"Karl Edward Wagner - Kane 01 - Darkness Weaves" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wagner Karl Edward)

But Arbas only chuckled and said, "Ask me again after you've met Kane!"




I

Those Who Dwell Within Tombs




Fed by cold springs and tiny streams of the highMyceumMountains far to the east, the River Cotras cut
its twisted path through miles of rocky foothills, until at last it reached the wide belt of lowlands that
circled the Lartroxian coast. There it began its rush to the western seas--a fifty-mile stretch of deep
navigable channel through fertile farmlands and rich forests. The city Nostoblet stood along the banks of
liver Cotras, where its waters first rushed from the low hills onto the coastal plains. By virtue of the wide
river channel, Nostoblet was an inland port, receiving both exotic trade goods from the merchant ships
that plied the western seas, as well as the wealth of the eastern mountains, brought down the roaring
waterway on rafts by the half-wild mountaineers.

The hills behind Nostoblet were thinly forested and scarred by great outcroppings and canyons, where
long ago mountain streams had slashed through the soft rock. Stone cliffs stood out in endless profusion,
some rising hundreds of feet above the valleys below them. An almost uncrossable barrier, they guarded
the plains of South Lartroxia, marking the limits where, as some scholars maintained, the ancient seas had
once rolled.

The cliffs in the hills behind Nostoblet had been honeycombed with tombs in many places. The
comparatively recent southern spread of the worship of Horment had instituted the custom of cremation
of the dead. Consequently these tombs had been out of use for over a century now, and the paths that
led to them had been unwatched by human guards for almost as long.

The people of old Nostoblet had always been a practical folk, whose religious habits had not required
them to furnish lavish tombs for their dead. The custom of the wealthy in those days when the tombs
were in use had been to lay their dead to rest in simple wooden boxes, which were set in niches within
caverns that had been cut into the cliffs. None of the corpse's personal belongings were interred except
the clothing he wore and occasional bits of jewelry of negligible value. (Consequently there was nothing
to tempt a would-be graverobber to slip past the few soldiers who had guarded the tombs in the past--or
to brave the inhuman guardians. For the tombs of Nostoblet were infamous for ghouls and other worse
dwellers, and the ghastly tales of their hauntings made all of Nostoblet scrupulously shun the area even to
this time.

It was along the tortuous trails which ascended these cliffs that two men laboriously picked their way one
stormy night. Lightning shattered the night's total blackness at frequent intervals, illuminating by its glare
the rain-slick rock path that they followed along the face of the bluff. Its unpredictable flashes lighted the
pathway far better than the feebly burning closed lantern Arbas carried.

"Careful here!" Arbas shouted back. "The rocks here are really slippery!" Ignoring his own advice, the
assassin half slipped on a glistening boulder, and in struggling to keep his footing he very nearly threw the
useless lantern over the edge.