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

of Asion's shoulders would be sufficient for most purposes.
Ilna glanced at the strands of yarn in her hands, ready to be woven into a pattern to freeze the mind or
stop the heart of anyone who saw it. She could instead knot the yarn into a simple oracle to answer the
question, "Does an enemy wait for us below?"
She did something similar every morning to choose the direction for the day's travels . . . but such care
wasn't required now. She trusted the long, fine fur growing on the top of Asion's ears, and she trusted her
own instinct to tell her if something ahead wasn't right, was out of place in a peaceful valley. She didn't
feel that here.
Ilna'd lived in a hamlet on the east coast of Haft until she was eighteen. Two years ago a wizard named
Tenoctris had washed up on shore and everything had changed. She and her brother Cashel had left
home forever, accompanied by their childhood friends, Garric and Sharina. And now—
Garric was ruler of the Isles; his sister had become Princess Sharina of Haft; and Cashel had the only
thing that'd ever mattered to him, Sharina's love. He could be Lord Cashel if he'd wanted, but the title
meant no more to him than it would've to Ilna.
Ilna's lips were as hard as knife edges. At one time she'd have said she didn't want anything beyond what

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her skill at weaving brought her. Then she met Chalcus and Merota, a man and a child who loved
her . . . until they were killed.
Ilna smiled. Death was the greatest and perhaps the only peace she could imagine. Until then, she'd kill
catmen.
"We'll go down," she said, standing and stepping out of the brush without waiting to see whether the
hunters agreed. That was their business; they'd joined her, rather than Ilna os-Kenset clinging to a
chance-met pair of strong, confident men for protection. The skills Ilna had learned in Hell were far
more lethally effective than the hunters' weapons and muscles. Though—
Ilna knew that meeting Asion and Karpos wasn't really chance. Her oracle had directed her over a ridge
and into a valley to the east of the one she'd been following for the first week after she left the royal
army and her friends. Her surviving friends. The smell of a fire had led her to the hunters, smoking thin-
sliced venison on a rack of green twigs.
Asion and Karpos followed her because they were confused and fearful, while Ilna had purpose. The
Change, the mixing of eras by wizardry, had turned the Isles into the single great continent which had
existed in its far past. The hunters—Ilna assumed they were from a much earlier time; she and they
struggled occasionally with each other's dialect, though they understood one another well enough—had
been completely disoriented by what had happened.
Ilna didn't understand the Change any better than the hunters did, but that was simply one more thing
that didn't matter to her. She lived to kill the catmen, the Coerli, because they'd killed the man and the
child who'd given her life meaning.
The hunters would've been willing to do things they found difficult to be allowed to accompany Ilna. All
she asked them to do was to kill, and at that to kill animals rather than men. That Asion and Karpos
found as natural as breathing.
Karpos went down with Ilna, angling a little out from her left side and letting his long legs carry him
enough ahead that he could be said to be leading. His right thumb and forefinger rested on his bowstring,
ready to draw it back to his ear and loose in a single motion. Karpos was a raw-boned man with beetling
brows. He looked slow and awkward, but he'd shown that he was neither.
Ilna smiled. The oracle of her cords wouldn't have led her to Karpos and his partner if they hadn't been
the sort of men she needed as helpers.
Asion waited on the ridge, watching the back-trail as Ilna and Karpos walked down the gentle slope. The