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

They found the murdered men and their horses where they’d left them, and it ached Maddyn’s heart to
think how close they’d been to safety when their Wyrd fell upon them. While the servants looked for a
place where the thawing ground was good and soft, Nevyn coursed back and forth like a hunting dog
and examined everything—the dead men, the horses, the soggy ground around them.

“You and the men certainly trampled all over everything, Maddo,” he grumbled.

“Well, we looked for footprints and tracks and suchlike. If they’d left a trail we would have found it, but
you’ve got to remember that the ground was frozen hard when this happened.”

“True enough. Where’s the third lad, the one who almost got away?”

Maddyn took him across the field to the sprawled and puffing corpse. In the warming day the smell was
loathsome enough to make the bard keep his distance, but Nevyn knelt right down next to the thing and
began to examine the ground as carefully as if he were looking for a precious jewel. Finally he stood up
and walked away with one last disgusted shake of his head.

“Find anything?”

“Naught. I’m not even sure what I was hoping to get, to tell you the truth. It just seems that . . . ” Nevyn
let his words trail away and stood there slack-mouthed for a moment. “I want to wash my hands off, and
I see a stream over there.”

Maddyn went with him while he knelt down and, swearing at the coldness of the water, scrubbed his
hands in the rivulet. All at once the old man went tense, his eyes unfocused, his mouth slack again, his
head tilted a little as if he listened to a distant voice. Only then did Maddyn notice that the streamlet
brimmed with glassy-blue undines, rising up in crests and wavelets. In their midst, and yet somehow
beyond them, like a man coming through a doorway from some other place, was a presence. Maddyn
could barely see it, a vast silvery shimmer that seemed to partake of both water and air like some
preternatural fog, forming itself into a shape that might not even have existed beyond his desire to see it as
a shape. Then it was gone, and Maddyn shuddered once with a toss of his head.

“Geese walking on your grave?” Nevyn said mildly.

When Maddyn looked around he saw Owaen and the prince walking over to them and well within
earshot.
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“Must be, truly. Here, Owaen, did you and the lads find anything new?”

“Doubt me if there’s aught to find. Young Branoic did come up with this, though. Insisted it might be
important, but he couldn’t say why.” Owaen looked positively sour as he handed Nevyn a thin sliver of
bone, about six inches long, barely a half inch wide, but pointed on both ends. “Sometimes I think that
lad is daft, I truly do.”

“Not at all.” Nevyn was turning the sliver round and round in his thin, gnarled fingers. “It’s human bone,