"Roland Green - Conan at the Demon's Gate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Roland)

patron of our late king. It likewise struck me that Sabaros of the Black Dragons

could doubtless, far more easily than I, put a name to his father.

None of this told me, however, what an image of Conan was doing here in a cave

where no civilized man had ever set foot. Stygian sorcerers were civilized only

by courtesy, and rumor named some of them not quite wholly men.

Suddenly the cave seemed less a refuge, and the rainтАФand even the Picts

outsideтАФless a peril.

One

The Black Coast, many years earlier:

The man passed through the shadows beneath the great trees by the Umfangu as

silently as a lion on the hunt. Indeed, there was much of the lion in his

soft-footed tread, the mane of black hair that swept to wide, bronzed shoulders,
and the eyes that searched endlessly about him for either prey or rival.

Those eyes, however, had never graced a lion's face, nor that of a man in the

Black Kingdoms. They were chill-blue northern eyes, with an intensity in their

gaze that might have made a real lion cautious. Certainly they had done so with

more than a few men, and those who had not learned caution from the ice-blue

gaze had mostly died before they'd had time for a second lesson.

Now the man's steps took him away from the river-bank and the stout trees there.

He approached a small clearing, where a forest giant had toppled years ago,

bearing to the ground all in its path. The robust life of the jungle already had

saplings and vines mounting the dead tree, but through the gap overhead,

sunlight still reached the jungle floor more freely than elsewhere.

The man was only a spears length from the edge of the sunlight when he halted,

studying a patch of ferns. With the woods-wisdom gained by many hard lessons,

some few not easily survived, he knew that he must watch from some other place