the fact that needful expansion of territory could only advance behind the point of a spear.
    Within the Confederation itself, however, there had been no warfare since the crushing of the Ehleen revolts nearly thirty years before. Within cities and towns, crime was petty and small-scale, and in the countryside, brigandage was almost unheard of. The descendants of the Ehleenee pirates who once had been the scourge of the mainland coasts now were the officers and crews of the swift oarships and far-ranging sailing ships that made the coastal waters too dangerous for any but honest merchantmen and the most suicidally foolhardy raiders.
    Save on the western frontiers, few towns or cities were still completely contained by walls. All the older, lowland urban areas had spread well beyond their walls and many had wholly or partially dismantled them. Even some of the conservative hereditary nobility had defortified their ancestral halls or even deserted the grim stone piles to live in the new-” style manor houses.
    But these nobles were not among those who had fought against the fanatic rebels of Gafnee, Morguhn and Vawn. Those nobles bided within their castellated halls, locked their gates each sundown, slept lightly and with a pillow-sword close to hand. And they distrusted all Ehleenee—for all that most of them had more than a trace of that blood in their own veins—especially the self-styled
kath-ahrohs
or Ehleenee of pure lineage.
    Such a
kath-ahrohs
house had spawned her who had been Mehleena Lohgos, ere she was taken to wife by Hwahlruh, chief of Sanderz and
Thoheeks
of Vawn; and loud, long and fierce had been remonstrations of his Kindred at word of the projected match. But he was a stubborn man; moreover was he the son and grandson of chiefs and unaccustomed to tamely submitting to the bidding of his subchiefs. Also, he had the full support of his premier wife, the Lady Mahrnee— widow of the chief and
Thoheeks of
Morguhn, ere she wed her second husband—and against those two the combined Sanderz Kin stood no slightest chance, for all their ranting and raving of Ehleen plots, past, present and future.
    But before her bridal year was spent, Mehleena was first and only wife, Lady Mahrnee being suddenly taken with a wasting sickness which claimed her life within two months of its onset. The servants had all loved and respected their dead mistress as cordially as they had quickly learned to hate and fear Lady Mehleena, and there were whisperings of witchcraft and poison. However, the improvable charges remained but the mutterings of older servants.
    However, the mutterings increased as ill fortune seemed to stalk the house of Sanderz. In his twelfth year, Gilbuht Sanderz, eldest son of the chief and heir presumptive, drowned in the lake, for all that he had been an excellent swimmer. And that same year, his twin, Ahl, was blinded and almost killed in a freak accident. The mutterings had it that neither “accident” had occurred until
after
Mehleena had been delivered of her firstborn son, dark little Myron.
    With one older brother dead and another disqualified for any clan