"David,.Peter.-.Sir.Apropos.2.-.Woad.To.Wuin" - читать интересную книгу автора (David Peter)

hold the upper corners of the card securely on the back of your hand, between
your fingers, and then snap it quickly forward. The card seems to have come out
of nowhere. As noted, not genuine magic, but sometimes we measure the quality of
life's passage by just how much of an assortment of mindless pastimes we develop
to entertain ourselves through it.
In terms of hunting, at first I stuck to small animals. But I tired quickly of a
steady diet of rabbit and squirrel. So I redesigned and reconfigured the traps
for bigger bait, hoping to snag a small deer or perhaps even a straying unicorn.
Immortal or not, such creatures could still die from a quickly snapped neck, and
such were my traps intended for. Naturally I set them nowhere near the roads
that occasional travelers might use, lest an unfortunate accident occur.
Yet it happened anyway.
I was moving through the forest one day with my customary stealth. It may sound
boastful or vain glorious, but when I elect not to be detected in the woods, it
is nigh unto impossible to find me. It is one of the few instances, outside of
swimming, where my lame leg does not deter me. Stealth does not arise from
speed, but from economy of motion. A high-speed marathon would leave me
hopelessly abandoned, but if you were seeking someone to move at a snail's pace
for days on end, I was your man.
Approaching one of my more crafty noose traps, I suddenly heard a startled and
truncated yelp from ahead. It was definitely of a human variety of noise. It
took me a moment to realize whence the sound had comeЧnamely from my trapЧand
but a moment more to grasp, with horror, the likely significance of it.
Disdaining silence, I practically crashed through the underbrush, hoping there
was time to salvage the situation. 'Twas not to be. Instead I came upon a scene
utterly dismaying . . . and yet also utterly fascinating in a perverse way, and
I do mean perverse.
The small pile of food which had served as bait within the snare now lay
scattered about. The noose was drawn taut, dangling about three and a half feet
in the air. And suspended from the noose itself, its feet clear of the ground by
a good six inches, was the aforementioned dwarf.
It was a damned odd-looking thing. Its head was slumped to one side. It was
round, with features that looked fairly squashed, as if someone had sat on its
face. Its arms were the disproportionate length so common to its kind, but its
legs were longer and less bow-shaped than one customarily saw in such creatures.
Its feet were odder still. At first I thought it was wearing hairy slippers of
some sort, but then realized that it was barefoot and simply had the most
hirsute pedal extremities of any creature I'd ever seen that didn't also possess
a tail.
It also sported an extremely sizable bulge in its loins which even its
loose-fitting breeches couldn't obscure. I'd never been present at a hanging,
but had heard that the victims of such incidents usually had themselves a fairly
healthy protuberance at the moment of death, which had always struck me as
somewhat puzzling. If anything could be deemed a sure killer of arousal, it was
having your neck snapped. But here was I, first-hand witness to the phenomenon,
and so knew it to be true. Who would have thought?
I still felt some measure of guilt for the passing creature's untimely demise,
but there wasn't much I could do about it after the fact. So instead I proceeded
to do the most reasonable thing one could under the circumstances: I checked him
over for valuables. I didn't bother to cut him down; gruesome as his situation