"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Dus 4 - Book of Silence" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

The Book of Silence
Book Four of the Lords of D├╗s
Copyright 1984 by Lawrence Watt-Evans


CHAPTER ONE

The last caravan had departed ten days before, and the next was not expected
for at least a fortnight. Skelleth's market lay still and almost empty in the
watery sunlight of early spring. No merchants or farmers disturbed its
silence, though a few loafers and strolling pedestrians were in sight. On the
east side of the square, the door of the new Baron's house was closed,
indicating that its occupants were not to be disturbed. Garth, one of only two
overmen still in Skelleth, sat in the King's Inn, staring out the window at
the lifeless market, with nothing to distract him from his own sour mood and
gloomy thoughts.
No news had come down from the Northern Waste since the last snows had
melted. That meant that Garth had received no word of his family, nor a report
about his latest petition to the City Council of Ordunin, asking that his
sentence of banishment from the Waste be revoked. He was still an exile from
his homeland, stranded in Skelleth for lack of anywhere better to go.
From the overman's point of view, Skelleth was not a particularly
pleasant place to dwell, but it did have certain advantages. First, it was on
the border, the closest human habitation to his native city of Ordunin;
therefore, his family could visit him more easily here than elsewhere, and his
petitions and letters to the Council could be delivered more quickly.
Second, he was on good terms with the local rulers. Saram, Baron of
Skelleth, before being elevated to his present position, had been the closest
thing Garth had to a human friend. The Baroness Frima was the only other
person who might possibly be considered for that title; Garth had brought her
to Skelleth himself, after rescuing her from a sacrificial altar in her native
city of D├╗sarra. It was he who had introduced Frima to her husband.
Furthermore, the Treasurer and Minister of Trade was the former master
trader, Galt of Ordunin, the only other overman still in Skelleth. Garth had
brought him down from the Waste to aid in opening trade between Skelleth and
Ordunin. That trade was flourishing now, despite the fact that Galt, like
Garth, was under sentence of exile.
Third, although the local populace did not, in general, like or trust
Garth, it had learned to accept his presence. The people of other human towns
might not be so accommodating. Three centuries had passed since the Racial
Wars between human and overman had dwindled away to nothing, but hatred, Garth
knew, could linger long after its cause was forgotten.
Fourth, at least at the moment, Skelleth was at peace-and that was an
increasingly rare distinction. Although the news from the lands to the south
and east and west tended to be muddled and sometimes contradictory, Garth knew
well that most of the world was at war. No one, including the Eramman barons
themselves, seemed to have a clear idea which side any given baron was on in
any given war; yet by all accounts, that uncertainty had not impeded the
fighting one whit. The greater wars provided the excuse for settling old
border squabbles or for simple raiding and looting. The civil war in Eramma,