Khudan's bone bow

The first thing anyone noticed about it was that it was not wood. Unstrung it is an off-white stave taller than most men, bone fused along its length, and a physician’s eye read it as more than one bone joined to make the draw, probably two femurs. It is backed with sinew and banded at intervals in a bronze-colored metal. The pattern is an eastern Karruk one, called an orc bow in places that have never seen either, and it is built to the scale of the bugbear who carries it. It seldom finds the gap in a man’s armor, but when it does the wound is tripled, and the arrows it throws are longer than anything the party had been shot with before.

From a rooftop across a Haudh-Gwenn street it put an arrow through Aldo and, a round later, landed the hardest single blow anyone has ever landed on Koa.

Khudan set it down himself when he surrendered. Mikhail insisted on taking it anyway, and Koa took it off him at Mikhail’s word; it came away grudgingly. Until that moment the two of them had been a contract and a target, which is a thing a professional can put down. As Khudan said afterward, there were feelings now. Koa was exempt and Aldo was exempt. It was Mikhail alone.

His quiver and short sword were kept, and so was a particularly fine boot dagger, which he gave up to save face once the bow was already gone. Mikhail handed the bow back as an apology before the negotiating started, and Khudan took it, and it mended nothing. He stayed hostile through the terms, the exile and the thirty gold that followed.