"Barb & J. C. Hendee - Noble Dead 03 - Sister of the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hendee JC & Barb)

Leesil bit on his lower lip as he shoved the inn's front door open. So much for Wynn needing no
coddlingтАФand she'd been with them barely since dawn.

IThat night, as the sun dropped below the horizon, Chane opened his eyes. His internal awareness was
unusually precise, even for a Noble Dead. He fell dormant at sunrise and woke at sunset, but for the first
time in memory, he felt a moment's uncertainty of his surroundings. Then he remembered.

He was in a country barn that his new companion, Welstiel Massing, had led them to the previous night.
An iron pitchfork, shovel, and hoe leaned against the weathered wall near the double doors, and the
place smelled of stale hay, rust, and dried dung. In place of livestock, all he sensed were small lives,
perhaps mice, and his own rat curled inside his cloak pocket. Sitting up in the loose pile of old hay, he
watched a fat spider above him crawl across a web glistening with evening dew. The egg sac it
approached seemed ready to burst with a hundred new lives.

Chane had never awoken in such a place or such a state. He had plotted the death of his own master
and creator to achieve freedom. Now he grew nostalgic for his clean cellar room in the lavish home back
in Bela, regardless of the servitude and enslavement that had come with it. He pulled his cloak tighter
about himself, though he felt no cold. Freedom had its price, so it seemed.

"Welstiel?" he said, voice cracking the silence of the decaying barn.

"Here, " a cultured voice answered.

Chane started at the movement in the stall across from him. A figure stirred, arose, and stepped from
those deeper shadows and into the open space between the stalls.

As always, Chane sensed nothing of his new companion. Both of them were Noble Dead, both adept in
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their arcane arts. Welstiel could be seen, heard, and touched, but even to Chane's heightened awareness,
nothing of his life force, or rather its lack, could be sensed. Chane did not know how this was so, and
that unnerved him further.

Welstiel brushed the straw from his black wool cloak. Of medium height and build, he appeared to be in
his early to mid-forties by human standards. He wore his dark brown hair combed back, revealing his
most distinguishing feature of two sliver-white patches at each temple. He wasn't wearing his gloves, and
Chane's eyes strayed down to the man's one tiny oddityтАФthe missing half of the little finger on Welstiel's
left hand.

Chane was taller, in his mid-twenties by appearance, with pale skin and red-brown hair halfway to his
shoulders, which he tucked behind his ears. They had spoken sparingly the night before upon their first
direct encounter following all that had happened in Bela. Now Chane was uncertain what to say or what
came next in their newfound association. He reached for his sword nearby, pulled his cloak back as he
got up, and strapped on the blade.

"Where to now?" he asked.