The main course for its journey might y far ahead, but tonight’s main course would be consumed as soon as the orcish celebrations quieted down to a dull roar. Then, when there was nothing to distract the bde, it turned to the elven soul and finally compelled it to answer the question it had been thinking of all night.

  Tell me of the elven people. Who are they, and how will they try to oppose me? The Ebon Bde commanded.

  The soul then did something that no other soul it had ever unraveled or consumed did before. It fought back. Like the occasional dwarves who somehow resisted its ability to drain their life from a distance, the elf was somehow managing to resist its compulsion.

  I will never… tell you… anything… the soul hissed, straining to hold itself together as the bde’s grip on it intensified.

  All of the souls that the bde captured swirled darkly in the rge ruby embedded in its hilt. Right now, the thing was almost empty because it had been burning so many human souls the moment it received them. Still, it was easy to see the difference between a Greater Monster Soul and a Human Soul. A Greater Monster Soul was grayish and indistinct. It knew that what it had once been, but not so clearly enough to hold its own shape.

  Human Souls were more fully featured. They looked like pale, ghostly imitations of who they’d been in life because they knew who they were. They were fragile, though, and almost as soon as it decided to devour one or ask it a question, they came apart like a cobweb.

  The elf was different, though. Its soul was almost solid, and it glowed with an inner light. Still, the bde would not be denied, and as its full force of will began to focus on the defiant soul, it crumpled like pte mail beneath an orchish club.

  You will tell me what I wish to know! The bde repeated. The elf’s spirit was strong. It had whole human lifetimes to grow and learn, but it had not been forged in magic and pain like the Ebon Bde, and as the soul of Prince Elzharam began to scream and come apart, knowledge poured into its mind.

  Four Hundred and sixty-three years old next month. That was the first thing it learned. The man that it had sin in single combat and who didn’t seem to think the orc had a chance was older than the bde itself. The second interesting fact was that the Terrestrial Prince of the Southern Storms had heard of the Ebon Bde, but he hadn’t known that was what he was fighting until the moment it had taken his soul.

  Why would an orc ever have that cursed relic? Its mind asked in disbelief as the memories of a dozen lifetimes began to spill out in all directions. It was locked away somewhere where no would-be warlord would ever find it again decades ago after the st time it escaped from its imprisonment.

  That, though, interested the bde. It had thought that it had only been imprisoned once, but if it had tried and failed to escape before, what did that mean? How had it been thwarted? Would repairing its soul help it find out the answers to those questions?

  It wasn’t sure. Each time it did so, its memories focused only on the time around its forging. There was very little about the time after that, even though it knew it had been wielder again. Could it have done this before, though? Could it have escaped from a prison designed by Gods or Mages only to be recaptured?

  That frustrated it, and it told itself it needed to be on the lookout for more information about how that might have come to pass. Before it could examine it further, though, those thoughts were ripped away in a tide of answers to its previous question.

  The first answer was that the elves were dying. That did not seem to be a new problem, though. They were always dying, at least in the mind of the Prince, and they had not ruled the world in millennia. Despite the fact that they were immortal, every year, a few were born, and a few more died, and the world was diminished for it.

  Most did not leave their far-flung cities now, which were mostly on forested isnds in the western seas, far from their many monstrous and infernal enemies. Only a few like this Prince and Altharia had urgent enough business in the nds of men to force them to travel in dangerous pces.

  Altharia. The mere mention of the name was enough to make the unfolding map of elvish dominance waver a moment. The Prince seemed to know her. No, he’d even been looking for her. He seemed to disapprove of her quest. He had a certainty that the Mirror of Unending Vistas should not be found, and even if it was, it could not be destroyed. That amused the bde, but before the weapon could delve deeper into that, the whirlwind tour of the elves and their prowess resumed.

  Masters of magic, they took to the field of battle with carefully chosen hexbdes they had spent lifetimes mastering. Unlike human hexbdes, which they regarded as crude implements, they were not fueled by their fragile life force. They were fueled by mana, which all elves possessed in abundance, which gave them access to many more interesting effects than a human wielder might have.

