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

scrambled down the rocks again and gathered up several of the fallen robes. Then he climbed back up,
wrapped himself in the robes as well as he could, and curled up. He didn't expect to be comfortable, but
he did expect that anyone climbing up the outcropping to get at him would make enough noise to
penetrate his sleep. In both Home Dimension and Dimension X, survival was a matter of a thousand small
precautions that made a man a more difficult victim.

Satisfied that he'd done his best, Blade relaxed. Like any healthy animal at the end of a long day's
hunting, he was asleep in moments.

Nothing bothered Blade that night. He woke in a land lit by a dying moon and the first pink traces of
dawn, but as lifeless and empty as the night before. He climbed back down the rock to the bones.

In the dawn he was able to make a more thorough search. He found more robes and tore some of them
into strips, then tied the strips around his feet. All the boots and shoes were too small for Blade, even if
the passage of time hadn't made them unwearable. A few layers of cloth would be better than nothing, to
keep the stones from wearing the skin off his feet as he climbed toward the mountains. When he'd
finished binding up his feet, he began searching for a weapon.

It was a long search. The ambushers had not only wiped the party out of existence, theyd stripped the
bodies of everything except the clothes on their backs and the harnesses on their riding animals. Blade
had to search through the whole area, scattering bones and whole skeletons that might have lain here
undisturbed for more years than he'd lived. At times he felt slightly like a grave robber.

At last he turned over an almost intact skeleton and found a long knife thrust up between its ribs.
Apparently the dead man had been stabbed, then fallen on his face, concealing the death weapon under
himself so that it was overlooked in the search after the battle. Blade drew the knife out from between the
dry ribs and examined it carefully.

It was nearly two feet long, with a heavy hilt of silver and black lacquer. The blade was slightly curved,
heavily weighted toward the point, and razor-sharp on both edges. Blade tried a few experimental
slashes. The knife was beautifully balanced, for both forehand and backhand strokes. It looked and felt
capable of lopping off hands, arms, and even heads with lethal efficiency.

Blade made a belt from a strip of fabric and a sling for the knife from another, then tied the sling to the
belt. It now rode easily on his right thigh, ready for a quick draw. It was a far better weapon than he'd
expected to find, and apparently in perfect condition, completely unrusted. Perhaps that shouldn't be so
surprising. This seemed to be the kind of land where a child could grow to middle age without ever
seeing rain.

As Blade started to sling the knife, he noticed a design worked in silver on the pommel and engraved
near the point. It was an elaborate design, showing a five-petaled flower that reminded Blade vaguely of
a poppy.

Presumably the original owner of the knife had been one of the ambushers, since his knife had been in
the body of one of the victims. Presumably he had also not survived the victory, otherwise he'd have
retrieved his weapon. The flower doubtless meant something to him. It meant nothing to Richard Blade,
who'd come across an unimaginable distance to stumble on this forgotten battlefield and play scavenger
among its bones. All that mattered to him was that the knife still held its edge and temper.

He bent to tighten his foot bindings, then straightened up and drew a patch of cloth over his head and