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

unto that which my dame has told me, too?"

"I think 'tis true. I'll know for sure tonight."

She drew away, kissed me again, smiled grimly, then drew the circle of the god,
Ormon, upon her breast. And then, because she could do it, she winked at me, signaled her
escort and her red-haired shield-maiden, and whistled her dottle to its feet.

It stomped its six fat paws to rid them of unmelted ice, whoooed loudly and led off
toward the castle. The bridge, now that red Fomalhaut had fled, was again a somber gray.
Fresh snow-flurries touched all the plain around us. An idiot's time, I mused wryly, for to go
a'gerd hunting.
 It was just then that I noticed the presence of Hooli the Court Pug Boo. He'd been
hidden by Murie's cloak. Now he clung to it for dear life, lest he be bounced from off her
dottle's rump. Round, symmetrical, Hooli was hardly two feet in height. His legs and arms
were short, sturdy; his ears furtufted, on a puff-ball head. I was again reminded of the first
time I'd seen him, when I'd whimsically compared him to a cuddly toy I'd owned in the
dreams or the play of my childhood.

Hooli was a number of things. First, he was a leaf-eating tree-dweller, indigenous to
the southern-Kaleen-controlled- continent of Om. He was also one of the Court Pug Boos
sacred to the kingdoms and the gods of the northern continent. He was, specifically,
however, the entity-occupant of the Pug Boo attached to the Marackian Court.

Exactly who or what this entity-occupant was, I hadn't the slightest idea. I knew only
that without his aid all our efforts at the previous battle of Dunguring, in the northern land of
Kelb where we had smashed and driven the hordes of the Dark One, the Kaleen, into the
River Sea, would have come
to nought. For it had been his, Hooli's magick, about which Rawl had spoken.

All the more reason then for my resurgent fear of new dangers all around us-for Hooli
and his cohorts, Pawbi, Dahkti, Jindil, and Chuuk, had disappeared, ceased to occupy their
hosts immediately after that battle. For six long months I'd had no contact with him. And in
that time, while I awaited the return of the Foundation Starship, Deneb-3, I'd become
obsessed with the insidious idea that I, Kyrie Fern, Adjuster, was quite alone now; had been
left, indeed, saddled, with the awful responsibility for every vestige of life on Camelot-Fregis.

With the first coming of snow rumors had become rife of riders on ice-bound roads
where their would not normally be; of strange guests in the castles of certain lords; of ships
and dark visitors to seacoast towns and villages. I'd even enjoined a preliminary discussion
some weeks before with the king and the lords of the privy council. To no avail. True
evidence Was lacking, they said, for a sequestering of this lord or that. Come spring, 'twould
all be checked out. And too, Dunguring, to them, with its two hundred thousand dead, was
both the greatest battle and the greatest victory of all time. How then, they reasoned, could
any enemy recover so quickly? Need I add that it was impossible to convey the simple fact
that while it was winter in Marack, it was the softest of summers in Om?

They'd listened, true, inclusive of the king himself. But they did so only because I was
the Collin-their hero-mythos-savior; that and the fact that no man alive, Kaleen possessed or
otherwise, would challenge the Collin's sword.