"Ed Greenwood - Band of Four 02 - The Vacant Throne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenwood Ed)

hurtled past, to ring and clang to the floor past the nose of a farmer cowering low over his tankard. Flaeros
turned with a snarl in time to see Baergin drawing another dagger, and then whirled again to the only way
still open to him: the stairs.
He pounded up the creaking treads into the darkness of the Lion's rental rooms, heedless of who he
might bowl over or shoulder aside, and shouts arose in the room below as the armaragors charged after
him.
Panting now, Flaeros leaped up the next flight of stairs, heard with momentary satisfaction the crash of
the foremost armaragor running straight into the edge of a door flung open by a bewildered renter, and
raced like the wind along the low-ceilinged top floor of the Lion. There was a back stair down the outside
wall, and if he could only just...
The door was barred. The young bard whimpered in fear as he franti-cally tore aside the bar and its
holding-chain, flung up the latchpeg, andтАФ
Found himself staring into the wolfish grins of threeтАФno, fiveтАФarmaragors who were mounting the last
flight of the stairs, their well-used swords drawn.
Flaeros gaped at them in despair, and then in desperation swung him-self around the top step, onto the
little balcony where Kessra was wont to hang the washing from. Her line was far too old, gray, and
fur-flimsy to hold him, and it stretched out a very long way across a deep gulf of cobbled stableyard, but the
next house over had a balcony of its own, and its rail was much closer. A dozen feet away, perhaps.
Or more. Flaeros stared at the gap between the two balconies as feet pounded up behind him, and
wondered if it would hurt more to smash down onto the dung-slick cobbles, or take a few swords through
his guts. . . .
An armaragor shouted in exultation right behind him, and Flaeros snarled a desperate curse and sprang
up onto the rail, gathering himselfтАФ

As the young bard's despairing cry echoed around the stableyard of the Lion, a cowled figure strode out
onto a balcony high above the swarming armaragors and their ready blades, looked down, and hissed in
anticipation.
The hand that closed on a balcony rail for support as the observer leaned out to see the fate of Flaeros
Delcamper was gray and covered with scales.
 1
No Shield Like Loyalty
Birds whirred, called, and shed droppings copiously in the ruined, riven place that had until recently been
a high-domed library (though it had been a very long time since its shelves had known books, and its aisles
the tread of folk intending to read them).
The deep wood had closed its green grip again around the ruins of abandoned Indraevyn almost uneasily,
as if expecting more warriors and wizards to boil up out of the overgrown stones at any moment and split
the soft forest sounds with the ringing of blade on blade and the ear-shattering cracks of striking battle
spells.
But days and nights had passed, and no more such combatants had come. The carrion-eaters had
plucked and crawled and gnawed at the sprawled bodies of the fallen, cracking and scattering bones, and
no new alarum arose.
The creepers had advanced their patient tendrils, and things that squeaked and slithered had done so,
and the Loaurimm had closed its hand over Indraevyn again. The forest had stood unbroken before men
had come to Silverflow Vale to hew and burn and ploughтАФand if the day came that all the men were gone,
it would as slowly and surely reclaim the cleared banks of the Silverflow, and in the end swallow every last
road and tower.
Soon after bloody battle and the hewing and burning that had preceded it, laying bare so many walls and
doors, Indraevyn looked more like a forest-cloaked rockpile than something men had built. The casual eye
would have seen raw nature, not the failing hand of man.
Except for six eerie shafts of glowing light that hung in a silent, vertical row in the heart of the riven