"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 01 - The Bronze Axe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

The rest was mere butcher's work. Blade felt his sickness grow as he watched and listened to
Taleen's whispered taunts.
"So I lie? So I am a credulous fool? I listen to foolish tales and repeat them, do I? It is a lie, then, that
the Drus eat human flesh?"
She nudged him with her elbow. "Why, then, are they gutting that poor slave girl like a capon?"
They were stuffing the body now with small leaves of some kind. Blade felt that he had seen enough.
He might even have conceded that he had seen too much. He did not care to linger and watch them spit
the body and place it over the coals. It was past time to go.
Taleen whispered the same thought bred by a different concern. She was again fearful for her own
tawny hide.
 "In the name of Frigga, Blade, let us go! We have been lucky but it will not last forever. By some
miracle we are still alive, no one has seen us, and no tales will be carried. If we go now it is just possible
that—"
She was interrupted by a loud cry from the glade. Then another cry. Then a series of muted screams
followed by a great hubbub.
A Dru was standing at the edge of the clearing. She was carrying the body of the Dru Blade had
killed. She stood there, chanting and moaning, and her own white robe was as scarlet as that on the dead
priestess she carried. The Drus rushed to gather about her, all gabbling and moaning and screaming as it
suited them. Blade glanced across the glade to the spot where the High Priestess had disappeared. She
did not reappear and he guessed that she had left the vicinity on some errand of her own. Perhaps, he
thought viciously, she does not like the taste of human flesh.
Taleen was doing her share of soft moaning beside him. "Frigga save us now! They have found the
slain one. We will be cursed forever, even if they do not kill us. I told you, Blade. I warned you. I—"
Blade put his big hand over his mouth. "Shut up, princess. Not another sound until I tell you. Now
crawl backwards, very slowly and very carefully, and then follow me. I think it is time to run again. But
softly—very, very softly."


Chapter Three
«^»
Taleen found her path just as the moon was setting. It was narrow and made rough underfoot by stones
and flints and, judging by the depth below embanking hedges, had been trodden for centuries. Blade's
feet suffered, while the Princess went easily enough in her buskins.
As they went Taleen poured out all her knowledge of the Drus, as though the horror she had just
seen had triggered her tongue. Blade, by nature a skeptic, was too much shaken by the recent scene not
to be attentive. He listened and learned. Later would be time enough to sort fact from fiction. One thing
he already knew. The Drus could not be ignored. They were a fact of life in Alb. They did evil and they
did good. The Mysteries—all knowledge and education, all medicine, all the higher arts and crafts and,
most especially, all magic, were in Dru keeping. And woe to he who tried to usurp their prerogatives.
The princess, Blade learned, had been returning home after four years in a Dru school on the Narrow
Sea when she had been attacked and captured by the minions of Queen Beata. The Queen was sister to
King Voth of the North, and there was a great hatred between the two.
"She thought to hold me captive as long as it pleased her," Taleen said now, "and to bring a great
ransom and many concessions from my father. He has great love for me, my father, and I am an only
child. That bitch of a Beata would have succeeded, too, had I not had the foresight and the courage to
bide my time and watch for my opportunity. I played very meek and frightened, Blade, and then I wept
and told Beata that confinement was killing me. On my knees—and I will make her pay forthat, by
Frigga—on my knees I begged that I be allowed long walks in the woods and fields. I said I would die
for lack of sun and air. Was that not clever of me, Blade? I pointed out that she, the queen, could have
no profit of a dead princess. That was sly, eh, Blade?"