"Doranna Durgin - A Bitch in Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Durgin Doranna)

Tallon dropped the satchel and looked thoughtfully at his new linehound.

Shiba gave him her Noble Beauty pose. After all, she was of the best bloodlines and
strikingly marked. The black of her back was glossy beneath her chain mail, and her chest,
belly, and legs were white, so heavily ticked with black that from any distance they looked
blue silver. The black of her head and ears was divided by a neat ticked blaze that spread o
to take over her muzzle, and her eyebrows were punctuated by deep brown. Her body was
sturdy, her tail strong and graceful, and her ears fell long and soft, the perfect complement t
her hanging flews. Best of all, her legs-long, heavy-boned and angular-were up to the task o
following her incomparable nose.

She knew all this because Jehn, her former partner, had told her so. She believed him
utterly, just as she believed everything he said.

Tallon just shrugged. "We'll get along fine," he said. "Jehn'll have trained her right, and
beyond that, a dog's a dog."

Shiba couldn't believe her ears. She looked at Eldon, who appeared to be speechless. A
dog's a dog, ey? Her ears, previously cocked forward like big floppy wings at the side of h
head, flattened. She rose and circled the man, eyeing him with cold brown eyes. A dog's a d
Well, this dog was a bitch. Tallon would not only do well to keep that in mind, he was abo
find out exactly what it could mean.

Shiba gave his satchel a sideways look. It did mean she couldn't lift her leg on the thing.
there were other ways… Shiba dropped shoulder-first on the satchel and rolled with the
dramatic wiggles and flourishes commonly reserved for the rankest carrion.



Tallon seemed to have missed the point, for he never made the necessary apologies and
overtures to earn Shiba's forgiveness. Of all the linemen on the border, why give her this on
break in? No matter how long he'd been a lineman elsewhere, Tallon was the green one her
for this was her territory. A lifetime-all three years of it-of protecting this section of the bo
from spellrunners meant that she knew all its hiding places, and all the tricky runners in the
area.

For a while there, spellrunners had taken to disguising the smell of magic with the much
stronger scent of critter. It'd worked, too, because Shiba, like any other linehound, had a
passionate hate for the oily-furred, long-bodied, toothy-jawed, witless-and here she had to
pause in her thoughts to get hold of herself-critters. Why, their true name was such an
abomination that a proper bitch never even said it, not even to herself. Critter, that's all they
were ever called by a linehound, all of whom were thoroughly trained from their natural
inclination to hunt down and shred every critter whose scent trail they crossed.

But the spellrunner ploy only worked for a while, until Shiba caught the faint scent of ma
beneath the critter/human trail, and learned that critter plus human smell was as good as
smelling magic. Jehn had been so proud of her the day she'd treed those first two spell-runn
And how silly they'd looked, perched up in that small trembling tree. One limp, tubular crit
body, tied to lay scent in their footsteps, dangled from each heel and spun slow lazy circles
at the height of Jehn's head.