"Margeret Weis & Don Perrin - Dragonlance - The Chaos War 01 - The Doom Brigade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weis Margaret)

Slith could only shrug. "Sorry, sir. It was all pretty confused..."
"Yes, yes, I know," Kang sucked in a breath, tried to calm himself. "Hand me a rag
to clean this filth off, will you? Deal with the wounded, then assemble the troops in
one hour in the compound. I want to talk to them before it gets too hot"
Slith laid a conciliatory claw on Kang's scaled arm. "The boys are having a rough
time of it now, sir. But we're still all behind you. Every one of us."
Kang nodded wordlessly, and Slith went off to carry out his orders. He and his
soldiers hauled the unconscious dwarves outside the gate and left them there. By the
next day, they would be gone. They would either wake up and stumble home, or their
families would haul mem off the following day.
Either way, they would be safe in bed by sundown.
"Damn crazy way to run a war, if you ask me," one draconian was overheard to
say to another, as they hauled a potbellied, black-bearded dwarf out the front gate.
Yes, Kang thought to himself. It was a damn crazy way to run a war.


Chapter Two


Kang had his reasons for this damn crazy way to fight a war. Reasons he'd shared
with the men under him time and again. They just needed another reminder.
The draconians descending the wall shuffled into the compound, forming orderly
ranks. Soon, all the draconians in Kang's command were standing in four rows. Kang
took his place before them. Slith gave the order, and the draconians snapped to
attention.
The morning sun, a fiery red eyeball that looked the way Kang's eyes felt this
morning, peered into the compound. The red light glinted on the scales of the
draconians, scales reflecting the type of dragon from which each was so hideously
descended. Sunlight gleamed in the brassy tinted scales of the Baaz. Slith, one of the
Sivaks, glittered silver. Stepping from the shadow of the command hut into the bright
compound, Kang's own scales glinted with burnished bronze. He was a Bozak, one
the few Bozaks in the troop and, for all he knew, perhaps one of the few Bozaks left
in the world.
"Lizard men" was the term the humans used to derisively refer to draconiansтАФan
insult that never failed to make Kang's scales twitch. His troops bore no more
resemblance to lizards than humans did to ... well . . . monkeys, for example. The
draconians were much closer akin to their parents, dragons.
The shortest draconian stands six feet tall, Kang himself was seven feet in height.
They walk upright on powerful haunches, their clawed feet needing no shoes or boots.
Their clawed hands are adept at wielding the weapons of war. All draconians except
the Auraks (who don't get along well with their fellow draconians and therefore tend
to be loners) have wings. These wings allow them to glide short distances or float
through the air. The Sivaks can actually fly. Draconians' eyes gleam red, their long
snouts are filled with sharp fangs.
Draconians are intelligent, much more intelligent than goblins. This created a
problem during the war, for many of the draconians proved to be far more intelligent
than the humans who led them. Bozaks, like Kang, have an inborn talent for magic,
similar to that possessed by their doomed parents. And though the draconians had
been brought into the world with only one objectiveтАФto destroy any force that
opposed themтАФthe longer they remained in the world, the greater their need to be part