"David Drake - Crown of the Isles 02 - The Mirror of Worlds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

I have no personal religious beliefs, but many very intelligent people believed that these voces mysticae
were effective in rousing spiritual powers to affect human endeavors. I prefer not to pronounce them
aloud. Readers can make their own decisions on the subject.
As usual in the Isles series, the literary allusions in this novel are to classical and medieval writers of our
own world. I won't bother to list the correspondences here, but the reader can rest assured that they exist.
I'll mention one further point. I almost always have a photograph or a painting beside me while I work
on a scene. That helps me give touches of reality to the fantasy worlds I'm creating. As one example
among many, this time I used a copy of Les Tres Riches Heures of the Duke de Berry, an illuminated
manuscript from around 1411 ad.
Readers familiar with horses will know that sidesaddles now put the rider's legs to the left. If those
persons will check August of Les Tres Riches Heures, they'll see that two of the three women riding
have their legs to the right.
While I do make mistakes, I suggest that this shouldn't be the first assumption readers make when they
find something that surprises them.
Dave Drake
david-drake.com




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Chapter 1
Ilna looked down the valley to the gray limestone temple and the slaughtered bodies around it. There
were many corpses, though she didn't know precisely how many: when a number was higher than she
could count on her fingers, she had to tell it with beans or pebbles . . . if she cared.
Mostly she didn't care. These folk, the humans and the catmen who must've killed them and been killed
in turn, were all dead. The dead didn't matter.
Ilna had loved her family, Chalcus and Merota. They didn't matter either because catmen had killed
them also.
"It can't've happened long ago," said Asion, the small, dark man who cropped his hair and beard with a
knife at long intervals. Ilna'd known the hunter for nearly a month, and she hadn't seen him trim it in that
time. "I don't smell them in the breeze."
"There's no breeze," said Karpos, his ginger-haired partner, equally unkempt. He crushed a pellet of dry
soil between the thumb and finger of his right hand, letting the dust drift to the ground. It fell straight, so
far as Ilna could see. "You're just pretending you feel one."
"There's a breeze," said Asion crooking his left index finger without taking his eyes off the valley. "The
fuzz on my ears feels the wind even when dust won't drift. There's breeze enough that I'd smell them if
they'd started to stink."
Karpos' left hand held a short, very stiff wooden bow with an arrow nocked; its point was bronze, thin
but with broad wings that'd require only a few heartbeats to bleed out the life of whatever he hit fairly.
Asion had a sling with a short staff and linen thongs. For ordinary hunting he shot smooth pebbles, but
he carried a few pointed lead bullets in a pouch; one of those was in the pocket of molded leather now.
A word was cast into the metal of the bullets. Asion seemed to think it was a valuable charm, though he
wasn't sure because the hunters couldn't read any better than Ilna did.
Ilna didn't believe in charms of that sort. From what she'd seen since the hunters joined her, the strength