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

Around him milled his company of bandits, rough and
scarred like burned villages. They bared their knives as they
watched the singers, smiling wickedly one to another, as
though keeping a dreadful secret unto a fast-approaching
hour.
I hovered at the mouth of the cave, listening for an hour
to the technically brilliant and lifeless songs of the bards.
They claimed to play the music for its own sake, for the
sake of the glory of song, but they all knew otherwise, for
always music serves some master.
Even Finn knew they were liars. Finn, who had held
neither harp nor flute, whose poetry was ambush and
plunder. He leaned into the eroded throne, dismissing the
pearly singer from Kalaman, the pale lad from Palanthas
and the merchant turned poet from Dargaard. Each gathered
a heel of bread for his song and turned, grumbling, eastward
toward Solamnic cities and the possibility of castles and
shelter.
It was night. Bats rustled in the upper regions of the
cavern, and I remembered an old time, a winter time, a
cavern and a dry rustling sound. Two last supplicants stood
between me and the bandit: a beggar whose leg had been
damaged in a field accident, and another bard.
While the beggar begged and was given a loaf, and
while the bard sang and received a crust, I waited in the
shadow of the cave.
None of them had the song. None of them. Neither bard
nor minstrel nor poet nor troubadour. Their songs rang
thinly in the cave, echoing back to them and to us, throwing
the music into a doubling confusion.
I had come this far, and for me there was still more to
discover, more than thin music and mendicant rhymes.
When summoned, I stepped to the light, and when the
dulled eyes of the bandit king rested upon me, I threw back
my hood.

*****

"Firebringer," he rasped, and "Orestes the Torch."
As all the bandits hastened to be the one to slay me, to
end the line and the curse before the approving eye of their
leader, Finn raised his hand and stayed theirs.
"No," he rumbled. The blood of the line of Pyrrhus
should not stain the floors of this cavern. For remember the
curse. Remember the harm it might visit."
One shaman, seated by the stone foot of the throne,
nodded in agreement, beads rattling as he fondled his bone
necklace.
I followed the bandit guards into the throat of the cave,
to a confusing depth where all light had vanished except the