"Gardner F. Fox - Kothar 01 - Kothar Barbarian Swordsman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fox Gardner F)

The young giant opened his mouth to speak, and could not. The
cadaver swung what was left of its legs over the side of the stone slab and
stepped down onto the hard dirt floor. A peculiar sound rose upward from
the bones of its throat.

A lassitude came upon Kothar. He began to sway back and forth, as if
tired in every muscle. Hai! He was weak, too. So weak he could not stand
up. The lich was doing this to him in some hellish manner he did not
understand.

It was too much to stand up. He could not do it. He fell forward slowly,
his legs did not bend, he simply toppled downward like a tree cut off at its
roots.
 Kothar lay frozen motionless on the dirt. He was alive and possessed of
all his senses but that of movement. He could not so much as flick a finger.
His cheek was pressed to the ground, he could feel a pebble pressing into
his temple. He could hear the savage thumping of his heart, and he was
aware that the corpse was moving.

This was worse than anything the Lord Markoth might do to him!
Flaying knives he could understand. He had lost to the king of Commoral,
and he was paying the penalty for failure. This made sense to his
barbarian mind.

But this was foul. Unclean! The tomb had opened for him who was
alive, and now it sought to drag him down into the coldness, into the utter
absence of all life.

Kothar fought, as much as he could fight it. His spirit, his savage soul,
writhed and tugged to force his huge muscles to obey the dictates of his
brain. They would not. He must lie here and—what?

The dead thing was approaching him with a dry rustle of brown
winding-sheets. It walked as if its weight were that of the fabled Jugnoth,
with heavy thumpings of the ground. It breathed with a harsh wheezing
and a vast rush of air like the huge bellows which had hung before the
forge at Grondel when Kothar had been a boy.

The giant lay waiting for the eldritch being to clasp him and drag his
limp body toward the slab. If he was going to die here in this tomb, he
wanted to bellow out his defiance, but he could make no more than a
croaking noise.

Behind him, metal rasped and the iron door swung inward again.
Kothar felt the fresh forest air drift past his body.

There was a silence.

The dead thing stared at the mercenaries crowding the doorway, and
the soldiers of the Lord Markoth, after one horrified glance at the inert