"David Farland - Runelords 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farland David)

1
Chapter 1
IT BEGINS IN DARKNESS

Effigies of the Earth King festooned the city around Castle Sylvarresta. Everywhere the effigies could be seen--hanging
beneath shopwindows, standing upright against the walls of the city gates, or nailed beside doorways--stationed any place
where the Earth King might find ingress into a home.
Many of the figures were crude things crafted by children--a few reeds twisted into the form of a man, often with a crown of
oak leaves in its hair. But outside the doors of shops and taverns were more ornate figures of wood, the full size of a man, often
elaborately painted and coifed in fine green wool traveling robes.
In those days, it was said that on Hostenfest Eve the spirit of the earth would fill the effigies and the Earth King would
waken. At his wakening, he would protect the family for another season and help bear the harvest home.
It was a festive season, a season of joy. On Hostenfest Eve the father in a home would play the role of Earth King by setting
gifts before the hearth. Thus, at dawn on the first day of Hostenfest, adults received flasks of new wine or kegs of stout ale. For
the young girls the Earth King brought toy dolls woven of straw and wildflowers, while boys might get swords or oxcarts
carved from ash.
All these bounties delivered by the Earth King represented but a token of the Earth King's wealth--the vast hoards of the
"fruits of the forest and of the field" which legend said he bestowed on those who loved the land.
So the homes and shops around the castle were well adorned that night, on the nineteenth day of the Month of Harvest, four
days before Hostenfest. All the shops were clean and well stocked for the autumn fair that would shortly come.
The streets lay barren, for dawn was approaching. Aside from the city guards and a few nursing mothers, the only ones who
had reason to be up so late of the night were the King's bakers, who at that very moment were drawing the foam off the King's
ale and mixing it with their dough so that the loaves would rise by dawn. True, the eels were running on their annual migration
in the River Wye, so one might imagine a few fishermen to be out by night, but the fishermen had emptied their wicker eel
traps an hour past midnight and had delivered kegs of live eels to the butcher for skinning and salting well before the second
watch.
Outside the city walls, the greens south of Castle Sylvarresta were dotted with dark pavilions, for caravans from Indhopal
had come north to sell the harvest of summer spices. The camps outside the castle were quiet but for the occasional braying of
a donkey.
The walls of the city were shut, and all foreigners had been escorted from the merchants' quarter hours ago. No men moved
on the streets at that time of night--only a few ferrin.
Thus there was no one to see what transpired in a dark alley. Even the King's far-seer, who had endowments of sight from
seven people and stood guard on the old graak's aerie above the Dedicates' Keep, could not have spotted movement down in
the narrow streets of the merchants' quarter.
But in Cat's Alley, just off the Butterwalk, two men struggled in the shadows for control of a knife.
Could you have seen them, you might have been reminded of tarantulas in battle: arms and legs twisting in frenzy as the
knife flashed upward, scuffling as feet groped for purchase on the worn cobblestones, both men grunting and straining with
deadly intent.
Both men were dressed in black. Sergeant Dreys of the King's Guard wore black livery embroidered with the silver boar of
House Sylvarresta. Dreys' assailant wore a baggy black cotton burnoose in a style favored by assassins out of Muyyatin.
Though Sergeant Dreys outweighed the assassin by fifty pounds, and though Dreys had endowments of brawn from three
men and could easily lift six hundred pounds over his head, he feared he could not win this battle.
Only starlight lit the street, and precious little of that made its way here into Cat's Alley. The alley was barely seven feet
wide, and homes here stood three stories tall, leaning on sagging foundations till the awnings of their roofs nearly met a few
yards above Dreys' head.
Dreys could hardly see a damned thing back here. All he could make out of his assailant was the gleam of the man's eyes and
teeth, a pearl ring in his left nostril, the flash of the knife. The smell of woodlands clung to his cotton tunic as fiercely as the
scents of anise and curry held to his breath.
No, Dreys was not prepared to fight here in Cat's Alley. He had no weapons and wore only the linen surcoat that normally fit
over his ring mail, along with pants and boots. One does not go armed and armored to meet his lover.