"Kate Elliott - Jaran 4 - The Law of Becoming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elliott Kate)

Her blue eyes shone even brighter, sparkling with unshed tears. She made a face, grimacing, and
looked wretched, and for an instant he felt guilty, making her feel this bad, but restrained himself,
knowing that to hesitate in attack is always fatal.

"Oh, Anatoly," she said, throwing her arms around him. "I was so worried."

Anatoly decided it wouldn't hurt his cause to embrace her back.

"What are we going to do with you?" she murmured into his ear. Unlike so much of her world,
Diana was solid; she had weight. She had warmth. But he said nothing, just held her. After a bit she
pushed away from him, sniffed once, and regarded him pensively. She had tied her hair back with a
ribbon, and he reached up and unbound it, liking it better when it flowed around her face and along
her shoulders. She hesitated, then went on. "Yevgeni Usova thinks he can get you work at the cobbler
shop."

"I think not!" he retorted. "A prince of the Sakhalin does not make boots for other people. And
certainly not side by side with an arenabekh, and a lover of men, at that."

"Anatoly! That is one thing you will not say in my tent. Do you understand?"

"Yes, my wife," he said meekly.

She sighed and folded her arms on her chest. "I don't know what to do with you."

But he already had some ideas. "Do you khaja mean to go to war with the zayinu, the Chapalii?" he
asked. She started, looking guilty, but did not answer. "Did the Prince of Jeds— not Tess Soerensen,
but her brother—not give up Jeds in order to come here to fight the Chapalii?"

She shrugged. "We want our freedom, it's true."

"Well, then, I'm trained to fight. Why shouldn't I offer my services to Charles Soerensen?"

Diana sighed and rested a hand on his sleeve and stared out at London, at the gently glowing
streetlamps, at the steady light glimmering through windows, at the distant lambent glow above the
rooftops of a million more lights of the vast khaja city. "The way we will train to fight and the way the
jaran fight, well, Anatoly, they aren't very alike any more."

But her words heartened him. She was a Singer, an artist, touched by the gods to perform her art.
But as much more as she knew of this art called acting, he knew of war. He had seen the khaja
weapons. They looked the same. Even supposing they had other weapons, ones that weren't solid,
that didn't have weight, still, he could learn to use them. And if, as slaves, these khaja had not used
weapons in a long time, then they would need a person trained as a soldier.

Every campaign must have an objective. Bakhtiian and Charles Soerensen had an alliance of some
sort. Soerensen had told him as much. Just as Anatoly had gone ahead into Habakar territory, hunting
down the Habakar king and gathering intelligence for the army, now here, too, he would act as
Bakhtiian's scout, as the vanguard of Bakhtiian's army in alliance with Charles Soerensen in his revolt
against humanity's alien masters.

PART ONE