"Doranna Durgin - A Feral Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Durgin Doranna)

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Chapter 1

THURISAZ
A Gateway

Always
Forgotten gods fill the layers of heaven. Quiescent, subordinate, long ago superceded. Waiting. And
every so often, reminded of their own existence.
***



Nineteen Years Before Now
She is nine years old, with tears streaming down her face and the intermittent hiccough of a sob jerking
her chest. Dressed in the ragged cut-offs and worn T-shirt that have been the choice of a generation of
children, she does not wait to hear the rest of her mother's words. She races out of the house, the screen
door banging hollowly in her wake, and runs across the soft spring grass of the yard to duck between the
first and second strands of the electric fence, feeling the swift zing of electricity run above and below her.

The old hound follows at his leisure, but follow he does, as stubborn in this as ever in following a
trailтАФeven though it takes him a moment to rise and his movement is stiff when he does. His tail waves in
gentle arcs as he detours to slip between gate and post rather than duck the fence wire. The day is barely
warm enough for the shorts that hang on the girl's lanky frame, but he is already panting.

She stops to wait for him. Of course. And one hand slips inside her back pocket to feel the stiff, folded
square of paper only recently purloined from her father's magazine. On it is a photo of a sculpture, a
simplistically elegant houndтАФnot a treeing hound like her lifelong companion, but a gaze hound,
couchant, with a long neck and pointed nose, and a gaze hound's insignificant ears.

He catches up with her, pleased with himself, and lifts his head to look up at her with a hound smile
through his panting. Unlike the statue, his ears are long and heavy and the softest things she ever has or
ever will feel. But she doesn't care about the differences between her companion and the Lydney Hound.
She's not particularly concerned about all the details in the accompanying article that are beyond her
ability to digestтАФcold anthropological facts that even her father doesn't read. She's seen him turning the
pages with dirt-encrusted fingers, skipping from one bright glossy photo to another and getting glimpses
of places that don't yet pull her own attention away from this small farm. That's all he wants, the glimpses,
and when he's had enough he puts the magazine beside his lounge chair and ambles off to see if he can fix
whatever mechanical thing has gone wrong now.

This is how she finds the Lydney Hound, andтАФlater, sneaking the magazine into her bedroomтАФreads
about the oddly named god called Mars Nodens who favors hounds, who likes dogs of all sorts. Who
has an ancient shrine from olden days so olden she can't even begin to imagine the scope of it and again .
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