"Roger Taylor - Hawklan 2 - Fall Of Fyorlund" - читать интересную книгу автора (Taylor Roger)

Jaldaric started suddenly out of his sun-hazed drowsiness. ‘What was that?’ he said, sitting up and
looking round at his friends.

In the distance, one of the horses whinnied uneasily.

There were six Fyordyn High Guard lounging away their off-duty hours in the small glade that they had
chosen as a camp site when the Lord Dan-Tor had called an abrupt halt to their journeying through
Orthlund.

For a moment Jaldaric thought that a muscular spasm had jerked him back from the twilight fringes of
sleep as his body relaxed into the soft turf but he noticed now that all his men were looking round
uncertainly, and an unfamiliar silence filled the clearing. Even the birds were silent.

He repeated his question.

The nearest man to him was Fel-Astian. Fair-haired and strongly built, he was not unlike Jaldaric, though
his face was leaner and lacked the seeming innocence of Jaldaric’s.

‘There was a rumbling sound, then the ground seemed to move,’ he said cautiously, as if not believing his
own words.

‘Did move,’ someone corrected, more confidently.

Fel-Astian nodded.

Then, as if signalling a release, a bird began to sing and the uneasy disorientation pervading the clearing
faded. The men all began to talk at once, debating this strange phenomenon.

Jaldaric craned his head back to ease a stiffness in his neck. The brightness of the spring sky made him
narrow his eyes and he noticed a small brown bird flying just above the tops of the trees. Strange, he
thought. It was one of those charmless, drab creatures that the Lord Dan-Tor seemed to be able to tame
and bring to his hand. Yet their flight was normally arrow-straight and almost alarmingly purposeful, while
this one was bobbing and dipping from side to side, as erratically as a swallow.

A little way from the clearing, Dan-Tor stood on the rocky outcrop that he had made his private domain
since he had returned from the village of Pedhavin with his unexpected order to halt and make camp.
However, it was not the Lord Dan-Tor that Jaldaric or any of his men would have recognized, even
allowing for the fact that his mood had been uncertain of late, and his normal commanding charm had
been marred by uncharacteristic bursts of irritation.

His body was rigid and quivering, and his eyes glowed red and baleful with a gaze that no ordinary man
could have met and stayed sane. Around his feet the rock was shattered and broken as if wrenched apart
from its very heart; innocent victim of his immediate response to the news he had received.

He was consumed with alternate waves of fear and rage. Hawklan had escaped the trap at the
Gretmearc leaving his, Dan-Tor’s, minion there demented and broken. Worse still, someone had aided
Hawklan in his escape and he it was presumably who was now assailing the birds, his messengers, his
eyes. Someone with knowledge of the Old Power, and no fear of using it.