"David Drake - Old Nathan (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

"And a drop of blood from me," the cunning man continued, stepping back and grimacing at the three
long hairs before he chose his locationтАФthe back of his left index finger, not the calloused padтАФand
pricked himself with the point of the blade.

While the blood welled slowly, Old Nathan wiped the steel clean on his trousers and closed the knife.
Closing his eyes again, he mimed putting the knife away on an invisible shelf. He saw it there, saw his
fingers releasing itтАФand they did release it, so that when he withdrew his hand and opened his eyes, the
well-kept tool was nowhere to be seen.

There was enough blood now on the back of the finger which pressed the bull hairs against his thumb.
Sighing, Old Nathan settled himself on his haunches in front of the bowl he had placed on the ground.
One of his splayed knees touched the lowest rail of the fence, giving him a little help in balancing when his
mind had to be elsewhere.

Spanish King made a gurgling sound in his throat as he watched over the fence, and his breath ruffled the
surface of the water. That would be beneficial to the process, if it made any difference at all. Old Nathan
was never sure how the things he did came about. Some thingsтАФtechniquesтАФfelt right at a given time
but the results did not always seem to require the same words and movements.

The cunning man dipped the tips of his left index finger and thumb in the shallow basin and whisked the
bull hairs through the water. The blood on the back of his finger trailed off in a curve like a sickle blade,
dispersing into a mist too thin to have color.

Old Nathan closed his eyes, visualizing the soup plate in which now drifted the blood and the hairs he
had released. The water in his mind clouded abruptlyтАФfirst red as blood, then red as fire, and finally as
white as the sun frozen in a desert sky.

The white flare did not clear but rather coalesced like curds forming in cultured milk. The color shrank
and gained density, becoming a great piebald bull that romped in a valley cleared so recently that smoke
still curled from heaped brush. Tree stumps stood like grave markers for the forest which had covered
the ground for millennia.

The bull's hide was white with a freckling, especially on the face and forequarters, of black and russet
spots. Its horns curved sharply forward from above the beast's eyes, long and sharp and as black as the
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Devil's heart. The bull raised its short, powerful neck and bellowed to the sky while its hooves spaded
clods from the loam.

The vision shattered. Spanish King was bellowing in fury, rattling the shakes with which the cabin was
roofed. Old Nathan shivered back to present awareness, flinging out his arms to save him from toppling
backward.

For an instant, the real soup plate trembling on the ground seemed as full of blood as the one which the
cunning man had imagined.

King stamped through a narrow circle, feinting toward invisible foes. His own horns flared more broadly