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

ground. There were human remains, and also skeletons that looked very much like camels. The bones
were bleached and scoured white as flour by the sun and wind of-how many years? Blade could only
guess.

Certainly a long time. There were cotton robes and leather belts, pouches, and boots among the
remains. The robes were pale and worn as fine as cobweb, the leather was cracked and flaking, baked
hard as wood. The dead had been lying here a long time since they came out of the desert to die here of
thirst before they could reach the mountains.

Or had they died of thirst? Blade found himself noticing other flashes of light on metal, cracks in some of
the skulls, peculiar stains on the robes. He began to move among the remains, examining them more
carefully.

Most of the robes were faded to a dingy white, but most also showed large patches of spots that had
once been stained dark. Bloodstains? Certainly nothing else was as likely.

Blade picked up a skull. It had been split from the crown to the bridge of the nose, and after that hacked
free of the neck that once held it up. Wind and sun had not done that.

Something sharper than a stone pricked Blade's foot. He stepped back, knelt, and felt in the gravel and
bones around him. He came up with a long, leaf-shaped arrowhead, still attached to a few inches of shaft
baked so dry that the wood crumbled to powder between Blade's fingers.

Blade found himself looking around the darkening landscape with new alertness and a growing suspicion.
These people might have been moving up from the desert in search of water, but he doubted they'd died
from not finding it. They'd died from bows and sharp steel in the hands of human enemies.

Again Blade examined the litter of bones and gear, studying them in the light of this new certainty. The
human enemies had been skilled enough to lay an ambush that struck down the whole party in almost the
same moment. Perhaps a few had ridden entirely clear, but the rest lay too close together for there to be
any other plausible explanation.

Blade backed away from the fallen bones, trying to look in all directions at once, and scrambled up the
rock outcropping. The last few feet were nearly vertical. Blade pulled himself over the sharp crest and lay
flat behind it, looking back the way he'd come.

Yes, here was where the ambushers had lain in wait. The rocks could conceal archers, holding their fire
until the riders were within easy bowshot. Then a sudden rain of arrows, at a range where they could
hardly miss the camels, and a mass of stunned and dismounted men to be finished off with swords.

All right, so he'd reconstructed the events of so many years ago. What did this mean for him now?

It didn't have to mean anything. The ambush could have been generations ago, the bones lying in the
open because on this rocky slope the sand of the desert would not creep over them. The youngest of the
ambush party could have long since died of old age.

Still, this land had once seen men killing each other, and it might do so again. Blade decided to strike out
for the mountains as soon as dawn gave him traveling light. Out on the slope he lacked not only water but
cover. He was as visible as a flea on a plate.
 By now the twilight was turning purple. A chill in the air began to nibble at Blade's bare skin. He