"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Ethshar 1 - The Misenchanted Sword" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

Nothing happened.
"Damn you, Wirikidor, do something!"
The sword did nothing; the sky dimmed further as he waited.
Thinking that perhaps the sword's abilities, such as they were, might be
linked to the sun, Valder tried to drop the sword; it remained adhered to his
palm.
It occurred to him that he might be doomed to hold the thing for the rest
of his life, which was hardly an appealing prospect. Of course, there were
plenty of wizards around; he would certainly be able to find one eventually
who could reverse the spell and free him of the sword's grip.
 Still, he was apparently stuck with it until he could return to
civilization.
Disgusted, Valder stopped playing with the sword and turned his attention
to making camp amid the black rocks above the high tide mark.


CHAPTER 5

In the eleven days that followed his drawing of the sword, Valder made
his way down the coast, living mostly on clams, crabs, and an occasional fish.
He tried every experiment he could devise on the sword, with no discernable
result. The blade remained sharp and clean, the hilt refused to leave his
hand, and he was unable to force it into the scabbard. His feet toughened
considerably, calluses replacing his blisters. He got very tired of carrying
an unsheathed sword, and his hands, too, grew calloused.
In all that time and in all the leagues he traveled, he saw no sign of
any other human beings -- or semihumans, for that matter. He had expected to
make frequent detours around northern coast-watchers but did not; apparently
those he had encountered on his way north had been withdrawn. He saw only the
endless sea to his right and the forests to his left, while the shoreline he
traveled varied from sandy beach to bare rock to sheer cliff and back again.
As he made his way southward, the nights grew warmer and the stars more
familiar; the pine forest began to give way slowly to other trees, and birds
in ever-increasing numbers sang in their branches or swooped overhead. Beasts,
too, increased in number -- mostly small ones such as squirrels and rabbits,
but he did glimpse a deer once and, on another occasion, thought he saw a
boar. His bow and arrow were long gone, and he did not feel like tackling deer
or boar with his sling, but twice, by persistence and luck more than skill, he
added rabbit to his diet.
He was in pursuit of a third such delicacy a hundred yards inland, in
mid-afternoon of his twelfth day of travel, when he heard a rustling in the
underbrush ahead of him, a rustling far too loud to be caused by his quarry.
He froze, the sling hanging from his right hand, the sword bare in his left, a
handful of sea-rounded pebbles clutched against the hilt.
The rustling stopped, to be followed by other small sounds. Valder judged
the source to be somewhere to his right, hidden by a tangle of flowering
bushes. He peered intently at the foliage and, as the rustling began again, he
made out the outline of something moving through the bushes, something roughly
human in size and shape.
For the first time in days, Valder remembered that he was in enemy