"Emil Petaja - The Prism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Petaja Emil)

steel into a green belly.
Kor showed even white teeth in a brown battle-tough face. “Then are
the Seven Kingdoms for weaklings? Are the Forest Helden become skittish
cave-skulkers? Speak, comrade!”
“Wait until I dispatch this big green bolo,” Atlan panted. “There! I think
we've routed them for the nonce.”
“So.” Kor nodded. The long claws of the swamp men dripped venom but
the bronzed Helden of the Forests put their long blades to good use;
presently the three Green Ones who didn't fall slithered off to sink back in
their lairs under the swamp.
From the woodpath between the purple trees they watched the
evil-smelling bubbles rise through the putrescent fen-mist where they sank.
Kor gave his great shoulders a shrug of good-riddance as he wiped the
ichor from his blade on the wide leaves of a berry bush before sheathing it
in the copper thrust at the side of his wide dragon-leather belt. Atlan
grinned back at him. Kor's smile broke off when those voices started up
again. They came from inside of his mind, abruptly, like a turned-on switch:
“These heroic combats are not to my taste, but I suppose
Tarzan-cum-Siegfried will always be popular with base-color. Anyone mind
if I switch to something less obvious?”
“I'd like to follow Kor a little further.”
Chuckle. “My daughter is young, Gold Dorff. She still finds muscles and a
handsome face intriguing.”
“We must indulge the child, by all means.”
Kor's weather-hard fight-hard face turned to stone, listening to such
strange talk. It was not until Atlan flicked his fingertips across his biceps in
a stinging slap that he snapped to.
“What gives, comrade Kor?” Atlan demanded. “Why are you standing
there staring at nothing? Thinking of Liti, I wager?”
“No. Not of Liti.”
Again Kor decided to say nothing. What would be the use? Atlan would
laugh and begin to wonder if his boyhood buddy was beginning to slip.
Sometimes Kor yearned back for the days when the two of them were boys
and Liti their inevitable tagalong; golden afternoons and silky dawns when
they swam the blue lagoons, fished the white-water streams, or hunted
selki with crossbow and flinted arrow. No mind-voices to plague him. No
questions to try answering when there were no answers to be had anywhere
within the boundaries of their adventuresome Seven Kingdoms.
They walked along through the purple sun-dappled trees.
“Well?” Atlan demanded.
“I was thinking of the Princess.”
Atlan's blue eyes danced. “So do all Helden youths. She is what keeps
us fighting and yearning. But she is only a fantasy, a hapless dream!”
Kor made no comment; his long bared legs brushed aside fern fronds as
they moved off the circuitous dragon's trail to rising ground and no trail at
all. Their sandals made no sound on the sward; their hunt-stalk-fight-kill
instructor had taught the two of them well. Had he not they would be dead
by now. Life was paced hot and fast among the Helden tribes of the Purple
Forests and the devil took the hindmost. Young.
Mists of shimmering vapor shrugged off the night-wet as the