"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Ethshar 3 - The Unwilling Warlord" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

for more than forty years. Maybe that peace would last.
Or maybe a war was overdue. He simply didn't know anything about the
situation.
It was time, however, to start learning as much as he could, as quickly
as he could. With that in mind, even as he tried to ride with dignity and
pride, and to look the part of a warlord despite his shabby, travel-worn
clothes, he was studying everything in sight.
The castle stood upon a slight rise, the closest thing to a hill that
Sterren had seen since leaving Akalla; Sterren could not tell if the little
plateau, standing eight or ten feet above the plain, was natural or man-made,
but it was certainly not new, in either case. Surrounding the castle and its
raised base were scattered two or three dozen houses and shops, all the same
dull yellow as the outlying farmhouses, all built of some substance Sterren
had never seen before and could not identify, all with thick walls and only a
few heavily shuttered windows. Gaily colored awnings shielded most of the
doorways and served as open-air shops; there was no single market square, just
a small plaza at the castle gate, and the streets were rather haphazard. All
the ground in the castle's vicinity was dry, hard-packed bare dirt, trampled
smooth and even, and the houses and shops were not arranged in clear, sharp
streets, but just ragged lines that wiggled every which way.
Outside the village in any direction Sterren could see scattered
farmhouses, built in the same way as the village's structures, strewn unevenly
across the plain.
The castle itself was a stark contrast to these humble dwellings; it was
an immense and forbidding structure built of dark red stone. An outer wall
topped with iron-braced battlements stood more than fifteen feet high, with no
opening anywhere in it save the gate by which Sterren's little party entered.
As they passed through this portal, Sterren saw that the wall was roughly
twenty feet thick and the gateway equipped with three sets of heavy doors as
well as a spiked portcullis and openings overhead through which assaults might
be made on anyone trying to enter uninvited.
It was not, perhaps, as overwhelming a piece of engineering and defense
technology as Ethshar's city walls and gate towers, but it had its own grim
power, certainly. Sterren was quite sure that he would not care to try to pass
that wall and gate without a very clear invitation.
Of course, his escort, now numbering fifteen in all, clearly constituted
an invitation.
The castle within that outer wall was vaguely pyramidal in its overall
shape. Low wings, a mere two stories in height, stretched out to either side
of the central mass, which stood some six stories, and was in turn topped by a
great central tower whose peak was, Sterren judged, fully a hundred feet from
the ground upon which the castle stood. A few turrets protruded here and
there, ruining the stepped outline. Window openings were nonexistent at ground
level, but grew steadily from narrow slits on the second floor to broad
expanses of glass under graceful stone arches on the uppermost level of the
tower.
The strip of ground between the curtain wall and the keep was entirely
taken up with paved walks and close-packed patches of garden; Sterren was a
bit surprised to see no inner line of defense there. The gap between Ethshar's
walls and its outermost street, he knew, was carefully kept clear of trees and