"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Ethshar 2 - With a Single Spell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

Tobas sighed again. "What in the world made you decide to sign up to be a
dragon slayer, anyway?"
Tillis was silent for a long moment before replying, "Sixteen siblings."
"What?"
"I have sixteen older siblings. Every single inheritance or
apprenticeship or wealthy marriage, or any sort of arranged marriage, my
parents could possibly claim was spoken for before they got to me. Nine
brothers and seven sisters can use up a lot of property, and my parents were
never rich."
Tobas whistled. "If they were raising seventeen children, it's no wonder!
They wouldn't have time to get rich, and that crowd would eat it as fast as
they brought it in!"
Tillis nodded silently.
Tobas lay for a moment, trying to imagine what it would be like to live
in such a large family. He had sometimes pretended Peretta and Detha and
Garander were his siblings instead of his cousins, but he had never considered
what a really large family would be like.
He didn't think he would like it. "How old's the oldest?" he asked.
Before Tillis could answer, a voice came from another hammock. "Aren't
you two ever going to shut up?"
 "Sorry," Tobas said. He rolled over to face the wall. The speaker was one
of those he had classified as blackguards or scoundrels, a small man with a
scarred face, at least ten years older than himself, who carried no fewer than
three knives. Tobas had not caught his entire name -- Arnen of something.
He was not someone Tobas cared to argue with.
He lay silently awake for some time after that, reassured that there were
others, like Tillis, at least as ill prepared as himself, but more worried
than ever about facing the dragon. He had assumed that the crew would include
a genuine dragon fighter or two, so that, if a mere unskilled nobody like
himself were to hang back or simply vanish, nobody would much care, and the
dragon would eventually be disposed of just the same.
Now that he had met the other recruits, he was not at all sure that as a
wizard, even a wizard with a single spell, he might not be the best chance the
kingdom of Dwomor had. Dragons were usually said to breathe fire and were
therefore presumably fire-resistant, but some way of using Thrindle's
Combustion against a dragon might still exist.
He dozed at last, as the ship sailed on into the east.
At dawn the next day, the lookout sighted land ahead; they had crossed
the Gulf of the East, leaving the Hegemony of Ethshar for the Small Kingdoms.
Tobas and the other adventurers came on deck to see the jagged, rocky
coastline for themselves.
"Is that Dwomor?" someone asked a crewwoman, pointing at the cliffs.
"No, of course not," she replied in heavily accented Ethsharitic. "Unless
the captain's gotten us off course again, that's Morria; we should be able to
see the castle in an hour or so."
Tobas had never actually seen a castle, though he had heard numerous
descriptions, some of them going into elaborate detail; the only castles were
in the Small Kingdoms, the other nations of the World being either too
advanced and peaceful or too barbaric and primitive to have any. He resolved
to watch carefully, so as not to miss it. One story he had heard as a child