"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 26 - City of the Living Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

A punitive expedition, a royal progress, a general's tour of inspection, a tax-gatherer's visit, or what?

There were enough men and animals and gear for the party to be any of these things, or several of them
at once. He decided to follow them for a while, although he'd keep his distance at first. He didn't want to
find out the hard way that these people killed or enslaved strangers on sight.

Whatever the men were and wherever they were going, they were going there fast. The drums thudded,
the trumpets blared, wheels banged and rumbled over rock, ungreased axles squealed, hooves and feet
clattered and thumped. In a few minutes the whole party was past, and the last rider was disappearing in
the mist. Blade waited until the noise started to fade away, then scrambled down to the valley floor and
set out in pursuit.

The trail showed poorly on the hard rock, but the soldiers made so much noise that only a deaf man
could have had any trouble following them. Blade kept a good mile behind them, out of sight in the mist,
stopping whenever silence from ahead told him the soldiers had stopped. Twice he dropped back even
farther as the mist lifted briefly. Otherwise he was on the move all day, his long legs easily keeping pace
with the soldiers ahead.

The soldiers kept on through the thickening mist of evening until the light was gone. Then they made
camp. From the splashing sounds, Blade guessed they'd made camp around a stream or spring. Wearily,
he resigned himself to a chill and thirsty night. He decided he'd scout out the camp, though, just to see
what more he could learn about these people.

He made his approach two hours after dark and promptly learned one thing. The soldiers had made a
circle of their wagons and crept inside that circle like mice into their holes. They hadn't even bothered to
post a guard over the spring. Blade took advantage of that, drinking the ice-cold water until his thirst was
gone. Then he made a complete circle around the camp, coming so close that he felt he could almost
reach out through the mist and touch the wagons. Except for the occasional lowing of the draft animals or
the choking snore of a restless soldier, the camp was as silent as the rest of the dark valley.

Blade refused to believe this was sheer carelessness. These men looked like experienced soldiers who
wouldn't leave a camp unguarded without some good reason. Either they knew there was nothing
prowling the valley by night that could do them any harm, or there was something against which there was
no possible defense. That was not a pleasant thought, and Blade found himself looking cautiously around
him and taking extra care to move silently.

Then he laughed softly to himself. If the soldiers who knew this land had decided there was no point in
losing sleep, he would take his cue from them. He retreated to a safe distance and found level ground
behind a large boulder that would conceal him when dawn came. Then he settled down for another night
of trying to find soft spots in the rocks.

Chapter 3

The camp woke at dawn with a burst of human and animal voices, drums and trumpets, and the clatter
of equipment and weapons. Blade listened, trying to make out what was being said.

He knew that if he made out any words he'd be able to understand them. As he passed into each new
Dimension, the computer somehow altered his brain so that the language of that Dimension came to him
as plain English-and his own speech came out in the new language. He'd experienced this miracle every
time he went into Dimension X, but even Lord Leighton and the Project's best neurologists didn't