"Claudia J. Edwards - Eldric the Healer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Edwards Claudia J)

Eldric the Healer
by
Claudia J. Edwards


Chapter One

IN ITS LAST days, the Republic must have strangled itself to death on
its paper.

I dashed across rooms and crept down corridors matted with sodden pulp,
the wreckage left by ten years of gaping doors, empty window frames,
and broken walls. There! Another door was ahead, sullen light
streaming in with the shouts and clangor of battle. I pulled my
disheveled jacket about me and muttered a cloaking spell to disguise my
femininity and my bloodied sword a healer tries to avoid killing if she
can and peered cautiously through the dismal rain into what had once
been a gracious square.

The fighting was heavy, too heavy. It was sure death to venture out
there. The Monarchists were outnumbered by the soberly clad Theocrats
but were putting up a valiant struggle, no quarter offered or asked. I
dodged back into the labyrinth of the administrative building. Pelting
down one corridor, I turned into a wider cross hall with mutilated
statues adorning its niches. This led into a vast, echoing chamber
echoing with the screams, shouts, death spells, and metallic clatter of
battle. Here the Monarchists were winning, slaughtering their foes
with the same dedication with which their comrades outside were being
butchered.

Not that I cared which side won or lost. This once fair land had gone
beyond the hope of triumph or even compromise. It was a giant in its r
death throes, tearing itself apart in a bitter cruel civil war. It
would end only as a desolation of corpses and destruction. I wanted
out of; this lethal trap of a building in which I had been driven to
hide, and out of this nation of fanatics and fools. There was a
gallery around the huge chamber. Perhaps free citizens had once
cheered the ceremonies of a self-governing state from there, or
visiting dignitaries marveled at the wonder of a people who ruled
themselves for the general good of all. Now it only offered a chance
of slipping past the battle without attracting notice. I was no mean
swords woman no woman who wanders the world alone goes unscathed for
long without either martial skills or potent magical protection. But
no woman in her right mind goes out of her way to challenge hundreds of
blood-mad zealots, either. I slipped up the stairs, edged past a
rotting corpse this was not the first battle in these precincts, and no
one bothered even to count the dead anymore, much less bury them and
crept about the back of the gallery, heading for the door on the far
side. I reached the opening without attracting notice, and stepped
thankfully into the hallway beyond. There were no steps on this side,