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

"The land is weak," he told Knucklebones. "Even the deer's bones are flimsy. All these skulls of
infant reindeer means they're stillborn, which means their mothers are sickly. The life of the land is
being sapped somehow."
Spring turned to summer, until Knucklebones stripped to leathers by day, though she was never
very warm. As the shaman had foretold, the soft earth of the tundra turned to bog. Muddy wallows
under the moss formed a gluey trap that pulled Sunbright's boots off, made their legs throb from the
weight of mud, slowed them down, and finally stopped them.
So they abandoned the search for the summer. They had reached the edge of the tundra at the west
anyway, and faced high cliffs topped by the Cold Forest and the icy mountains of the Dementia Range
in the distance. Skirting the Bay of Ascore, Sunbright sought work in Sepulcher and Arctic Rim. He
found it easily, for the towns were starved for meat. Even townsfolk saw that the once vast herds had
thinned, and few would enter the trackless bogs for food. So Sunbright hunted, and sold venison, wild
boar, even bear meat. He gave the money to Knucklebones, for he had no use for it. The thief, with
shrewd bets and quick hands, doubled and tripled their coins gambling with sailors and loggers and
fishwives.
"I still don't understand," Knucklebones told him one night as she stacked coins by candlelight.
They'd rented a small cabin along the water, in sight of the Barren Mountains. Sunbright found this
ironic, for there he'd begun his adventures, years ago. "How can the tundra be weak? How can any
land so cold and icy and muddy suffer? It's the people who live there who suffer!"
Sunbright rolled over from a doze. Hunting for miles from dawn till dusk, dragging back heavy
game, tired him out. "The tundra is a hard country, but a fragile one, though it seems contradictory,"
he told her. "It only supports a few beasts and birds, so they rely on one another to survive. Reindeer
eat the moss and leave droppings. Birds pick out seeds and bugs that live in the droppings. The birds in
turn carry the seeds far and wide. That spreads the moss, keeps muddy spots from growing barren. The
new growth attracts musk oxen, who churn the soil with their hooves and leave more manure, and so
on, in a closed circle. If one part is removed, the circle falls apart. If the weather grows too warm, as
happened once, lungworm sprout in the musk oxen. Too many worms kill the calves. Then the soil
isn't turned over, barren spots spread, water erodes the wallows so the earth is scarred, the moss grows
thinner, the reindeer starveтАФ"
"All right, all right. I believe you," Knucklebones cut him off, tugging up her eye patch to rub
sleepy eyes. Revealed was her blind eye, a milky white. At Sunbright's grimace, she hurriedly tugged
it down. "I don't want the natural history of the world, but why is just the tundra weakened, or drained
of life, or whatever you call it? Why not everywhere?"
"It is happening everywhere," Sunbright yawned, and lay back by the tiny hearth fire. Golden
flames reflected on the white skin of his scarred and muscular chest. "It's just the effect shows first in a
fragile area like the tundra. Candlemas spent months fighting a blight, a wheat rust, that spread
through grain crops. He couldn't find any logical cause. The crops simply couldn't fight off normal
diseases. As someone with measles will die if exposed to whooping cough, while a healthy man or
woman shakes it off. This mysterious drainтАФand as a shaman, I sense it more than understand itтАФ
affects all life. Eventually, it may causeтАФ"
Nodding at the table, Knucklebones jerked awake at the sudden silence. "Cause what?" she asked.
"Disaster. Famine. Possibly for years. Deaths in the thousands."
"No." The small woman rose, stretched like a cat, unlaced her leather vest and trousers, and said, "I
was born in the future, remember? There were no great disasters. Not that I ever heard of, anyway."
"I'm not sure you would have heard," Sunbright said. He sat on their thinnest blanket and stared at
the fire. By the hearth, his great longbow and heavy-nosed sword softly gleamed. "The Netherese run
this world, and write down history as it suits them. They've never shown compassion for starving
peasants. Commoners are fit for farming and mining and huntingтАФas preyтАФand nothing else."
Yawning, Knucklebones lay beside him. Fire reflecting on her body showed more scars than the
barbarian's. The thief had grappled in knife fights since she was a baby. Lifting a thin arm, she cooed,