"Sara Douglass - Redemption 2 - Pilgrim" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglass Sara)

WolfStar grinned, feral and confident in the darkness.
"Here," he muttered, and ducked into a dark opening no more than head height.
It was an ancient drain, and it lead to the bowels of the Keep on the shores of Cauldron Lake.
WolfStar knew exactly what he had to do.
The horses ran, and their crippled limbs ate up the leagues with astonishing ease. Directly above them flew
the Hawkchilds, so completely in unison that as one lifted his wings, so all lifted, and as another swept hers
down, so all swept theirs down.
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Each stroke of their wings corresponded exactly with a stride of the horses.
And with each stroke of the Hawkchilds' wings, the horses felt as if they were lifted slightly into the air,
and their strides lengthened so that they floated a score of paces with each stride. When their hooves beat
earthward again, they barely grazed the ground before they powered effortlessly forward into their next
stride.
And with each stride, the horses felt life surge through their veins and tired muscles. Necks thickened and
arched, nostrils flared crimson, sway-backs straightened and flowed strong into newly muscled haunches.
Hair and skin darkened and fined, until they glowed a silky ebony.
Strange things twisted inside their bodies, but of those changes there was, as yet, no outward sign.
Once fit only for the slaughterhouse, great black war horses raced across the plains, heading for the Ancient
Barrows.

12.

The Dreamer
The bones had lain there for almost twenty years, picked clean by scavengers and the passing winds of
time. They had been a neat pile when the tired old soul had lain down for the final time; now they were
scattered over a half-dozen paces, some resting in the glare of the sun, others piled under the gloom of a
thorn bush.
Footsteps disturbed the peace of the grave site. A tall and willowy woman, dressed in a clinging pale grey
robe. Iron-grey hair, streaked with silver, cascaded down her back. On the ring finger of her left hand she
wore a circle of stars. She had very deep blue eyes and a red mouth, with blood trailing from one corner
and down her chin.
As she neared the largest pile of bones the woman crouched, and snarled, her hands tensed into tight claws.
"Fool way to die!" she hissed. "Alone and forgotten! Did you think 7 forgot? Did you think to escape me so
easily?"
She snarled again, and grabbed a portion of the rib cage, flinging it behind her. She snatched at another
bone, and threw that with the ribs. She scurried a little further away, reached under the thorn bush and
hauled out its desiccated treasury of bones, also throwing them on the pile.
She continued to snap and snarl, as if she had the rabid fever of wild dogs, scurrying from spot to spot,
picking up a
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knuckle here, a vertebrae there, a cracked femur bone from somewhere else.
The pile of bones grew.
"I want to hunt," she whispered, "and yet what must I do? Find your useless framework, and knit something
out of it! Why must / be left to do it all?"
She finally stood, surveying the skeletal pile before her. "Something is missing," she mumbled, and swept
her hands back through her hair, combing it out of her eyes.
Her tongue had long since licked clean the tasty morsel draining down her chin.
"Missing," she continued to mumble, wandering in circles about the desolate site. "Missing . . . where ...
where ... ah!"
She snatched at a long white hair that clung to the outer reaches of the thorn bush and hurried back to the