"Stephen Goldin - Storyteller" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldin Stephen)

Hakem Rafi in its ferocious talon, the rukh beat its wings and flew off into the sky, away from the forest
where the ambush had occured.

Hakem Rafi was a small man in his forty-second year, wiry and quick. He had a swarthy face with a
coarse black beard and mustache, and the nervous disposition of a mouse invading a granary, constantly
alert for the local cats. Since he was far smaller than an elephant there was plenty of room for him to rest
comfortably within the rukh's grasp—but Hakem Rafi was far from comfortable.

The thief was now terrified he'd unleashed more power than he could possibly control. Aeshma had
sworn in the name of his master Rimahn, the god of evil, that he would not harm Hakem Rafi—but when
faced with the immensity of the being he'd released from captivity, Hakem Rafi wondered whether a few
well-chosen words, spoken in haste, would be sufficient to bind this daeva to his service. With one tiny
contraction of his monstrous scaly claw, Aeshma could rip the thief apart and be forever free of his
obligations to the puny human he'd promised to obey. It would be typical, too, Hakem Rafi thought.
Everyone betrayed him. It just wasn't fair.

But Aeshma did not kill him. The rukh flew on, covering in fifteen minutes almost that many parasangs.
With each passing minute, Hakem Rafi's terror eased a little more. Surely if the daeva wished to kill him,
he would have done so by now. The old tales must be true, then, that a daeva who swears in his master's
name is bound by the oath to fulfill his promises. Aeshma would be his slave, after all. Hakem Rafi began
to relax and enjoy his flight.

Once he learned to accept it, the flight was actually pleasant. Their path took them southwest, past the
city of Ravan—though the rukh skirted widely around it to avoid passing over its charmed walls—and
onward in that direction. They crossed the Zaind River and flew over fields, mountains, and deserts. They
passed the city of Durkhash and continued southwest, into the vast desert south of Sudarr. Hakem Rafi
derived a particular enjoyment from peering down at the landscape beneath him and seeing how vast
lands and important people all seemed tiny and insignificant from this altitude. Hakem Rafi had never had
much chance in his life to look down on others, though he always felt he should, and he relished the
opportunity now that it was his.

He flew for hours, it seemed, in the claw of this bird before he began to wonder where Aeshma was
taking him. The only order he'd given was to get him safely away from the scene of the battle, and
Aeshma was obviously interpreting that order liberally. Since Aeshma was bound by oath not to harm
him, Hakem Rafi did not worry that they might be going someplace dangerous—but at the same time, he
didn't want to travel to the ends of the world, away from all other human contact.

“Where are we going?” he finally asked the rukh.

Aeshma's voice rumbled back to him in tones like distant thunder. “With your permission, O master, I
am taking you to the palace of Rashwenath."

There was a time when the name Rashwenath would have set such a man as Hakem Rafi quaking in his
boots, for Rashwenath was the mightiest king ever to dwell upon the earth. His empire spanned half the
vast continent of Fricaz, and his subjects numbered tens of millions. Ten thousand slaves had he merely to
serve him in his palace, and tens of thousands more would do his bidding throughout his vast empire. If
his enormous army could ever have been assembled in one place, it could have marched past his parade
post in double file for three days and three nights without its end being seen, and the stomping of the
soldiers’ feet would have set the ground trembling for parasangs around. King Rashwenath ruled an
empire greater than Parsina had ever seen before or since—greater by far than the meager lands