War Maid's Choice-ARC Read Online Free Page A

at him. Sermandahknarthas zoi’Harkanath was three times Brandark’s age and the senior engineer on what had been dubbed the Gullet Tunnel, but he was also barely two thirds as tall as the Bloody Sword and his head barely topped Bahzell’s belt buckle. “Walsharno likes me. He won’t step on me without a lot better reason than your petty irritation!”
    The colossal stallion—he stood over eight feet tall at the shoulder—tilted his head, ears cocked thoughtfully. Then he reached out and shoved Brandark between the shoulder blades with his nose. Despite his dandified appearance, the hradani was a solid, thick-boned plug of muscle and gristle, with shoulders so broad he looked almost squat, in spite of his height. He easily weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, none of it fat, and no one would have called him an easily brushed aside lightweight. But the stallion weighed over two tons, and Brandark staggered forward under the “gentle” push. He turned to look over his shoulder, his expression betrayed, and Bahzell laughed.
    “Walsharno says as how he’ll always have a ‘better reason’ when it comes to stepping on such as you, little man,” he rumbled in an earthquake bass. “Mind, I think he’s after exaggerating a wee bit...but not so much as all that.”
    “Will the both of you please be quiet?” Serman demanded. “This is a very ticklish moment and—”
    “Yes, it is,” a female voice agreed tartly. “And I would be grateful if all three of you could manage to keep your mouths shut for fifteen seconds at a time! Unless you’d like the next section of this tunnel to go straight down...and begin directly underneath you!”
    Serman closed his mouth with an almost audible click, and Bahzell chuckled softly. It was a very soft chuckle, however. He didn’t really think Chanharsadahknarthi zoihan’Harkanath would suddenly open a yawning pit under his feet, but he was in no tearing hurry to test the theory. Besides, she had a point.
    Brandark contented himself with one last glower at Walsharno—who only curled his lips to show his teeth and shook his head in very horselike, mane-flipping amusement—then crossed his arms and concentrated on looking martyred. It wasn’t a very convincing performance, especially given his obvious interest in what was about to happen, and Bahzell smiled and patted Walsharno’s shoulder as he watched his friend’s long nose almost quiver in fascination.
    Quiet fell. It wasn’t really a silence, for the shouts and sounds of construction gangs came up the steadily climbing tunnel from behind them, but those noises were distant. In a way, they only made the quiet even more profound, and Chanharsa closed her eyes once more. Her hands were outstretched, palms pressed flat against the smooth, vertical wall at the end of the tunnel, and she leaned forward, resting her forehead between them. She stood that way for several minutes, her posture relaxed, yet the others could literally feel the concentration pouring off of her.
    It wasn’t the first time Bahzell had watched this same scene, but the dwarvish art of sarthnaiskarmanthar was seldom seen outside the dwarves’ subterranean cities, and like Brandark, he found it endlessly fascinating. Sarthnaiskarmanthar was the talent which truly set dwarves off from the other Races of Man and allowed them to undertake their monumental engineering projects, and they guarded their sarthnaisks (the word translated roughly as “stone herds” or “stone shepherds”) like the priceless treasures they were.
    There’d been occasions, especially during the dark and dreadful days of the Fall of Kontovar, when enslaved sarthnaisks had been valued by their captors above almost all other prisoners...and all too often driven until their talent consumed them. The dwarves had sworn that would never happen again, and any sarthnaisk was always accompanied by his personal armsman on any trip beyond the safe caverns of his—or, in this case, her