"Ed Greenwood - Forgotten Realms - Elminster 2 - Elminster In Myth Drannor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Greenwood Ed)

Whenever steel drew blood, his enchantment fled from it. Elminster dropped his saddlebag and
went forward cautiously to retrieve his daggers and fork from the men who'd fallen. It would be easy to
slip away now, but then he'd never know how many survived to stalk him-and he'd never get his blades
back.
The two El had seen fall were both dead, and a heavy trail of blood told him that a third man
wouldn't run much farther before the gods gathered him in. A fourth man made it back to Elminster's
horse before the young Athalantan's sword plunged itself into his back, and he fell over it onto his face
and lay still.
Elminster retrieved all but his borrowed dagger and one of his belt knives, finding two more
bodies, before he gave up the grim task and resumed his journey. Both of the dead men had weapons
marked with the crudely scratched serpent symbol. El scratched his jaw, where his unshaven stubble was
beginning to itch, and then shrugged. He had to go on; what did it matter which gang or fellowship
claimed these woods as its own? He was careful to take all the bows he saw with him, and thrust them
inside a hollow log a little farther on, startling a young rabbit out of its far end into bounding flight through
the trees.
El looked down at the cluster of bloody blades in his hand and shook his head in regret. He never
liked to slay, whatever the need. He cleaned the blades on the first thick moss he found and went on,
south and east, through the darkening wood.
The skies soon turned gray, and a chill breeze blew, but the rain that smelled near never came,
and Elminster trudged on with his saddlebag growing heavier on his shoulder.

*****

It was with weary relief that he came down into a little hollow just before dusk, and saw chimney
smoke and a stockade wall and open fields ahead.
A signboard high on the cornerpost of what looked like a paddock, though it held only mud and
trampled grass just now, read: "Be Welcome At The Herald's Horn." Underneath was a bad painting of
an almost circular silver trumpet. Elminster smiled at it in relief and walked along the stockade, past
several stone buildings that reeked of hops, and in through a gate that was overhung with someone's
badly forged iron replica of the looped herald's horn.
This looked to be where he'd be spending the night. El strode across a muddy yard to a door
where a bored-looking boy was peeling and trimming radishes and peppers, tossing his work into
water-filled barrels, and keeping watch for guests at the same time.
The boy's face sharpened with interest as he surveyed Elminster, but he made no move to strike
the gong by his elbow, merely giving the weary, hawk-nosed youth an expressionless nod of
acknowledgment. El returned it and went inside.
The place smelled of cedar, and there was a hearth-fire somewhere ahead to the left, and voices.
Elminster peered about, his shoulder-borne saddlebag swinging, and saw that he stood in the midst of yet
another forest-this one a crowded tangle of treetrunk pillars, dim rooms, and flagstones strewn with
sawdust, complete with scurrying beetles. Many of the planks around him bore the scars of old fires that
had been put out in time, long ago.
And by the smell of things, the place was a brewery. Not just the sour small beer that everyone
made, but the source of enough brew to fill the small mountain of barrels El could see through a window
whose shutters had been fastened back to let in a little light and air- and a face that stared in at him,
wrinkled bushy brows, and growled, "Alone? Afoot? Want a meal and a bed?"
Elminster nodded a silent reply and was rewarded with the gruff addition, "Then be at home. Two
silver a bed, two silver for meals, extra tankards a copper apiece, and baths extra. Taproom's on the left,
there; keep your bag with you-but be warned: I throw out all who draw steel in my house . . .
straightaway, into the night, without their weapons. Got it?"
"Understood," El replied with some dignity.