"Clayton Emery - Netheril 03 - Mortal Consequences" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emery Clayton)

Eating snow for water. Walking and more walking. Trudging through fog for two days once.
Darkness, daylight, darkness. Boots crunching a million times, and walking on.
Just when Knucklebones thought she'd go screaming mad, a spark glowed on the horizon. "Is that a
village?" she asked.
"No. Northern lights."
The thief stared in awe. Reds and blues shimmered like rainbow curtains in the sky. The colors
danced, dipped, soared, settled, jiggled, never still.
"They're beautiful!"
"You're learning," Sunbright chuckled. "Feel? The land dips. And hear that?"
The part-elf tipped her hood to reveal pointed ears. Far off she heard a jabbering, the first noise in
days.
"What is it?"
"A rookery. A nesting ground for puffins."
They walked faster over snow tinged red and blue by northern lights. Gradually the land sloped,
then dropped by the frozen stream Sunbright had mentioned. (And found unerringly, she noted, after
ten days of walking through a void.) The slope grew lumpy with rocks where the tundra had been
scraped away eons ago. Rocks the size of skulls lay beside boulders as big as houses. Scattered amidst
them bobbed knee-high birds with black bodies, white masks, and fat yellow beaks. Even at midnight
they were busy, waddling, gossiping, arguing, fighting, lovemaking, even tumbling and sliding on
their bellies down a slick mud slope. Knucklebones laughed, "It looks like market day!"
Sunbright pointed and said, "And down that rill we'll find my tribe. They've wintered here for
centuries, pulling the whitefish through the ice and salting them down... ."
His voice was mixed with joy and sorrow. Happiness at seeing his tribe and mother, sadness that
they might be killed outright. Or driven away again. Knucklebones wondered which, for Sunbright,
would be the crueler fate.
Skirting rocks, careful of twisting ankles, they negotiated the rill by starlight, then touched coarse
sand. A bluff rose at their right, and the frozen arm of the sea trapped a narrow beach between. Ice
floes grinding together drowned out the happy clatter of the puffins.
Down the beach they walked and walked. At every step Sunbright strode faster, until Knucklebones
trotted to keep up. Finally they rounded the bluff, and walked onto a sandy spit. Before them loomed
the growling, ice-packed ocean. And nothing else.
"Where are they?"
Sunbright cast about again and again. "I ... I don't know."
Knucklebones felt a pang for him. "ButтАФif they're not hereтАФwhere can they be?"
The shaman's voice drifted away. "I don't know. I can't even guess...."
 Chapter 2
The gulguthhydra was hungry. It was always hungry. Now it sensed food approaching.
The cavern was black, so its many heads couldn't see. The gulguthhydra was also black, though its
dozen eyes would shine dull white in any light. The monster looked like a hill of black thorns that
sprouted necks studded with scales like chips of volcanic glass, and atop the necks were fang-studded
mouths, pug noses, and short, sharp ears. Too, the beast sported a pair of tentacles. All these writhing
organs roved over the walls and floor of the cavern incessantly, scouring the stone so often it was worn
smooth as far as the beast could reach. Centuries ago, the black hydra had been captured by the pit
fiend Prinquis, and rooted in this corridor by magic. Over decades, it had scraped the walls clean,
caught the occasional rat or bat or lesser imp, growing a tiny bit at a time, reaching a little further with
tooth and tentacle.
But always it was starving, and here came food.
The creature picking along the corridor came with a heavy tread. The monster was taller than a tall
man, naked but for an ugly, lumpy, flinty hide formed of something stronger than stone, for its jagged
feet scratched and nicked the polished stone floor. In light, the flinty hide would have glistened