"Katherine Kerr - Deverry 06 - A Time Of Omens" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kerr Katherine)

shrike nailed to a farmer’s barn, was the corpse of a man, half-eaten by ravens and well ripened by the
spring weather. Yet the worst thing wasn’t the stench. The corpse was hung upside down and
mutilated—the head cut off and nailed between its legs with what seemed to be—from the fragment
left—its private parts stuffed into its mouth. Branoic stared for a long moment, then turned and ran to the
shelter of the palisade to vomit, heavily and noisily.

“Uh gods!” Owaen whispered. “What?!”

For all his aplomb earlier, Nevyn looked half sick now, his face dead white and looking with all its
wrinkles more like old parchment than ever. He ran his tongue over dry lips and spoke at last.

“A would-be deserter, most like, or a traitor of some sort. They left him that way so he’d roam as a
haunt forever. All right, lads, get back to the troop. I think they’ll all agree that we don’t truly want to
camp here tonight, shelter or not.”

“I should think not, by the asses of the gods!” Owaen turned to Maddyn. “I know the horses are tired,
but we’d best put a couple of miles between ourselves and this place if there’s a haunt about.”

“You’re going to, certainly,” Nevyn broke in. “I’m going to stay here.”

“Not alone you aren’t,” Maddyn snapped.

“I don’t need guards with swords, lad. I’m not in danger. If I can’t handle one haunt, what kind of
sorcerer am I?”

“What about this poor bastard?” Owaen jerked his thumb at the corpse. “We should give him some
kind of burial.”

“Oh, I’ll tend to that, too.” Nevyn started walking for the gate. “I’ll just get my horse, and then you all go
on your way. Come fetch me first thing in the morning.”

Somewhat later, when they were all making camp—in a meadow about a mile and a half downriver—it
occurred to Maddyn that Nevyn seemed to know an awful lot about these mysterious people who had
left that ugly bit of sacrilege on the palisade. Although he was normally a curious man, he decided that he
could live without asking him to explain.



With the last of the sunset, Nevyn brought his horse inside the tumble-down lodge, tied him on a loose
rope to the wall and tended him, then dumped his bedroll and saddlebags near the hearth, where there
lay a sizable if dusty pile of firewood already cut, left by the hirelings of the dark dweomermaster behind
this plot—or so he assumed anyway. As assumptions went, it was a solid one. After he confirmed that
the chimney was clear by sticking his head up it for a look, he piled up some logs and lit them with a
wave of his hand. Once the fire had blazed up enough to illumine the room, he searched it thoroughly,
even poking at the rotting walls with the point of his table dagger. His patience paid off when under a pile
of leaves that had drifted in through a window he found a pewter disk about the size of a thumbnail, of
the kind sewn onto saddlebags and other horse gear as decorations. Stamped into it was the head of a
boar.
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