"Elrod, P N - I, Strahd 1 - Memoirs of a Vampire e-txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elrod P N)

gates, aware of the dangers, of the torpid guards living and… not living. It had
been grim going to walk past the dragons that glared down at him from their
stone perches and the gargoyles and all the other things that he'd sensed or
imagined were lurking in the shadows around him, but he had done it. The traps
still worked, but those could be avoided if one had the right skills. He'd
gotten in, and, most importantly, he expected to get out again.
He moved toward the table and gently set his lantern down, using a stack of
yellowing paper to keep its metal base from scratching the pristine wood.
You're a foolish old humbug, Rudolph, he chided himself. But he had an ingrained
respect for workmanship, and the table was a beautiful piece of art, however
terrible its owner.
Carefully and not a little nervously, he ran his fingers over the fine leather
cover of the book. It had an odd texture to it, odd and repulsive, as if it were
made from…
He yanked his hands away as he realized the source of the unusual leather.
Damn the creature. Damn the thing that was capable of such an obscenity.
After a moment's pause to offer a prayer for the soul of the book's victim, he
inhaled a great breath, and reached out again, swiftly opening it.
It wasn't precisely a book, so much as a collection of various folios loosely
bound together in such a way that more could be added or removed as needed. Some
of the parchment pages were the color of cream, thick and substantial, made to
last many, many lifetimes. Other pages were thin and desiccated, positively
yellow from age, and crackled alarmingly as he turned them over. There were no
ornate illuminations, no fussy borders, only lines of plain text in hard black
ink. The flowing handwriting was a bit difficult to follow at first; the
writer's style of calligraphy had not been in common use for three hundred
years. No table of contents, but from the dates it looked to be some kind of
history.
He turned to the first page and read:

I, Strand, Lord of Barovia, well aware certain events of my reign have been
desperately misunderstood by those who are better at garbling history than
recording it, hereby set down an exact record of those events, that the truth
may at last be known. …
He caught his breath. By all the good gods, a personal journal?



Part I
Chapter One
Twelfth Moon, 347
"There is a traitor in the camp, you know," Alek Gwilym said, not looking at me,
but at the bottle of wine standing tall on the table between us. He studied the
graceful shape of the dark green glass as an artist might admire an especially
beautiful model. After a long moment during which he satisfied his aesthetic
sense, he finally reached for it, blandly intent on satisfying some other senses
as well. Touch, in the way his hands closed around the bottle's dusty surface,
and smell, once the cork was off and the contents were breathing. Taste would
come later. I had little understanding of such ritual for myself, but Alek's
obvious enjoyment of the process had taught me to respect it.