"Denning, Troy - Forgotten Realms - Legacy of the Draw 2 - Starless Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Denning Troy)

"Stupid priests!" the dwarf king said more forcefully.
"Yeah!" Pwent readily agreed.
"Me king, ye've set two patrols off to Silverymoon, and another north o' the city/' Dagna tried to reason. "And ye've got half me soldiers walking the tunnels below."
"And I'll be sending the other half if them thaf s there don't show me the way!" Bruenor roared.
Regis, still standing unnoticed by the door, was beginning to catch on, and he wasn't displeased by what he was seeing. BruenorЧand it seemed like the old Bruenor once more!Чwas moving heaven and earth to find Drizzt and Catti-brie. The old dwarf had stoked his inner fires!
"But there are a thousand separate tunnels down there," Dagna argued. "And some may take a week to explore before we learn that they're dead ends."
"Then send down a thousand dwarves!" Bruenor growled at him. He stalked past the chair again, then skidded to a stopЧand Pwent bounced into his backЧas he regarded the halfling.
"What're ye looking at?" Bruenor demanded when he noticed Regis's wide-eyed stare.
Regis would have liked to say, "At my oldest friend," but he merely shrugged instead. For an instant, he caught a flash of anger in the dwarf's one blue-gray eye, and he thought that Bruenor was leaning toward him, perhaps fighting an inner urge to rush over and throttle him. But the dwarf calmed and slid into his throne.
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Regis cautiously approached, studying Bruenor and taking little heed of pragmatic Dagna's claims that there was no way to catch up with the two wayfaring friends. Regis heard enough to figure that Dagna wasn't too worried for Drizzt and Catti-brie, and that didn't surprise him much, since the crusty dwarf wasn't overly fond of anyone who wasn't a dwarf.
"If we had the damned cat," Bruenor began, and again came that flash of anger as he regarded the halfling. Regis put his hands behind his back and bowed his head.
"Or me damned locket!" Bruenor roared. "Where in the Nine Hells did I put me damned locket?"
Regis winced at every roaring outburst, but Bruenor's anger did not change his feelings that he had done the right thing in assisting Catti-brie, and in sending Guenhwyvar along with her.
And, though he half expected Bruenor to punch him in the face at any moment, it did not change the halfling's feelings that he was glad to see Bruenor full of life again.
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Chapter 9
CAGED
lodding along a slow and rocky trail, they had to walk the horses more than ride them. Every passing inch tormented Catti-brie. She had seen the light of a campfire the previous night and knew in her heart that it had been Drizzt. She had gone straight to her horse, meaning to saddle up and head out, using the light as a beacon to the drew, but Fret had stopped her, explaining that the magical horseshoes that their mounts wore did not protect the beasts from exhaustion. He reminded her, too, of the dangers she would likely encounter in the mountains at night.
Catti-brie had gone back to her own fire then, thoroughly miserable. She considered calling for Guenhwyvar and sending the panther out for Drizzt, but shook the notion away. The campfire was just a dot somewhere on the higher trails, many miles away, and she had no way of knowing, rationally, that it was indeed Drizzt.
Now, though, crossing along the higher trails, making their steady but painfully slow way in that very same direction, Catti-brie feared that she had erred. She watched Fret,
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scratching his white beard, looking this way and that at the unremarkable landscape, and wished they had that campfire to guide them.
"We will get there!" the tidy dwarf often said to her, looking back into her disgusted expression.
Morning turned into afternoon; long shadows drifted across the landscape.
"We must make camp," Fret announced as twilight descended.
"We're going on," Catti-brie argued. "If that was Drizzf s fire, then he's a day up on us already, no matter for yer magical horseshoes!"
"I cannot hope to find the cave in the darkness!" the dwarf retorted. "We could find a giant, or a troll, perhaps, and I'm sure that many wolves will be about, but a cave?" Looking into Catti-brie's deepening scowl, Fret began to ponder the wisdom of his sarcasm.
"Oh, all right!" the tidy dwarf^cried. "We will keep looking until the night is full."
They pressed on, until Catti-brie could hardly see her horse walking beside her and Fref s pony nearly stumbled over the edge of a ravine. Finally, even stubborn Catti-brie had to relent and agree to make camp.
After they had settled in, she went and found a tree, a tall pine, and climbed nearly to its top to keep her vigil. If the light of a campfire came up, the young woman determined, she would set out, or would at least send the panther.
There were no campfires that night.
As soon as the dawn's light permitted, the two set off again. Barely an hour out, Fret clapped his clean hands together excitedly, thinking that he had found a familiar trail. "We are not far," he promised.
Up and down went the trail, into rocky, tree-filled valleys, and up again across bare, windswept stone. Fret tethered his pony to a tree branch and led the way up the steep side of one mound, telling Catti-brie that they had found the place, only to discover, two hours of climbing later, that they had scaled the wrong mountain.
In midafternoon they discovered that Fret's earlier
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promise that they were "not far," was accurate. When he had made that statement, the cave the dwarf sought was no more than half a mile from their location. But finding a specific cave in mountain territory is no easy task, even for a dwarf, and Fret had been to the place only onceЧnearly twenty years before.
He found it, finally, as the shadows again grew long in the mountains. Catti-brie shook her head as she examined the entrance and the fire pit that had been used two nights before. The embers had been tended with great care, such as a ranger might do.
"He was here," the young woman said to the dwarf, "two nights ago." Catti-brie rose from the fire pit and brushed her thick auburn locks back from her face, eyeing the dwarf as though he was to blame. She looked out from the cave, back across the mountains, to where they had been, to the location from which they had seen this very fire.
"We could not have gotten here that night," the dwarf answered. "You could have run off, or ridden off, into the darkness with all speed, andЧ"
"The firelight would've shown us through," Catti-brie interrupted.
"For how long?" the dwarf demanded. "We found one vantage point, one hole through the towering peaks. As soon as we went into a ravine, or crossed close to the side of a mountain, the light would have been lost to us. Then where would we be, stubborn daughter of Bruenor?"
Again Catti-brie's scowl stopped the dwarf short. He sighed profoundly and threw up his hands.
He was right, Catti-brie knew. While they had gone no more than a few miles deeper into the mountains since that night, the trails had been treacherous, climbing and descending, winding snakelike around the many rocky peaks. She and the dwarf had walked a score of miles, at least, to get to this point, and even if she had summoned Guenhwyvar, there was no way the panther could have caught up to Drizzt.
That logic did little to quell the frustration boiling within Catti-brie. She had vowed to follow Drizzt, to find him and bring him home, but now, standing at the edge of a for-
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