"Nancy Varian - Berberick - Dalamar the Dark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varian Nancy)

bulk of Her Dark Majesty's army waited, thousands of soldiers, humans, ogres,
goblins, and- Blood Gem made a sound of disgust-and draconians, the misbred
dragonmen, spawn of an evil magic-making that corrupted the eggs of dragons.
These were Takhisis's fiercest fighters. All the army waited impatiently to
fall upon this forested land of wealth and beauty that for centuries had been
denied to everyone but the Silvanesti themselves. High in the peaks of those
foothills, a strong wing of red dragons brooded, impatient to take to the sky
and, with their riders, lead that dark army into battle.
It will be a glorious battle, the dragon mused, his thought matching his
rider's.
Phair laughed, the sound wind-torn from her throat and flung out to the hard
blue sky. "It will be, and we will soak the forest with elf blood!"
Soon?
The highlord said nothing, but Blood Gem knew her, deeply as dragons know
their riders. She had laid her plans in the winter, and those plans called for
an army so strong that the elf defenders would crumble before it. A
blood-lusty soldier, she was also a canny strategist. She would not commit her
army until she was certain her numbers would overwhelm the elves. More
soldiers were coming down from Goodlund and across the Bay of Balifor. Once
these arrived, she would be ready. Until then, she would play as a cat played
with a mouse-cruel games to amuse herself. Phair Caron despised elves, and of
all elves, she despised Silvanesti most. If anyone needed a picture of that
hatred's birth, Blood Gem knew the perfect one.
A near-grown girl shivered in the shabby winter streets of Tarsis, her rags
clutched around thin shoulders, the bones of her face too clearly defined by
hunger-carved flesh. In glittering gold, a party of Silvanesti walked past,
holding the hems of their robes high out of the running gutter. One turned and
saw Phair, the child whose face looked more like a skull than not. With one
hand the elf drew aside the hem of his robe, the silk and the brocade all
glimmering with jewels. With the other he covered his mouth and nose as one of
his companions tossed a copper coin at Phair. The coin fell into the gutter,
landing in a pool of muck.
Phair scrambled for it, never minding that she had to scrape through mud and
worse to find it. Here was a week's worth of food! Enough to keep her sister
out of the brothels where most of the gutter-girls went to earn their bread.
Phair had served there herself at need, but never would she let her sister do
that. Never. When she looked up, a word of thanks on her lips, she saw only
the backs of the elves and heard one say, "Filthy gutter wretch. Why did you
do that, Dalyn? The creature is no concern of ours."
"None," his companion had agreed. "But that will keep it from following."
But the gutter creature had followed, Blood Gem thought as he soared over the
Sylvan Land. She followed those elves right home, didn't she? It took her a
while of years, but she did. And now, a highlord in the army of the goddess
elves most hate, Phair Caron had a kind of thanks to offer for their treatment
of her, that thanks too long deferred.
Blood Gem banked and turned, soaring away north again. When he came within
sight of the Khalkists and the northern border of the Sylvan Land where the
trees were not so thick, he felt the uplifting currents of hot air. Three
villages were afire, the acrid fumes of terror and dying wafted up to the sky.
All around the smoking ruins, bodies lay, most looking like they'd been nailed