"Dave Duncan - A Man of His Word 3 - Perilous Seas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Dave)

his home was soon abandoned to weeds and swallowed up by scrubby woodland. '
A woman bereft must find herself another protector at once, and her children
likely died soon anyway. Even among jotnar, few men would actually kill a child
in cold blood, but even fewer would care overmuch for brats spawned by a
predecessor. The work was done by neglect and indifference, or in mindless
drunken rages. A widow who did not find another guardian was soon driven out by
the other women and vanished into the nightmare slums of Finrain.
But in every evil there was some good, as the priests said, and housing was thus
no problem for a newcomer. He might pick a pleasant spot not too far from one of
the streams and build the home of his dreams, or he could just move into one of
the empties. The selection was wide: impish wooden shacks, or low, dark sod
hovels of the Nordland type favored by jotnar, or the rambling piles of masonry
constructed by trolls. There were also some abandoned gnome burrows, but even


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the rats shunned those.
The faun had selected an ancient log cabin off by itself, and labored to make it
shipshape while he settled down to life as a sailor. After every voyage he added
more improvements. The months slipped by imperceptibly in that silken halcyon
climate, and spring had become summer already.

2
Far to the east, under a harsher sun, the caravan road from the great port of
Ullacarn ran eastward through the foothills of the Progistes before swinging
north to branch and divide and become a skein of paths into the Central Desert.
Squeezed between sand and mountains, the single way was known to the merchants
as the Gauntlet. Their guards called it the Slaughterhouse. In some places the
road was so constricted that drivers heading seaward could shout insults or
greetings to those bound for the interior, while the bells on their respective
camels rang in rondelet together. Many trader trains came through there, but not
as many as tried, for banditry was the main source of employment in the
district. The names of the passes told the tale: Bone Pass, Bodkin's Eye, One
Out, Bloody Spring, High Death, Low Death, Buzzard's Gizzard, and Eight Men
Dead.
Additional guards could be hired at either end of the Gauntlet, but they might
not be of authentic royal blood. The genuine lionslayers distrusted them
utterly, and with good reason.
After many weeks of trekking across the wastes of Zark, the caravan led by the
venerable Sheik Elkarath had come at last to the Gauntlet. A few dangerous days
ahead lay the fair city of Ullacam, representing rest, profit, and well-earned
comfort. The camels that had borne necessities to the humble folk of the
interior-shovels and mattocks of tough dwarvish steel, cunning elvish dyestuffs,
strong linen thread-were laden now with produce that the rest of Pandemia would
greet as luxuries: wool of mountain goats and bright rugs woven from it, uncut
emeralds, and durable garments of leather or camel hair, crafted by humble,
hungry folk, whose only resource was unlimited time.
Many times in a long life, the sheik had traversed the Gauntlet. He had met