"C. S. Friedman - Coldfire 2 - When True Night Falls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friedman C. S)

something - was watching us. Several nights
later an earthquake struck, with devastating
result: two of the horses were killed, and but
for Tarrant's aid I would have drowned in the
whitewaters of the Achron. Even worse, it
disarmed us at a crucial moment. For it was
then that the rakh attacked.

Your Library has information on what
these native predators once were; I have
attached several drawings of what they now
are. Though evolution has forced them to
adopt a human shape, they are not human in
nature; their intelligence, which rivals our
own, seems at war with a bestial inheritance,
making them unpredictable and often violent.
They have never forgotten what humankind
did to them - or attempted to do - and the
memory of that holocaust is as fresh and as
real to them as though the attempted
genocide of their species occurred only days
ago. In truth, the only thing which saved our
lives was that their curiosity outweighed their
anger - for the moment - and we were taken
as bound prisoners to their camp. I have
enclosed separate notes on their encampment
and what little we could observe of their
society. We tried to argue for our lives, our
pleas translated into their tongue by the
bilingual khrast, but how could we argue
with such an ingrained hatred? In the end it
was our purpose that saved us. For the
demons we sought had struck here, as well,
and the ravaged souls they had left behind
gazed out at us through rakhene eyes, behind
a veil of rakhene tears. In serving our own
quest we would be serving the rakh as well.

We were given a guide from among their
people, a khrast female named Hesseth. Ours
was a tense partnership, made more so by an
open display of Tarrant's murderous powers.
But she led us across the great plains of the
rakhlands, negotiating with various hostile
tribes along the way, and we soon came to
realize that we could not have made the
journey without her. Not in the face of a
hatred that had festered for so many
centuries, with so many different tribes to
appease.