"Cook, Glen - The Black Company 07 - Black Seasons (1)" - 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.


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.


2
Hey, there! Welcome to the city of the dead. DonТt mind those guys staring. Ghosts donТt see a lot of strangers, at least of a friendly persuasion. YouТre right. They do look hungry. That happens during these siege things.

Try not to look too much like a lamb roast.

Think thatТs a joke? Stay away from the Nar.

Welcome to Dejagore, what the Taglians call this deathtrap. The teeny brown Shadowlanders the Black Company grabbed it from call it Stormgard. People who actually live here always called it Jaicur even when that was a crime. And who knows what the Nyueng Bao call it. And who cares, eh? They arenТt talking and they arenТt part of the equation anyway.

ThatТs one of them. That rascal there, no meat on him and a skull face. Everybody around here is some shade of brown but theirs is different. It has a grey cast to it. Almost deathly. You wonТt mistake a Nyueng Bao for anything else.

Their eyes are like polished coal no fire will ever warm.

That noise?

Sounds like Mogaba, the Nar and the First Legion rooting out Shadowlanders again. Some get inside almost every night. They are like field mice. You just canТt get rid of them all.