"Cherryh,.C.J.-.Morgaine.4.-.1988.-.Exiles.Gate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cherryh C J)

had looked up to see two moons, and constellations strangely warped; that night
he had first looked on a sea of black water, among drowning hills; a dawn that
had risen and showed him a land unwalled by mountains for the first time in his
life, horizons that went on forever and a sky which crushed him beneath its
weight. He blinked this ruin about him clear again, in its desolation; and the
cries of birds brought back keen memory, a presentiment of danger in the sea and
the omen of the gray gulls, and the threat of moons unnaturally large.
A third blink, and it was forest, and they were black ravens that cried, and the
stones held no present threat.
Behind them was dust, friends were long dead, and all they had known was changed
and beyond recall, although the pain of parting was for them as recent as this
morning and keen as a knife. He tried to be wise as his liege and not to think
on it.
But when they rode over the shoulder of that hill, the ruin and the forest gave
way to barren plains on their right hand, and sunset on their left. A wolf
cried, somewhere beyond the hills.
Morgaine let slip the ring of her sword-belt, letting the dragon-hilted weapon
which rode between her shoulders slide down to her side.
It had a name, that sword: Changeling. His own nameless blade was plain
arrhendur steel. Besides his sword he had a bow of arrhendur make, and a quiver
of good arrows, and a stone next his heart, in a small gray pyx, as a great lord
had given it to himЧas memory went, it had been very recent. But the worlds
shifted, the dead went to dust; and they were in a place which made that small
box no comfort to him, no more than that ill-omened blade his liege handled, on
the hilt of which her hand rested.
Birds rose up from that horizon, black specks against the setting sun at that
hour when birds would flock and quit the field; but not birds of the field,
nothing so wholesome, gathered in hills so barren.
"Death," Morgaine murmured at his side. "Carrion birds."
A wolf howled, and another answered it.

They were there again in the twilight, yellow-eyed and slope-shouldered, and
Chei ep Kantory gathered himself on his knees and gathered up the weapons he
had, which were a human bone in one hand and a length of rusty chain in the
other; he gathered himself to his feet and braced his back against the pole
which his efforts and the abrasion of the chain had cut deeply but not enough.
The iron held. The food was gone, the water-skin wrung out to its last drops of
moisture.
It would end tonight, he thought, for he could not face another day, could not
lie there racked with thirst and fever, listening to the dry rustle of wings,
the flutter and flap and the wafts of carrion-stench as a questing beak would
delve into some cranny where flesh remained. Tonight he would not be quick
enough, the jaws that scored his armor, the quick, darting advances that had
circled him last night, would find his throat and end it. Falwyn was gone, last
but himself. The pack had dragged Falwyn's body to the length of the chain and
fed and quarreled and battled while Chei sank against the post that was the
pivot and the center of all his existence. They had worried the armor to rags
among the bones; the ravens helped by day, till now there was nothing but the
bones and shreds of flesh, too little, perhaps, to content them.
"Bastards," he taunted them, but his voice was a croak like the birds', no more