“Lord Olmstead?” Orum said, looking around the room and half-expecting to find some much larger, muscled man with a thick mane of hair and a rugged beard to boot. Someone whose appearance matched the gruff voice and the brutal nature of the mansion’s adornments.

“Who else would I be?” the lord said, in that same bark that made Orum want to take several steps back. He managed to simply freeze in place, his tongue fumbling inside his mouth to find an appropriate response.

“No one, of course.”

“You think I’m a ‘no one’? Is it because of my stature? I’ll have you know, I’ve hunted and killed the world’s most deadly beasts, monsters that would devour you in a single bite. Did you see the mamoothen in my study? The curaccan in the corridor? I’ll have you know that, at this very moment, you’re standing on the hide of a mature female obrivvoro. Do you know how many obrivvoro have been spotted in the wild?” Orum hadn’t the faintest idea what an obrivvoro was, and in truth whatever he was standing on looked like any other brown carpet he’d ever seen, but luckily the man didn’t seem to expect an answer to any of his rapid-fire questions. “Only one,” he continued. “And now she’s dead, being stood upon. Because of me.” He said all of this with unfiltered pride. To a humble man like Orum, it felt very much like bragging. Also, something about killing the only one left of a sort of creature, whatever that creature was, felt undeniably wrong to him. Especially if the only point of such a killing was to make a carpet.

“Why did you kill the…obrivio?” he asked, struggling to get the name right.

“Obrivvoro,” the man corrected, impatience in his tone. He spoke around the pipe, its stem clamped firmly between his teeth. “Why? Are you daft or just stupid?” It was another question to which Orum had no answer, mostly because the last time he checked, those two words were synonyms of each other. “Why wouldn’t I kill the obrivvoro? is the better question. And the only answer is that there is no answer. I’m a hunter, man, and a hunter must hunt. Otherwise, I might as well kill myself right here and now.” Having uttered that statement, the short-statured man wrenched one of the many daggers from the table and pressed its tip to his heart, gripping the handle with two hands. His teeth ground together, as though preparing for a gritty task, and then…