"Troy Denning - Forgotten Realms - The Cormyr Saga 02 - Beyond the High Road" - читать интересную книгу автора (Denning Troy)

Cormyr Saga
Book Two
Beyond the High Road
Troy Denning
Scanned by Dreamcity
Proofread and formatted by BW-SciFi/Dreamcity
Ebook version 1.1
Release Date: February, 1th, 2004
 Prologue
One man could not kill so many. It was not possible. The murderer's trail led down to a gnarled fir tree,
where an entire company of Purple Dragons lay strewn across the landscape as still as stones. There were
more than twenty of them, sprawled alongside their dead horses in every manner of impossible contortion.
Arms and legs hooked away at unexpected angles, torsos lay doubled back against the spine, heads rested
on shoulders staring in the wrong direction. Many had died with their shields still hanging from their saddles.
A few had fallen even before they could draw their weapons.
Emperel Ruousk unsheathed his sword and eased his horse down the hill, keeping one eye on the
surrounding terrain as he read his quarry's trail. There remained just one set of tracks, each print spaced
nearly two yards apart. After a hundred miles, the murderer was still running-an incredible feat for any
man, let alone one who had been roaring drunk when he fled.
The trail of the Purple Dragons paralleled the killer's at the regulation distance of one lance-length. The
hoof prints ran in strict double file, with no stray marks to suggest the presence of outriders or point scouts.
The commander had taken no precautions against ambush, no doubt thinking it a simple matter to capture a
drunken killer. Emperel would not make the same mistake.
As he neared the site of the massacre, a murder of crows rose from among the bodies and took wing,
scolding him raucously. He watched them go, then stopped to make certain the killer was not lying in
ambush among the corpses. The area reeked of rotting flesh. Clouds of black flies hovered over the dead
bodies, filling the air with an insane drone. The soldiers' breastplates were cratered and torn and streaked
with sun-dried gore. Their basinets were either staved-in or split open. Some helmets were missing, along
with the heads inside. Many shields had been smeared with the vilest sort of offal, completely obscuring the
royal crest of the purple dragon, and several men had died with their own eyeballs in their mouths. One had
been strangled with his own entrails.
Emperel began to feel nauseated. He had seen dozens of slaughters in the Stonelands, but never
anything so sick and angry. He rode over to a headless corpse and dismounted, then kneeled to examine the
stump of the neck. The wound was ragged and irregular and full of gristle strings, just like the stump of the
tavern keeper's neck in Halfhap. According to witnesses, the murderer had simply grabbed the poor fellow
beneath the jaw and torn off his head.
Emperel stood and circled through the dead bodies, taking care to keep his horse between himself and
the gnarled fir at the heart of the massacre. With a twisted trunk large enough to hide ten murderers, the
tree was a particularly huge and warped specimen of an otherwise regal species. Its bark was scaly and
black, stained with runnels of crimson sap. Its needles were a sickly shade of yellow. The tangled boughs
spiraled up to a cork-screwed crown nearly two hundred feet in the air, then withered off into a clawlike
clump of barren sticks.
On the far side of the tree, Emperel discovered a large burrow leading down beneath the trunk. The soil
heaped around the opening was lumpy and dark, with lengths of broken root jutting out at haphazard angles.
A string of ancient glyphs spiraled up the trunk above the tunnel opening, the letters as sinuous as serpents.
He did not recognize the language, but the shape of the characters struck him as both elegant and vaguely
menacing.
Emperel studied the burrow for several minutes, then approached and tethered his horse to the tree. The
hole itself was oval in shape and barely broad enough for a man to enter on his belly. There were several
boot prints in the dirt outside, but the walls and floor of the tunnel had been dragged smooth by a passing