"Roger Taylor - Ibryen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Taylor Roger)

Copyright ┬й 1995, Roger Taylor
Roger Taylor has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified
as the Author of this work.
First published by Headline Book Publishing in 1995.
This Edition published in 03"" by Mushroom eBooks, an imprint of Mushroom Publishing, Bath, BA1
4EB, United Kingdom
www.mushroom-ebooks.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without
the prior written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 1843192152




Ibryen

A sequel to the Chronicles of Hawklan

Roger Taylor

Mushroom eBooks


Chapter 1

The wind that brought the messenger was full of strangeness. For several days it had blown, no different
from the wind that always blew at this time of year, loaded with subtle perfumes from the
spring-awakening grasses and flowers that coloured the lower slopes of the mountains, and woven
through with the whispering sounds of high, tumbling streams and the home-building clamour of the birds
and animals that dwelt amid the towering peaks.

Yet, for Ibryen, the wind was different. It carried at its heart a faint and elusive song that possessed a
cloak-tugging urgency during the day and reached into his sleep during the night, bringing him to sudden
wakefulness. Thus roused, he would lie, still, silent, and expectant, with anxious magic hovering,
black-winged, about him in the darkness that spanned between his sleeping world and his solitary room.
But nothing came to explain this mysterious unquiet тАУ no sudden illumination to show a way through the
uncertain future before him, no new tactics to outwit the growing power of the Gevethen, no new words
with which to encourage his followers. Nothing.

You expect too much, he thought irritably, on the third night of such an awakening. Or was he perhaps
just tormenting himself with imaginary hopes? Was this disturbance no more than his clinging to some
childish fancy that all would be well in the end? Was he deluding himself that somewhere, something was
preparing to come to his aid, rather than face the dark knowledge within him that he and his cause, and
his men, were probably lost?

No. Surely it couldnтАЩt be that! Doubt was an inevitable part of leadership, he knew. It underscored his
every action and he deemed himself sufficiently aware of his own nature not to have such a foe lurking in
the darker recesses of the mind waiting to spring out in ambush.

Yet . . .?