"Arthur H. Landis - Camelot in Orbit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Arthur H)

To read a Camelot report had been a joy indeed, excepting the one received six
months before predicting the onset of a dark and terrible sorcery to encompass the entire
planet. Unless we moved quickly, the report had said, the forces for progress, the five
kingdoms of the north, would be ruined, destroyed. The result? Chaos! A new dark age, and
worse, for all the foreseeable future of the beauteous water-world of Fregis-Camelot.
 Not liking the prognostication one damned bit, the Foundation had moved instantly to
insert a bit of magick of its own, scientific magick! In essence, me, Kyrie Fern, an
Adjuster-manipulator of the socio-evolutionary processes-the sly introducer at dark
campfires of the sharpened stick and the gut-stringed bow. At the Court of Marack, I had
passed myself off as Sir Harl Lenti. I had also been accepted-for my prodigious deeds-as
their "Collin mythos," reborn. He who had returned to save the Northlands from darkest peril!

A graduate of the Foundation's Collegium, I'd become, at age thirty, somewhat of a
genius in the art of "adjusting." The very man for the job, said the Prime Council, except that
Camelot was one gigantic game of misdirection. On the one hand the "play" involved an
extra-universal, alien intruder ferred to as the Kaleen, or the "Dark One"; with his opponents,
other than Marackians, etc., being the host-occupants of a half-dozen cuddly, button-eyed,
wet-nosed, fat-fannied, normally useless tree dwellers called Pug Boos. The Foundation and
the Prime Council hadn't the whiff of an idea of what the job really was. And I, after six
months of a great and bloody war, wild sorcery, and a seething chaos of events involving a
potpourri of the most lovable and zany friends that a humanoid could have-and the most evil
of enemies- was just beginning to find out!

I glanced toward the Lord of Bleese. He was seated and smacking his lips over the
steaming contents of a stirrup cup. "The man's smart," Rawl said bluntly. "He makes haste
slowly, since our good Lord Hoggle-Fitz is still at joust." A roar from the lists where Hoggle
was no doubt pummeling somebody, backed up this statement.

Toward the east then and sharp on the frozen air came the shrill notes of a trumpet, to
be followed by a lusty feminine hallooing from many voices. I turned to stare in that direction;
focused my contacts to four magnitudes. A covey of riders had topped the road up from
Glagmaron City on the banks of the Cyr below. Their colors were those of my betrothed,
Murie Nigaard Caronne, the Princess of Marack.

I nudged the squinting Rawl. The squires had finished with our plate-mail so that we
now sat in padded jupon and chain long-shirts. I waved them away. "'Tis the Princess," I told
Rawl softly. "Your lady's with her."

He frowned, half arose, and sat again; said, puzzled, "But 'tis only four days. They
were to be gone a week."

She'd spotted my colors-the field being not all that broad from the bluff's edge to the
bridge. An instant wheeling of her mount in a shower of ice shards from off the cobbles, and
she charged toward me as she'd seemingly charged the gates.

At first sight, I'd thought she but raced the threat of the storm clouds. But her ride
toward me, headlong, precipitous, gutsy, was not only symptomatic of her character, but
suggested, too, a possibility of peril.