"Michael Moorcock - Elric 2 - Sailor on the Sea of Fate" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

sighed. For a moment a moonbeam touched him and from
the white flesh of his face there glowed two crimson,
tormented eyes; then darkness came back. Again the man
turned, plainly fearing that the light had revealed him to
some enemy. Making as little sound as possible, he headed
towards the shelter of the rock on his left.

Elric was tired. In the city of Ryfel in the land of
Pikarayd he had naively sought acceptance by offering his
services as a mercenary in the army of the governor of that
place. For his foolishness he had been imprisoned as a
Melnibonean spy (it was obvious to the governor that Elric
could be nothing else) and had but recently escaped with
the aid of bribes and some minor sorcery.


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The pursuit, however, had been almost immediate. Dogs
of great cunning had been employed and the governor
himself had led the hunt beyond the borders of Pikarayd
and into the lonely, uninhabited shale valleys of a world
locally called the Dead Hills, in which little grew or tried to
live.

Up the steep sides of small mountains, whose slopes
consisted of grey, crumbling slate, which made a clatter to
be heard a mile or more away, the white-faced one had
ridden. Along dales all but grassless and whose river-
bottoms had seen no water for scores of years, through
cave-tunnels bare of even a stalactite, over plateaux from
which rose cairns of stones erected by a forgotten folk, he
had sought to escape his pursuers, and soon it seemed to
him that he had left the world he knew forever, that he had
crossed a supernatural frontier and had arrived in one of
those bleak places of which he had read in the legends of
his people, where once Law and Chaos had fought each
other to a stalemate, leaving their battle-ground empty of
life and the possibility of life.

And at last he had ridden his horse so hard that its heart
had burst and he had abandoned its corpse and continued
on foot, panting, to the sea, to this narrow beach, unable
to go further forward and fearing to return lest his enemies
should be lying in wait for him.

He thought that he would give much for a boat now. It
would not be long before the dogs discovered his scent and