"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 27 - Master of the Hashomi" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

desert, Blade decided. He'd have to reach water within three days. That was as long as he could hope to
last in this sun-baked land. Then he would die. In a few more days after that his body would be a
withered husk. In a few months the sand would have buried him, or perhaps stripped the flesh from his
bones so that only a bleaching skeleton would remain to greet travelers.

There seemed to be nothing out there worth risking such a fate. If the ground at his feet had been
sprouting man-eating tigers and poisonous snakes, perhaps Blade would have thought differently. But it
was only bare rock, sullen gray streaked with black and brown, cracked and flaked by thousands of
years of sun, and at the moment almost too hot to stand on. To the west rose the mountains, and Blade
turned to study them more closely.

The nearest peaks leaped up to at least ten thousand feet. Farther away Blade could see more peaks
rising to twelve and fifteen thousand feet, with white snowcaps blazing from their summits. Still farther off
he could make out the white wall of a magnificent triangular peak soaring up to at least twenty thousand
feet. A plume of snow trailing from its summit hinted at strong winds high aloft.

Where there was snow, there would be water. Where there was water, there would be life, and where
there was life Blade could find something to eat. If there were no people, Blade knew he might be in for
an uncomfortable time. He'd be eating berries and roots and raw fish, drinking from mountain streams,
and generally living more like an animal than a human being. But he would be living, which was more than
the desert would let him do.

It was time to move out. Blade decided he'd go north at his present altitude, between mountain and
desert. There wasn't much to choose between north and south-the view was equally dismal in either
direction. But at his present altitude the nights should be endurable, and any streams flowing down from
the mountains might not have entirely dried up.

Blade licked lips that already felt dry from the sun and gritty with rock dust, then struck north, moving
with steady, unhurried strides.

The mountains to the west seemed unchanging, always turning the same face toward him. The nearer
peaks seemed close enough for him to throw a rock over their summits, but in fact had to be at least
twenty miles away. He'd be crossing those miles sooner or later, but not today.

He'd arrived in this Dimension about mid-morning. At noon he stopped for a short rest, then moved on.
At this pace he could keep moving for two days without food or water, covering a good fifty miles in that
time.

Slowly the boulders began to cast lengthening shadows.

The sun's light took a reddish tinge as it sank toward the peaks. In another hour the darkness and chill of
the desert night would come swiftly. Blade began looking for something better than bare rocky ground to
give him a resting place for the night. As his eyes searched, his legs kept moving.

He'd come perhaps seven hours and twenty miles from his starting point when he saw something
breaking the monotony of rocky ground, upended boulders, and scrubby bushes. At first it seemed only
an irregular smudge on the ground, pale and uncertain in the fading light. Then Blade's eyes caught a last
flash of sunlight on something metallic. He increased his pace, until he was almost running across the last
three hundred yards.
Half in the shadow of a high outcropping of gray rock, a litter of bones stretched for fifty yards along the