David Eddings

“You’re a slave trader, then?”

Althalus shrugged deprecatingly. “It’s a living, your Highness. Slaves are a valuable commodity. I buy them in places where they’re an inconvenience and take them to places where they can be put to work to pay for their keep. Everybody benefits, really. The one who sells them to me gets gold, and the one who buys them gets laborers.”

“What do the slaves get?”

“They get fed, your Highness. A slave doesn’t have to worry about where his next meal’s coming from. He gets fed even when the crops fail or the fish aren’t biting.”

"Our philosophers tell us that slavery’s an evil.”

“I don’t concern myself with philosophy, your Highness. I take the world as I find it. I’m prepared to offer ten Perquaine gold wheats for every able-bodied young captive you’d care to sell.”

Delegating authority seems unnatural to women. First they tell you to do something, and then they keep sticking their noses into it while you’re trying to do it, and all they’re really doing is getting in the way.

“Why must they always set fires?” Bheid asked Althalus as the two of them stood on the portico of the temple waiting and watching the columns of smoke rising from various quarters of the city.

“I’m not really sure, Bheid,” Althalus confessed. “It might just be accidental. Looters are usually fairly excited, and sometimes they get careless. My best guess, though, is that the fires are being set deliberately to punish the noblemen for their bad habits.”

“That’s pure stupidity, Althalus,” Bheid objected.

“Of course it is. It’s the nature of mobs to be stupid. A mob’s only as clever as its stupidest member.”

“You’ve got some fairly radical opinions for a member of the priesthood, Bheid,” Althalus suggested.

“The goal of mankind should be justice, Althalus. In their hearts, men really want to be just and kindly, but other things get in the way. It’s the duty of the priesthood to keep man on the right course.”

“Isn’t it just a little early in the day for these dense philosophical discussions?” Althalus asked.

“It’s never too early—or too late—to learn, my son,” Bheid proclaimed sententiously.

“Now, that’s really offensive.”

Bheid gave him a mischievous little smirk. “I’m glad you liked it,” he said.

“That information is not supposed to be in the hands of the general population. Ordinary people aren’t equipped to deal with it.”

“Ordinary people are probably much wiser than you think they are, Reverend [...] Every family has a few black sheep. There’s nothing really unusual about it.

"Arums are real soldiers, and I want to hire them to train and advise the lowlanders to fight their own wars—at least this one.”

“You’re asking me to put myself out of business, Althalus,” Albron objected.

“Not really. After we’ve smashed Ghend’s armies, things should go back to normal. The princes of the low countries will still break out in rashes of ambition, and they’ll come here to Arum to hire professionals to do their fighting. It’s a matter of economics, Albron. It’s very expensive to train and maintain any army. Even when there’s no war, you have to keep feeding them. It’s cheaper in the long run to hire Arums.”

“You’re forcing me to violate one of my most sacred vows.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. We won’t do it that way then. We’ll just kill everybody in this part of Kweron instead. You’ll be standing waist-deep in blood, but your soul will be all nice and clean. Won’t that make you proud?”

“Monstrous!”

“It’s entirely up to you, Bheid. You can either be a swindler or a butcher. Take your pick.”

Wars are a summer pastime, Althalus. Politics is a year-round entertainment.

“Astonishing!” Andine said in mock amazement. “Everybody says that making speeches is difficult. I didn’t seem to have any trouble at all.”

“Any speech goes over better with musical accompaniment, Andine,” Leitha suggested. “And Eliar plays the gold keg like a world-renowned virtuoso.”

“It’s the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard,” Koleika said fervently. “I’m glad I stayed for the concert.”

“You don’t carry spears or bows?”

“They’d just get in the way, sir. A sling doesn’t weigh hardly anything, and you can find good rocks anywhere.”

“I thought the sling was just a child’s toy.”

“Oh, no, Sergeant Khalor,” Althalus told him. “I carried a sling for years myself when I was younger. It kept me eating on a regular basis.”

“Could a man kill a horse with one?”

“Easily. The bone between a horse’s eyes isn’t very thick. I haven’t used a sling for a long time, but I’m fairly certain I could drop a horse in midstride from a hundred paces.”

“That’s a little hard to swallow, Althalus."

“I’ve taken rabbits at fifty paces — and a horse is quite a bit bigger than a rabbit.”

The Queen of Night was in full voice when Althalus and the others reached the battlements on the eastern side of the city, and her catapults were hurling boulders at the walls of Mawor with a monotonous thudding sound. “I’m starting to get a bellyful of that,” Duke Nitral growled. “I spent a fortune on that marble sheathing on the outer wall, and she’s breaking it all to pieces with those accursed engines. Excuse me, gentlemen. I’m going to do something about that right now.” He went on down the parapet to a cluster of peculiar-looking engines.

“What are those things?” Eliar asked curiously.

“Nitral calls them arbalests,” Koleika replied. “They’re sort of an oversized bow. They’ll throw a spear for half a mile. Nitral and I’ve come up with a way to make life very interesting for those catapult crews out there.”

Duke Nitral barked a sharp command to the men around the arbalests, and a sheet of spears trailing fire shot out in long arcs from the high walls of Mawor.

"His father was killed in a war several years ago, and Eliar became his mother’s only support. [...] [His] mother needed his soldier’s pay to keep eating. [...] Your father was unlucky enough to get in his way while he was showing his veneration for his parents. Isn’t that sort of what you were doing when you were planning to kill him before Althalus came along?”

“It’s not the same thing at all, Bheid [...] My father was the Aryo of Osthos. Eliar’s father was just a common soldier.”

“And do you believe that Eliar loved his father less than you loved yours? We all love and revere our parents, Andine, and the peasant or common soldier loves—and grieves—as deeply as the aristocrat. You might want to think about that just a bit before you launch yourself into your next tirade.”