"Cook, Glen - Black Company 09 - Glittering Stone 03 - Water Sleeps" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cook Glen)

1



In those days the Black Company did not exist. This I know
because there were laws and decrees that told me so. But I did not
feel entirely insubstantial.



The Company standard, its Captain and Lieutenant, its
Standardbearer and all the men who had made the Company so
terrible, had passed on, having been buried alive at the heart of a
vast desert of stone. "Glittering stone," they whispered in the
streets and alleys of Taglios, and "Gone to Khatovar," they
proclaimed from on high, the mighty making what they had been so
determined to prevent for so long over into a great triumph once
the Radisha or Protector or somebody decided that people ought
to believe that the Company had fulfilled its destiny.



Anyone old enough to remember the Company knew better. Only
fifty people had ventured out onto that plain of glittering stone. Half
of those people had not been Company. Only two of those fifty
had returned to lie about what had happened. And a third who had
come back to retail the truth had been killed in the Kiaulune wars,
far away from the capital. But the deceits of Soulcatcher and
Willow Swan fooled no one, then or now. People simply pretended
to believe them because that was safer.



They might have asked why Mogaba needed five years to conquer
a Company that had passed on, squandering thousands of young
lives to bring the Kiaulune domains under the Radisha's rule and
into the realm of the Protector's twisted truths. They might have
mentioned that people claiming to be Black Company had held out
in the fortress Overlook for years after that, until the Protector,
Soul-catcher, finally became so impatient with their intransigence
that she invested her own best sorceries in a two-year project that
reduced that huge fortress to white powder, white rubble and white
bones. They might have raised these points. But they remained
silent instead. They were afraid. With cause, they were afraid.



The Taglian empire under the Protectorate is an empire of fear.