"Lords Of Avalon - 02 - Knight Of Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacGregor Kinley)

turn of her perfectly shaped lips he could tell she didn’t find his words
amusing. Before he could move, she waved her hand in a circle before his face,
causing a mist to form a ball in the air. As the mist swirled, it began to
reveal an image.
It showed a man in his mid twenties lying facedown in a pool of his own
blood…only the blood wasn’t red, it was a dark sickly gray…as was everything in
the picture. That told him that the body wasn’t in the world of man or in
Avalon. It was on the “other” side—the one that was controlled by unrelenting
evil.
Beautiful, just beautiful. He could see right where this was heading…straight
down a shitty road that ended with him getting screwed over.
Again.
He must truly be a masochist, otherwise, he’d get up right now, tell her to
shove it, and leave.
If only it were that easy.
Varian narrowed his gaze on the man’s body. Dressed in the chain-mail armor and
dark surcoat that were common for mid twelfth-century England, the dead man had
one arm outstretched toward an old stone building as if he’d been reaching for
help when he’d died. Not that anyone in that particular realm would ever stoop
to help someone, at least not unless an obscene amount of money had changed
hands.
But that wasn’t what disturbed Varian, nor did he care that it was obvious from
the bruises and cuts that the man had been severely beaten and tortured before
death had spared him. What made his heart stop beating was the sight of where
the knight’s armor had been torn free of his left shoulder blade to reveal the
tattoo of a dragon encircled by fire rising out of a goblet. There were only a
handful of men who bore that mark, and their names were a very carefully guarded
secret. More than that, they were men who’d been imbued with extremely strong
magick. That alone should have kept the dead man safe from whatever had killed
him.
“A grail knight?”
Merlin nodded as she released him and stepped back. “Tarynce of Essex. Morgen’s
MODs seized him before I could dispatch aid. They dragged him from his home in
medieval England through the veil into Glastonbury, where they killed him.”
Little wonder that. He personaly knew several of Morgen’s minions of death, and
they were a hardy bunch who lived for the opportunity to kill anything. To be
unleashed against an original knight of the Round Table was something they would
sell their own mothers for. There was nothing they loved more than to bathe in
the blood of their enemies…or their friends either for that matter.
“Did they learn anything from him?” he asked Merlin.
The worry returned to her brow. “I don’t know. No one does, except the MODs or
Morgen. That’s why I need you.”
How he hated those words. He’d long grown tired of being Merlin’s tool. She was
forever asking him to ferret out traitors and information from the other side.
And when the traitor needed executing, that, too, was his job. Honestly, he
wanted to absolve himself from these distasteful tasks. He was tired of being
caught between Merlin and Morgen. “You don’t need me for this.”
“Yes, I do. From the way his armor was torn from his shoulder, it appears they
knew to look for the mark. Someone had to tell them of it, and if Morgen has
learned that, then she knows how to identify the remaining grail knights. We are