"Stackpole, Michael A. - Once a Hero" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stackpole Michael A)

have half a mind to leave now."

"If you had half a mind, you'd not have come here at
all."

The Elf shook his head ruefully. "Clearly my faculties
have been atrophied by five years of association with you."

"I'm thinking it's our dying that has befuddled you."

"Ah, yes, to be dead in the city of the dead. The concept
amused, but the reality has failed to satisfy expectation."
He spat at the nearest building. "This is a foul place."

"Foul it is, and fairly we will quit it, when we are
done." Looking about through the dark-shrouded streets, I
thought "foul" a rather mild adjective, for death haunted
the city of Jammaq. The wind kept it cold, even in high
summer, though I had no complaint about that. Growing
up in the Roclaws, I had been born in an unseasonable
blizzard and had spent more time walking on snow and ice
than in spring-green meadows.

With ourselves being the exception, not a living crea-
ture walked the cobbled streets in the Reithrese city of the
dead that night. The swirling wind brought with it the rot-

Once a Hero 3

scent of decaying meat, and that made taking every step
toward the center of the city a battle. I pulled the natari
scarf up over my nose again and let the wet-wool scent
mask the death stench so I could go forward.

I had no idea what the Reithrese envisioned when they
created Jammaq, but I could see what it had become over
the centuries and centuries. Streets ran haphazard through
the city, like cracks in ice, without rhyme and certainly
with little reason. The outlying buildings, none over a sin-
gle story tall, sprouted comers as a bird would feathers.
Odd blocks jutted out, studding the walls with stone
thorns so thick that even a rat would be hard pressed to
find shadowed space large enough in which to hide. That
fact had caused my friend and I no end of anxiety, until we
both discovered that all but a few of the buildings were
empty, and those that were not, advertised their condition
with loud music and thin slivers of light limning tight-
closed shutters and doors.

If it weren't enough that all the buildings had been