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

“I wonder,” he said aloud. “The Boar clan’s territory lies a long way from here, but still, if they thought
the journey worth it for some purpose . . . are they in league with the dark dweomer then?”

The idea made him shudder. He slipped the disk into his brigga pocket, then paced back and forth
before the fire as he considered what he was going to do about the possible haunt. First, of course, he
had to discover if indeed that poor soul whose body rotted outside was still hanging about the site of his
death. He laid more wood on the fire, poked it around with a green stick until it burned nice and evenly,
then gathered up a mucky little pile of the damp and mildewed thatch that had slid from the roof over the
years. If he needed it, the stuff would produce dense smoke. Then he sat down in front of the hearth, let
himself relax, and waited.

It was close to an hour later when he felt the presence. At first it seemed only that a cold draught had
wafted in from the door behind him, but he saw the salamanders in the fire turn their heads and look up in
the direction of something. The room turned thick with silence. Still he said nothing, nor did he move, not
even when the hair on the back of his neck prickled at the etheric force oozing from the haunt. There was
a sound, too, a wet snuffling as if a hound were searching for a scent all over the floor, and every now
and then, a scrabbling, as if some animal scratched at the floor with its nails. As the air around him grew
colder, he concentrated on keeping his breathing slow and steady and his mind at peace. With a burst of
sparks the salamanders disappeared. The thing was standing right behind him.

“Have you left somewhat here that won’t let you rest, lad?”

He could feel puzzlement; then it drifted away, snuffling and scrabbling round the joining of floor and
wall.

“Somewhat’s buried, is it?”

The coldness approached him, hesitated, hovering some five feet off to his left. He could feel its
desperate panic as clearly as he could feel the cold Casually, slowly, Nevyn reached out and picked up a
handful of the grubby thatch.

“I wager you’d like to feel solid again, nice and solid and warm. Come over to the fire, lad.”

As the presence drifted into the warm light Nevyn could feel its panic reaching out like tendrils to clutch
at him. Slowly he rose to his knees and tossed the half-rotten hay onto the hottest part of the fire. For a
moment it merely stank; then gray smoke began to billow and swirl. As if it were a nail rushing to a
lodestone the presence threw itself into the fire. Since it “lived” as a pattern of etheric force, the matrix
immediately sucked the smoke up and arranged the fine particles of ash to conform to that pattern.
Hovering above the fire appeared the shape of a youngish man, naked but of course perfectly whole,
since his killers’ knives could do no harm to his etheric body. Nevyn tossed in another handful of thatch
to keep the smoke coming, then sat back on his heels.

“You can’t stay here. You have to travel forward, lad, and go on to a new life. There’s no coming back
to this one.”

The smoke-shape shook its head in a furious no, then threw itself out of the fire, leaving the smoke
swirling and spreading, but ordinary smoke. Yet enough of the panicles clung to the matrix to make the