"Zach Hughes - Killbird" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

of the Strongarm come from his hidehouse and reach for the message
string, and then I moved closer and watched as he tied on the clue which
Yuree was giving us. I saw the other chosen watching, and I saw Teetom's
face blanch, he being the first to see as Strabo stepped away. I saw it then.
There was no mistaking it. I'd seen it before, on Strabo's father when he
was family head, on Strabo himself. The thing which hung there was
multicolored, connected by the hard veins, lumpy, hard, beautiful and
deadly.

All Yuree was asking her future pairmate to do was bring her a
necklace of dragon guts.


Chapter Two

I spent the night alone atop a dome. God likes chaos. I used my hardax
to chop and strew underbrush and a few trees, working in the late-evening
light until I had transformed the very peak into a tangle in the center of
which I made my bed and lay down with the fire burning low, godsticks in
my hands making the sign.

"God of Chaos," I prayed. "I have prepared a small place for use, feeble
as I am, unable to wreak the huge and terrible beauty which is in your
power alone. I use it to pray to you, to pray to you to guide me into, the
land of the dragons, to give strength to my arms and courage to my heart."

God sent a sign. I saw it coming from the far horizon, to the west,
where the hills were high and the forests deep, from where Strabo had led
us to the Valley of Clean Water. It was burning there in the night sky, a
star larger than the rest, moving relentlessly toward me but high, high, up
there where the gods of man lurk. It moved directly over me and
continued until, after a long, long time, it went below the lower hills from
which the sun rises to sink, some say, into the field of large water which is
there beyond the deadly flats where once, Seer of Things Unseen says,
there were giants in the old days.

A sign. God spoke. I rubbed my godsticks and made the sign and fought
sleep. I thought of my father. When I was to go on my first hunt he gave
me the hardax. Dragonskin. Lovely and deadly and capable of cutting
rock. Jagged, laced to the sturdy wooden handle with animal thongs. I had
never allowed one spot of the red dragon's blood to stain it, polishing it
daily, oiling it with the fat of the swimmers. I had learned early that there
is a certain amount of oil in the skin, so on long hunts I rubbed it, being
careful of the sharp cutting edge kept keen by constant honing, against
me, my face, my belly, my arms. Until it gleamed. No one had a finer
hardax. And no one had such a father.

I awoke with the sun and did not scrape my curse. I would be away for
days, moons perhaps. There would be no one to see my shame. I ate of the
fruit from trees and went down the hill to find Seer of Things Unseen at