"Cook, Glen - Black Company 07 - The Bleak Season" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cook Glen)

BLEAK SEASONS

by Glen Cook

The Sixth Chronicle of the Black Company


Incessant wind sweeps the plain. It mutters across grey pavements that sweep
from horizon to horizon. It sings around scattered black pillars, a chorus of
ghosts. It tumbles leaves and scatters dust come from afar. It teases the hair
of a corpse that has lain undisturbed for a generation, mummifying. Impishly,
the gale tosses a leaf into the cadaverТs silently screaming mouth, tugs it away
again. The wind carries the breath of winter. Lightning leaps from pillar to
ebon pillar like a child skittering from base to base in a game of tag. For a
moment there is color on that spectral plain. The pillars might be mistaken for
relics of a fallen city. They are not. They are too few and too randomly placed.
Nor has a one ever fallen, though many have been gnawed deeply by the teeth of
the hungry wind.



Chapter 1


. . . fragments . . .
. . . just blackened fragments, crumbling between my fingers.
Browned page corners that reveal half a dozen words in a crabbed hand, their
context no longer known.
All that remains of two volumes of the Annals. A thousand hours of labor. Four
years of history. Gone forever.
Or are they? I do not want to go back. I do not want to relive the horror. I do
not want to reclaim the pain. There is pain too deep to withstand right here,
right now. There is no way to recapture the totality of that awfulness, anyway.
The mind and heart, safely over to the farther shore, simply refuse to encompass
the enormity of the voyage.
And there is no time. There is a war on.
Always there is a war on.
Uncle Doj wants something. Just as well to stop now. Teardrops make the ink run.
He is going to make me drink some strange philtre.
Fragments . . .
. . . all around, fragments of my work, my life, my love and my pain, scattered
in this bleak season . . .
And in the darkness, shards of time.


Chapter 2

Hey, there! Welcome to the city of the dead. DonТt mind those guys staring.