"Brooks, Terry - First King of Shannara" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brooks Terry)

The
Tall
of
yaranor




The old man just appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.
The Borderman was watching for him, sitting well back
within the concealing shadows of a spreading hardwood
high on a hillside overlooking the whole of the Streleheim and the
trails leading out of it, everything clearly visible in the light of a
full moon for at least ten miles, and he still didn't see him. It was
unnerving and vaguely embarrassing, and the fact that it happened
this way every time didn't make it any more palatable. How did
the old man do it? The Borderman had spent almost the whole of
his life in this country, kept alive by his wits and experience. He
saw things that others did not even know were there. He could
read the movements of animals from their passage through tall
grass. He could tell you how far ahead of him they were and how
fast they were traveling. But he could not spy out the old man on
the clearest night and the broadest plain, even when he knew to
look for him.

It did not help matters that the old man easily found him.
Moving quite deliberately off the trail, he came toward the Bor-
derman with slow, measured strides, head lowered slightly, eyes
tilted up out of the shadow of his cowl. He wore black, like all the
Druids, cloaked and hooded, wrapped darker than the shadows
he passed through. He was not a big man, neither tall nor well
muscled, but he gave the impression of being hard and fixed of
purpose. His eyes, when visible, were vaguely green. But at times
they seemed as white as bone, tooЧnow, especially, when night
stole away colors and reduced all things to shades of gray. They
gleamed like an animal's caught in a fragment of lightЧferal,
piercing, hypnotic. Light illuminated the old man's face as
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4 First King of Shannara

well, carving out the deep lines that creased it from forehead to
chin, playing across the ridges and valleys of the ancient skin. The
old man's hair and beard were gray going fast toward white,
the strands wispy and thin like tangled spiderwebs.

The Borderman gave it up and climbed slowly to his feet. He
was tall, rangy, and broad-shouldered, his dark hair worn long and
tied back, his brown eyes sharp and steady, his lean face all planes
and angles, but handsome in a rough sort of way.