"Jane S. Fancher - Dance of the Rings 3 - Ring of Destiny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fancher Jane S)

Ganfrion propped himself against a marker post that pro-
claimed this block of tents the Aerie of the Seventh Eagle
and scanned the rows, seeking any sign of movement, any
hint of the sort of stirring that ought to occur among sea-
soned troops as the sun's first rays gilded the snow-capped
tops of the mountains. Never mind most had lain awake
watching that web disintegrate into sparkling motes of en-
ergy, motes that had drifted down from the sky hovering
and darting and floating on a breeze like a billion fireflies
on Midsummer's Eve.
And this morning . . . the bodies lay still as death.
The cough that had plagued him since long before the
world ended threatened, and he slaved it off with a long
pull from the flask he carried. Stolen, that flask, or given
to him sometime last night before men turned to corpses.
He honestly couldn't recall how it had come into his posses-
sion. He only recalled wanting a drink, badly, and that flask
arriving in his hand in a moment of darkness between one
heartbeat and the nextmuch as he had arrived in this
camp last night. One moment, he'd been gasping his last
in the middle of the Khoratum Maze, his back braced
against a wooden door, the dancer he'd gone to rescue
huddled against his side; the next, he'd been .here on the
leyroad side of the camp, the dancer still at his side and
his back to the earthen fortification, his feet hanging in a
half-dug trencha day's ride from that maze under the best
of circumstances.
At least, he'd assumed it was the same night. The tower
battle had ceasedbefore or after that final moment in the
maze, he couldn't swear tobut the web in the sky had
only just begun to disintegrate. The moon was still full.
And it was just himself and the dancer, both as immobile
as they'd been in the maze. Time had passed; the leythium
motes had drenched them, and eventually he'd found the
strength to gather himself and the dancer up, to stumble
across that waist-high ditch and through the camp to the
caves, miraculously alive, and without a clue as to why that
was true or how he'd come to be here.
Later, after the stand-down had been ordered, with his
precious charge delivered into the proper hands, with every
right to a month's rest, with in 'fact his liege lord's direct
order to celebrate his unexpected aliveness in that man-
nerand still no answers to the mysteries surrounding that
facthe had refused to so much as lie down as long as the
glitter remained in the air. Having cheated Death once that
night, in a Khoratumin alleyway and against honest steel,
he wasn't about to lie down and passively surrender to this
new, insidiously attractive threat. Never mind he'd stood
outside the caves watching the spectacle, as mesmerized as
all the others by the sheer beauty of the moment. He'd