Dark Vengeance by Ed Greenwood

the starry sky, to fix its awesome array in his mind to revisit later.
    A sudden movement brought him back to the rocks around him, sword out. It was Harkon, with a sack.
    â€œFrom Larane. The meat left over from this night, and all the cheese in her larder. Meljarra came all this way with it cooking; can you believe it?”
    Orivon smiled. “Meljarra can do anything. She just lacks enough very deaf and very patient folk to lord it over. Don’t tell her that last part.”
    Harkon’s teeth flashed suddenly in the darkness. “I won’t, fear not. If you’re safely down fighting nightskins where she can’t get at you, ’tis
me
she’ll savage.”
    Orivon nodded, looking at the faint beginnings of coming dawn on the horizon. “Tell Larane thanks, and I’ll bring back her lost ones
and
kill a score of nightskins for each. It may take me some time.”
    Harkon said quietly, “Orlkettle thanks you, Orivon Firefist. You have given us hope.”
    â€œThat’s a great thing,” Orivon replied, “but I intend to return with more than that. Brith. Reldaera.”
    He turned and stepped into the cave.
    A few paces in, Harkon heard him mutter, “Aumril.”
    Then Harkon heard the forge-giant’s quiet voice again, coming from a little farther off. “Kalamae.”
    Harkon stood listening a long time at the cleft where the deeper darkness had swallowed Orivon Firefist, but if the onetime slave of the nightskins said anything more, he didn’t hear it.

4
Scheming, Bloodletting, and Endless Spite
    Six houses rule Talonnorn
That knows no end to their spite
The Holy of Olone the deadly seventh
So revere the Ice
The Ever-Ice that endures
And be free of such foolishness
And self-serving venom
At least until Talonnorn seeks to conquer here.
    â€”
old saying of Ouvahlor
    S earing magical fire spat from the crones’ scepters in great stabbing lances of bright light, needles of blinding brilliance that thrust at the wheeling, swooping darkwings of the Hunt.
    Transfixed and aflame, one of those fearsome beasts tumbled out of the air, shredded black wings curled up and flapping. Another screamed, scorched and riderless, and fled wildly away across the cavern.
    Yet the flying Hunt wasn’t toothless. One rider had a scepter of his own; its first strike blasted one of the two crones standingwith Jalandral Evendoom right off the podium. She made not a sound on her fall into the Nifl-crowded forecourt below, but that was probably because she fell in several tumbling pieces.
    The other crone shrieked in fearful rage—and then in pain, as a second scepter-bolt lashed along her arm, baring it not only of garments, but of skin.
    Then another scepter flashed, and the scepter-wielding Hunt rider spun headless from his saddle, his weapon spinning harmlessly down to land somewhere amid the turrets of the Eventowers.
    Jalandral Evendoom smiled, hefted the scepter no one knew he’d had, and slid it back into his sleeve again.
    â€œKlaerra,” he told the empty air pleasantly, watching another Hunt rider lean down with a long, barbed whip and lay open the face of the last burned crone,
“Now
.
”
    As if in reply, the air above the Eventowers blossomed into a vast, eerie blue glow, so vivid and splendid that the crowd of assembled Nifl gasped in almost perfect unison.
    From out of that thrilling blue cloud more darkwings came flying fast—every one ridden by an armored Niflghar with a longlance glittering under his arm!
    A second Hunt, swooping out of the heart of the spell that had brought them there, fell upon the flying Hunt in savage battle, spearing Hunt riders out of their saddles and slamming their darkwings head-on into anyone swooping too close to Jalandral Evendoom.
    Who stood watching with a triumphant smile on his face, as his own hitherto-secret Hunt, which he’d trained in hiding for precisely this task, butchered the famous flying