The Steel Remains
C H A P T E R 1
When a man you know to be of sound mind tells you his recently deceased mother has just tried to climb in his bedroom window and eat him, you only have two basic options. You can smell his breath, take his pulse, and check his pupils to see if he’s ingested anything nasty, or you can believe him. Ringil had already tried the first course of action with Bashka the Schoolmaster and to no avail, so he put down his pint with an elaborate sigh and went to get his broadsword.
“Not this again,” he was heard to mutter as he pushed through into
the residents’ bar.
A yard and a half of tempered Kiriath steel, Ringil’s broadsword
hung above the fireplace in a scabbard woven from alloys that men had
no names for, though any Kiriath child could have identified them from
age five upward. The sword itself also had a name in the Kiriath tongue,
as did all Kiriath- forged weapons, but it was an ornate title that lost a lot
in translation. “Welcomed in the Home of Ravens and Other Scavengers
in the Wake of Warriors” was about as close as Archeth had been able to
render it, so Ringil ...
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