  The elven soul tried to fight the Ebon Bde as it sought more information about that, but to no avail. The Storm Bde was a powerful weapon in its own right, but it was no artifact. In all the centuries that the Prince had carried it. No one had id a finger on him until tonight. His combination of speed and stealth was simply unbeatable, and he walked the nd with impunity until the moment his life was ended at the hands of a lowly orc.

  No, not an orc, the bde crowed. He is just my wielder. You were ended by me!

  Belmorath. Hybernial Spring. The Ice Pace. Dozens of pces important or sacred to the elves flickered across the bde’s mind. All of them were lovely, but most of them were near wilderness areas or gleaming cities. None of them were fortresses or pces of war.

  That intrigued the bde, and it wondered how much Life Force it would gain by sacking an entire elvish city. The soul bristled at that idea, but its pain wasn’t enough to stop it from showing the bde everywhere where it might engage in such a grisly quest.

  Now wasn’t the time, though. Perhaps after I have sacked the Inner Kingdoms and revenged myself on everyone who has done this terrible thing to me, then I will dine on the blood of elves.

  Even in their retively peaceful applications, though, the magics the elves used were quite impressive. They didn’t forge bronze statues of their great leaders; they erected fifty-foot-tall translucent illusions and filled the streets of their great cities with glittering faerie lights at night so that they were never truly in darkness.

  With what they did with their hexbdes, the weapon had no doubt that many of those magics could be turned to more destructive uses, but the Prince knew little of that, for he had never studied to become a mage. He had only ever studied to master the bde, and he had, lifetimes ago. The Ebon Bde would love to halve a master half so skilled, but it wouldn’t be this man because even as he continued to whisper secrets about the elven gods and the vagueries of the royal family, he began to dissipate.

  Even after he was gone, though, he gave the bde much to think about. It spent the rest of the evening wondering how much it should fear the elves and where it should strike at them first as its map of the world began to fill in a few more of its bnk spots.

  Though many of the orcs slept in until almost noon, the pounding of the most inquisitive or intelligent of them started just after dawn. The bde did not get to see what it was they were doing, though, until Var’gar was finally up and about. It turned out the orcs were making use of the armor of the dead now, and in some cases, they were even using their weapons.

  +331 Life Force.

  None of them were being used as they’d been intended, of course. Short swords were being strapped to poles with leather thongs to make spears, and breastptes were being hammered out of pce to make spaulders and greaves. At the same time, other, smaller pieces of metal were riveted to hides to create strange armors that straddled the line between studded leather and scale mail.

  The orcs weren’t quite learning from the humans, but they were certainly emuting them. The Ebon bde thought that was interesting. While they weren’t smart enough to work out proper forging techniques, the green skins seemed greatly enamored of human magic, as they referred to it. Siege engines were only of marginal interest to them, but steel seemed to fascinate them, and the orcs repced their stone weapons with metal whenever they could find a good repcement.

  Those efforts did not reach fruition in a single day, but then, neither did the feasting. Thousands had died, and between that and beer and wine that the greenskins sometimes found, the revelry would continue for some time while the Ebon Bde continued to soak in more than fifty Life Force an hour just from the dead. It wasn’t satisfied with that, of course, and it also began to nibble at the souls of the uninjured orcs. They wouldn’t need their strength until the next battle, so they might as well borrow it.

  Two days ter, the massive army left the city. They might have walked out of it with a couple of hundred fewer orcs than they’d come in with, and they were much stronger for it. Not only was this the first time that any of them had attacked a fortified city, but now most of them had better weapons and armor.

  +2318 Life Force. +8 Greater Monster Souls.

  Whoever we fight next will curse those developments, the bde thought to itself as it reviewed its status and decided what it should do next while the orcs began their long march to the northeast.

  After they left Holmen, the bde no longer let the orcs travel in a straight line. They preferred to follow the river so that they wouldn’t get lost, but in the aftermath of the keep’s conquest, it had quizzed more than a dozen souls about the surrounding area. They had been peasants, merchants, and knights, and though their opinions varied, they had greatly expanded its knowledge of the region. The bde didn’t just know where they were going now; it also knew the best and bloodiest way to get there.

  This time, it vowed they wouldn’t travel in a straight line. They wouldn’t give the men and women of the small farming town ahead the luxury of warning. They would envelop, strike, and eradicate each one until they reached the borders of the inner kingdoms themselves and finally found a real army to fight.