"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 25 - Torian Pearls." - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

campfires that looked exactly like this from a distance.

He looked again, and saw that the darkness behind that hill and its neighbors on either side was not quite
perfect. A dim, diffused glow with a faint tinge of orange seemed to be spread along that portion of the
horizon. More campfires-the campfires of an army whose scouts he could see on this side of the hill?
 Blade started wedging himself firmly into place. He wasn't going anywhere tonight, even if a city of solid
gold lay under that distant orange glow. He knew the value of doing his exploring with a rested body, a
clear head, and the light of day to help him.

He willed himself to ignore the hardness of the branches under him, the roughness of the bark against his
skin, the continuous whine of insects and the occasional raucous screech of a night bird. Slowly the world
faded away, and he slept.

Chapter 4

Blade awoke with a watery sunlight in his eyes and a monumental uproar in his ears. It sounded like a
hive of angry bees, a tribe of monkeys, and a rioting football crowd all rolled into one continuous roaring
and screeching and droning.

Blade sat up, stretched to unkink his muscles, and started to climb down the tree. Ten feet above the
ground he stopped abruptly and scrambled back up to the nearest branch.

A herd of low-slung, broad-snouted, grayish-brown animals was flowing past the tree, snorting and
grunting and jostling each other. The smallest one must have weighed a lean and sinewy two hundred
pounds, and all of there had long dirty yellow tusks. Blade carefully climbed back to a higher branch and
waited there for the herd to pass. If those beasts were as bad-tempered as they were ugly, he didn't want
to face them with his bare hands.

There seemed to be no end to the herd. The beasts trotted past by the hundreds, their gruntings and the
thud of their hooves rising to drown out all the other sounds of the forest.

Then suddenly half a dozen dark-striped yellow shapes seemed to explode out of the underbrush or
drop down from a nearby tree. Each of the attackers selected a victim from the herd, leaped on its back,
and cut halfway through the neck with a single bite. Some of the older boars turned to face the enemy,
but were swept away in a snorting, squealing flood as the rest of the herd panicked. The herd vanished
with a tremendous thunder of hooves and a deafening crackling and crashing of flattened bushes. They
left behind them a good many of their comrades knocked down and trampled, as well as the half dozen
taken by the striped beasts.

These now settled down to feed. They were the size and shape of leopards, with large erect ears and
dark bluish stripes instead of spots. Blade waited until they seemed to be paying attention to nothing but
their meals. Then he clambered around to the far side of the tree, climbed down as quietly as possible,
and ran.

He kept running until he was sure he was out of sight, scent, or hearing of the blue-striped cats. Then he
slowed down to a brisk walk, eyes darting from, side to side, searching for possible attackers or
weapons. He tried to follow a course toward the northwest, where he'd seen the lights during the night.

After an hour the overcast broke up and the sun came out. Now Blade was able to take a bearing every
time he came to a clearing. As far as he could see the underbrush was trampled down or eaten bare.