"Dan Parkinson - Dragonlance Tales - Cataclysm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Parkinson Dan)

have ripened."
Mother clutched my shoulder. The pain relented a bit.
"Continue what? Lady, 'tis a riddle."
A riddle the druidess answered, there in the vaulted
cave, as the weather outside turned colder still and colder,
on a night like those on which the fisherman claim you
could walk on ice from Caergoth across the waters to
Eastport.
She told me that my father, Orestes, had ridden
desperately westward as the peninsula burned at the hands
of the invaders. He rode with freebooters - with Nerakans
and the goblins from Throt, and they were rough customers,
but he passed through Caergoth unharmed. None of them
knew he was the son of Pyrrhus Alecto - "the Firebringer,"
as the songs called my grandfather.
"Why did he ... why DIDN'T he ..." I began to ask. I
was only fourteen.
The druidess understood and lifted her hand. "He was just
one, and young. And there is a harder reason. Orestes, NOT
YOUR GRANDFATHER, had brought the fires to the
peninsula. You see, he murdered his master. Your
grandmother had fostered his apprenticeship with Anon of
Coastlund. She taught him from childhood that he must
recover his father's honor at any cost. Your grandfather's
honor. So he killed Arion, that he should sing no longer of
your grandfather's shame."
Mother's grip tightened on my shoulder. I shrugged her
away yet again. Again the scars on my neck and face bit
and nettled.
"Go on."
"Then the goblins came, when they heard the new song
Orestes sang. ..."
When Orestes saw what his words had wrought, he ran.
It was at the last village seawards - Endaf, where the coast
tumbles into the Cape of Caergoth - that Orestes could
abide no more of the plunder and burning. Caergoth was in
flames behind him, and Ebrill, where the bandits first
camped, then Llun and Mercher, vanished forever in the
goblin's torchlight.
 He was just one man, and he was young, but even so,
surely it shamed him as much as it angered him.
At Endaf he stopped and turned into the fray. He
dismounted, broke through the goblins, and joined in a
frantic attempt to rescue a woman from a burning inn.
Orestes was sent to the rooftop, or he asked to go. The
beams gave way with him, and the goblins watched and
laughed as Orestes fell into the attic, which fell around him
in turn, crashing down and up again in a rapture of fire.
But he lived. He was fire-marked, hated of men, and
they would know him by his scars henceforth. The burns