"Rosenberg,.Joel.-.Guardians.Of.The.Flame.06.&.07.-.To.Home.And.Ehvenor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragon Stories)

the two-room suite my wife and I shared. Well, maybe it was a three-room suite, if you included the
secret passage to the room next door, although the room next door was unoccupied, and the passage
was barred from our side. I like the idea of having a back way out; I'm cautious enough that I don't want
anybody else to have a back way in.
Kirah lay stretched out on the bed, the blankets having slid aside, revealing one long leg almost to the
hip. Sunlight splashed on her long, golden hair, her breasts rising and falling with her gentle breathing, her
arms spread wide, her mouth just barely parted, all trusting and innocent and vulnerable and lovely.
I felt cheated: I wanted to reach over and hold her for a moment before I left, but I couldn't. Not while
she was sleeping, ever. One of the rules. Not mine. Kirah has her own way of enforcing her rules. Call it
passive-aggressive, if you like—but ithurts her when I push things.
Damn.
I exchanged my cotton trousers for leather ones—you can get cut by the brush—and after I'd buttoned
the fly I shrugged into a hunting vest, and then the double shoulder holster that Kirah had made for me. I
belted my shortsword around my waist, tucked an extra brace of throwing knives never mind exactly
where.
An oak box with a trick catch—you have to push down on the top of the box while you press up on the
latch—held my two best pistols, loaded, oil-patched, and ready to go; I slipped them into the holster. A
nice design: it held one pistol a bit too high, but the other, held in place by a U-shaped spring hidden in
the leather, was held slantwise under the armpit, butt-forward. Draw, cock, and bang.

Me, I'd rather store most of my guns safely unloaded, and eventually I'd be able to. Jason's twin sixguns
were the first on this side, but they wouldn't be the last. With Jason's revolver and speedloader, it's flip,
slip, slam, and blam—flip the cylinder out, slip the Riccetti-made speedloader into place, slam the
cylinder shut, letting the outer shell of the speedloader fly where it may, and thenblam. And that's
worst-case; most of time, I'd keep the revolver loaded, trusting Lou Riccetti's unlicensed modification of
the Ruger transfer-bar safety to keep the gun from goingbang unexpectedly.
On the other hand, it takes more than a minute to load a flintlock, and I've never,ever been in a situation
where I've said to myself, "Gee, it'd be nice to have a loaded gun in about a minute."
Never. It's eithernah , or it'snow.
A small gunmetal flask of extract of dragonbane sat on the bureau, carefully sealed with wax, secondly
because I don't like the reek of the gooey stuff, but mainly because a good friend of mine is highly allergic
to it, being a dragon. While creatures with the sort of magical metabolisms that can be harmed by
dragonbane had long been driven away from the Eren regions—humans and magical creatures tend not
to get along—there had been rumors about things coming out of Faerie, and out on the Cirric Jason had
seen a few creatures he couldn't identify.
So I slipped the flask into my vest.
Last but not least, I tucked two Therranji garrottes into their separate, leather-lined pockets. Vicious
things—the slim cables were made with springy barbed wire, the barbs canted backwards so that the
garrotte could only be tightened. Just tuck the handle through the loop, then slip the barbed-wire noose
over a head, give the wooden handle one hard jerk, and let go—in order to get it off, the poor slob
would have to remove the handle, then slip the loop off the butt end.
Can't get it over the head? No problem—whip it around the neck, put the handle through the loop, and
pull. Trust the Therranji to come up with a weapon that mean—elves can be nasty—and somebody like
me to carry two of them on his person.
Still, peace is nice. You don't have to take a lot of precautions before going out for a simple walk in the
woods.
I wanted to take one last look at Kirah sleeping, and I wanted not to take one last look at her, so I hung
a quiver from my shoulder, grabbed my best longbow and a couple of spare strings, and headed down to
the stables.
* * *