"Gordon R. Dickson - Dragon Knight 05 - The Dragon, the Earll" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

Dickson, Gordon R - Dragon Knight 05 - The Dragon, the Earl ,and the Troll (v1.0) (html).html



CHAPTER 1
The Hobgoblin had come out into the kitchen again. "I can't understand it!" Jim
said. "Fleas, lice, rats, hedgehogs looking for a warm place to sleep—but
hobgoblins!"

"Calm down," said Angie.

"Why do we have to have hobgoblins?" demanded Jim.

All hobgoblins lived in chimneys. They were small, harmless, sometimes
beneficial Naturals. You left out a bowl of milk—or whatever you had to share
with them—every night.

The Hobgoblin would drink or eat that, and not bother anything else. But the
Malencontri kitchen Hobgoblin apparently went on periodic binges. He did not
drink anything, unless it was milk; but when on a binge he took one bite only out
of everything else that was eatable in the kitchen—and after that the kitchen
workers would not touch anything he might have touched, for some superstitious
reason.

"Calm down—" said Angie…

"—Remember?" said Angie now. "And that was just the day before yesterday."

She nestled a little closer with her head in the hollow of Jim's shoulder as they
stood together, the only people awake and on their feet along the wooden
walkway just behind the top of the curtain wall—that later centuries would rush
to call "the battlements" of a castle—of their home, Malencontri.

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Dickson, Gordon R - Dragon Knight 05 - The Dragon, the Earl ,and the Troll (v1.0) (html).html



A December dawn, icy under a cloud-heavy sky, was just breaking. In its gray
light they looked out on the trampled open space before the wall, to the thick
surround of forest, some hundred yards away, from which a few pencil-thin
ghosts of gray smoke were beginning to rise, back a small distance behind the
first treetops.

Yesterday's blood had turned black on the snow and become indistinguishable
from the blackness of the miry ground, where snow and bare earth had been
ground together into equally black mud, under heavy boots and iron heels.

A little snow had fallen during the late afternoon of the attack, and had to a
certain extent hidden the dark shapes that lay still on the ground—those of their