"Sheri S. Tepper - Dervish Daughter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

through if we'd had a few extra hours with nothing
better to do and hadn't minded leaving the wagon


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CHAPTER ONE

behind.
Off to the right the forest thinned out a little. There
were wide-enough spaces between the trees to get
down into a meadow, and the meadow looked as
though it stretched past the obstruction and back to the
road. Chance was at the edge of the open space,
beckoning.
Queynt krerked a few syllables to Yittleby and Yattleby,
they turning their great beaks in reply. He had said,
'Can you handle this?' and they had replied, 'Why even
ask?' He had picked up a few words of the krylobos*
language over the years. I wasn't always sure that he
knew what he was saying.
It was first light, still very dim. I got off to walk beside
the wagon as it tilted from side to side over the road
banks and through the scattered trees. Watching where
I was walking had become a habit, and when I saw it I
stopped without conscious effort, hollering to Queynt,
'Shadow! Stop. Look there.'
Unlike the rivers of dark we had seen flowing along
the road farther south, this patch was a small one, the
size of an outspread cape. It lay under a willow copse,
directly in my path, easy to miss in this half-light.
When we'd started this adventure, traveling along
the shores of the Glistening Sea among the towns of
the Bight, we'd seen shadow piled on shadow. We'd
taken refuge in the wagon more than once when we'd
encountered great swatches of it creeping and crawling
about us in the forests and chasms. In comparison to
that, this little patch was almost innocent looking.
'What's holding you?' asked Peter, riding down
behind us.
'Shadow.' Queynt was laconic about it. Though he
claimed to have seen it seldom before we started our
northern trip, he had accustomed himself to the sight
better than I. Shadow never failed to give me a sick
emptiness inside, a fading feeling, as though I had
become unreal. I had been shadow bit once, in
Chimmerdong. As they say, once bit, twice sore.
'Well.' He sat there for a moment, staring at it, shifting


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