"Christopher Stasheff - Rogue Wizard 07 - A Wizard In Midgard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stasheff Christopher)

himself. But it worked on the overseer, too; the man paused to yawn, then leaned
against the side of the barracks. He yawned again and again; his head nodded,
then jerked upright, his eyes blinking; but he yawned yet again, nodded some
more, then slipped to the ground, not even waking enough to notice he had
fallen.
Gar stepped over to take the man's cloak, hat, and prod. It wasn't much of a
weapon, but it would have to do. Then he slipped into the shadows, going from
outbuilding to outbuilding until he was catfooting past the steward's house. He
stopped to take his pack from the toolshed, then crept onward.
When he came to the road, he paused. He had never been out this way before; the
slaves always went to the fields behind the house, and Gar had a vague notion
the crops across the road belonged to someone else. He called to mind the
photo-map he had studied in orbit, remembered where the sun rose, and turned to
his right, following the road to the east, hunched over under the cloak, tapping
with the staff as though he were an old man, trying to look no taller than five
and a half feet.
It almost worked. But as he passed the next farmhouse, a voice out of the night
snapped, "Who goes there?"
"It's a slave!" someone shouted from the other side of the road. "A big one,
trying to hide his inches!"
Then they hit him, half a dozen at least, furious blows of iron-shod prods,
shouting in anger.
This time, though, Gar was ready for them. He set a bubble of mental force
around himself; it wasn't strong enough to stop the blows, but it slowed them
enough so that their hurt was minor, and so that Gar could block some, then
return them with harder blows of his own. He parried an overhand blow, kicked
the man in the stomach, whirled around and jumped high to kick another man in
the chest and struck downward to crack a third over the head. As he landed,
though, a blow from behind made his head ring; he fell to his knees, groping
frantically for the man's mind, lashing out with the outrage and anger of a
week, only a week....
He heard the strangled cry even as he pushed himself to his feet. He stepped
over the body toward the lone overseer who still stood, backing away from him,
the whites showing all around his eyes in terror, shouting, "What did you do to
him? What did you do?"
Gar reached out for the man, who turned and ran. Gar thought of stumbling, toes
catching against the opposite ankle, and the man went down in a tangle. Before
he could even cry out for help, Gar let a burst of illumination explode in the
man's mind and savored his lapse into unconsciousness. Then he took the man's
sword and hid it under his own cloak.
Lamps were lighting up in the farmhouse, and voices were calling in alarm. Gar
stepped back into the shadows and thought very intensely into the mind of each
man who was still alive-five out of six wasn't bad. A few minutes later, he
relaxed, then slipped away to find a brook he could wade. The men would wake, he
knew, and all tell the same story of the bear who had come out of the night and
fought in eerie silence, striking down overseer after overseer-and if one had
mysteriously died without a mark on him, well, no one could be surprised that he
had died of sheer fright.
For himself, Gar wouldn't mourn the man. It was a week for firsts in his life-he
felt not the slightest hint of remorse.