"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 19 - Looters of Tharn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

up inside him like vintage champagne in a glass.

They had done it! After all the time and money wasted on a dozen schemes to bring about a controlled
return, he was back in a dimension he had visited before! Back in Tharn, by pure accident. Or was it
pure accident? He had been thinking of Tharn as the computer gripped his brain. A clear image of
Zulekia, the Maiduke girl he had loved, the girl he had left carrying his child, had been floating before his
eyes as he was whirled away from Home Dimension. Did this possibly have something to do with where
he had landed?

Possibly. But that was a question for Lord Leighton, back in Home Dimension. For the moment he had
landed in Tharn, on his own, as he had always been. But in Tharn he had been Mazda, HE WHO
CAME TO THEY. He had been given godlike reverence even before he turned Tharn upside down,
ended the power, slaughtered the Pethcines, and finally helped bring about the destruction of Urcit, the
great city of Tharn.

A thought struck Blade. Could he be sure that Mazda was remembered with favor, considering how
much destruction he had wrought in Tharn? It had been needed to break the mold which had caught and
frozen Tharn for centuries, the mold that held people, neuters, Maidukes, bearer maidens, ceboids, and
even the Pethcines. They had all been dying in that mold. But what he'd wrought was destruction
nonetheless.

Blade remembered the battlefield littered with the corpses of men, women, and horses, the smoke
boiling up from Urcit as the explosion of the power pool destroyed it, the screams of the maimed and
dying. Was it possible that Mazda would be remembered as a force for evil, who had brought
destruction and death when he came to his people?

Blade could not really blame the people of Tharn if that was their attitude. But he had to find out,
preferably before he came up against some Tharnians who would take vengeance on Mazda by filling him
full of spears and arrows on the spot.

In fact, now seemed the best time. This neuter was weakly armed and comparatively feeble. He was
also likely to know more of what had happened and was happening in Tharn. Blade looked at the neuter
again.

The neuter had been growing increasingly uneasy as Blade stood silent and motionless thinking over his
next move. Now he called out almost plaintively, "How is it that you know all those things? You are no
neuter, for you have a Lordsman's body-or a Pethcine's. Yet you cannot be either, for you are too large
for a Pethcine and all the Lordsmen were slain in the great battle with the Pethcines. Other than the
Pethcines, the only being who had such as a Lords. man had-" He stopped and his mouth fell open as if
there was a heavy weight attached to his lower jaw. His eyes widened until it seemed that the eyeballs
were going to fall out of their sockets and drop to the ground.

"Yes," said Blade, nodding. "I am Mazda, HE WHO CAME TO THEY. I came once and did much in
Tharn. Now I have come again." He tried to keep his voice low, soothing, and as calm as if he was
buying pipe tobacco in a store. He had to fight down the urge to shout "I am Mazda!" until it went rolling
away across the plains on the wind.

The neuter raised one skinny, shaking hand and pointed a finger at Blade. His mouth closed enough so
that he could get out a few halting words.