"Elenium 01 - The Diamond Throne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

hard-pressed and dying, he cast the Thalesian crown into
the murky, peat-clouded waters of the lake, even as
Ghwerig, who had followed his lost treasure, watched in
horror from his place of concealment in a nearby peat
bog. The Zemochs who had slain King Sarak immediately
began to probe the brown-stained depths, that they
might find the crown and carry it in triumph to Azash,
but they were interrupted in their search by a column of
Alcione Knights sweeping down out of Deira to join the
battle in Lamorkand. The Alciones fell upon the
Zemochs and slew them to the last man. The faithful
vassal of the Thalesian king was given an honourable
burial, and the Alciones rode on, all unaware that the
fabled crown of Thalesia lay beneath the turbid waters of
Lake Venne.
It is sometimes rumoured in Pelosia, however, that on
moonless nights the shadowy form of the immortal
Troll-Dwarf haunts the marshy shore. Since, by reason of
his malformed limbs, Ghwerig dares not enter the dark
waters of the lake to probe its depths, he must creep
along the marge, alternately crying out his longing to
Bhelliom and dancing in howling frustration that it will
not respond to him.
!!!
PART ONE
Cimmura
*Chapter1
It was raining. A soft, silvery drizzle sifted down out of
the night sky and wreathed around the blocky watchtowers of the city of
Cimmura, hissing in the torches on each side of the broad gate and making
the stones of the road leading up to the city shiny and black. A lone rider
approached the city. He was wrapped in a dark, heavy traveller's cloak and
rode a tall, shaggy roan horse with a long nose and flat, vicious eyes. The
traveller was a big man, a bigness of large, heavy bone and ropy tendon
rather than of flesh. His hair was coarse and black, and at some time his
nose had been broken. He rode easily, but with the peculiar alertness of
the trained warrior. His name was Sparhawk, a man at least ten years older
than he looked, who carried the erosion of his years not so much on his
battered face as in a half-dozen or so minor infirmities and discomforts
and in the several wide purple scars upon his body which always ached in
damp weather. Tonight, however, he felt his age, and he wished only for a
warm bed in the obscure inn which was his goal. Sparhawk was coming home at
last after a decade of being someone else with a different name in a
country where it almost never rained, where the sun was a hammer pounding
down on a bleached white anvil of sand and rock and hard-baked clay, where
the walls of the buildings were thick and white to ward off the blows of
the sun, and where graceful women went to the wells in the silvery light of
early morning with large clay vessels balanced on their shoulders and
black veils across their faces. The big roan horse shuddered absently,
shaking the rain out of his shaggy coat, and approached the city gate,