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

dry, dusty smell of disuse. It was plain that nobody had been living in the
room recently.
Hesitantly, he crossed to the windows and looked out. He judged the angle
of the sun and decided he was looking almost due north.
The view was spectacular; he could see the castle roofs below him, hiding
his view of the outer wall and most of the surrounding village. Beyond that he
could see a few houses, and then the plain, rolling on into the distance,
spotted with farmhouses, orchards, and various outbuildings, marked off into
individual holdings by hedges and fences. He saw no roads, however; what
traveling was done here was apparently done straight across country.
To the right he thought he could see, out near the horizon, the farms and
grasslands fading into desert sand; somewhat to the left of center he thought
he might be seeing the peaks of distant mountains somewhere beyond the
horizon.
He turned back to the doorway and saw that Lady Kalira and the two
soldiers were still standing in the corridor. He had a sudden vision of the
door slamming, trapping him inside.
"Aren't you coming in?" he asked.
Lady Kalira nodded and stepped in.
"What did you wait for?" he asked.
"I would not enter your private chamber without an invitation, Lord
Sterren," she replied.
Baffled by this pronouncement, which clearly implied that he had some
authority and was not merely a prisoner, it took Sterren a moment to realize
that Alder and Dogal were still waiting in the hall. He looked at Lady Kalira.
She looked back, paying no attention to the soldiers. "May I sit down?"
she asked.
"Yes," Sterren said in Ethsharitic, again caught off guard by her sudden
deference. He corrected himself, repeating it in Semmat, as he remembered his
escort waiting for him, back out on the plain.
 Maybe they were serious about calling him a lord.
She pulled a chair from a corner and sat. Sterren considered for a long
moment before lowering himself cautiously into the chair by the desk.
The healing salve on his saddlesores was working; he could sit with only
mild discomfort.
"You must have questions," Lady Kalira said. "Now that we're safely home,
maybe I can answer them."
Sterren stared at her for a moment, still puzzled, and then smiled
crookedly. "I hope so," he said.


CHAPTER 5

"Everything in this room is yours," Lady Kalira said. "This, and the
position of warlord, are your inheritance from your great-uncle Sterren.
Nothing else; everything he owned when he died is right here, or was given, at
his request, to others."
Sterren struggled with that for a moment and carefully phrased a
question.
"How did he give anything to me? How did he know I... I was alive, when