"Anthony Piers - Incarnations Of Immortality 2 - Bearing an Hourglass [uc]" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anthony Piers)

"Puk—a small household dragon. Ours was only half
a yard long. I gave it an awful scare; it had been napping
in a sunbeam. My folks had to put me in a steel playpen
after that. At age two I fashioned a rope out of my blanket
and scaled the summit of the playpen wall and went after
the cat. I vivisected her after she scratched me for cutting
off her tail. So they brought in a werecat who changed
into the most forbidding old shrew when I bothered her.
She certainly had my number; when I toasted her feline
tail with a hotfoot, she wered human and toasted my tail
with a belt. I developed quite an aggravation for magical
animals."

"I can imagine," Norton said politely. He himself was
always kind to animals, especially wild ones, though he
would defend himself if attacked. There were things about
Gawain he was not fully comfortable with.

"I was sent to gladiator school," the ghost continued.
"I wanted to go, and for some reason my family preferred
to have me out of the house. I graduated second in my
class. I would have been first, but the leading student had
enchanted armor, even at night, so I couldn't dispatch
him. Canny character! After that, I bought a fine outfit
of my own, proof against any blade or bullet or magic
bolt. Then I set out to make my fortune.

"There are not many dragons around, compared to
mundane animals, and most of them are protected spe-
cies. Actually, I respect dragons; they are a phenomenal
challenge. It's too bad that it took so long for man really
to master magic; only in the last fifty years or so has it
become a formidable force. I suppose it was suppressed

S

by the Renaissance, when people felt there had to be
rational explanations for everything. As a result of that
ignorance, dragons and other fantastic creatures had a
much harder time of it than they had during the medieval
age in Europe. Some masqueraded as mundane animals—
unicorns cutting off their horns to pass for horses, griffins
shearing their wings and donning lion-head masks, that
sort of thing—and some were kept hidden on private
estates by conservationists who cared more for nature
than for logic. A number developed protective illusion so
they looked a good deal more mundane than they were,
and Satan salvaged a few, though most of His creatures
are demonic. But now at last the supernatural is back in