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

overlords of the Hegemony of Ethshar from reconquering the Free Lands and
ruling harshly over them, as they had ruled long ago, but everybody said that
it worked, so he had long ago stopped questioning it.
His father had never worried about polite names, never bothered with
excuses; to the neighbors' dismay he had insisted on calling himself Dabran
the Pirate, rather than Dabran the Privateer, and had told anyone who asked
that he was in business to make money, not for the sake of patriotism.
Dabran had been careful with his money, too. That was a major reason his
son Tobas was now penniless. The pirate's entire fortune had been aboard his
ship, Retribution, when he tried to board the wrong vessel and got sent to the
bottom of the Southern Sea, along with his whole crew.
From that stroke of monumental bad luck had descended all the rest of
Tobas' misfortune. Who would have expected an ordinary Ethsharitic merchant
vessel to be carrying a demonologist capable of summoning such a thing? The
witnesses on the shore had agreed on very little in their descriptions, save
that the thing that pulled Dabran's ship under had been huge, black, and
tentacular.
Tobas signed again. He missed his father. He had never seen much of the
old man, even in the best of times, but at least he had known that Dabran was
alive, out there somewhere plundering, until the demonologist had brought that
thing up out of nowhere.
He tried to cheer himself up by telling himself that it could have been
worse. At least he hadn't been on board Retribution when she went down. If he
had accepted his father's offer of an apprenticeship, in addition to the
eventual inheritance of the ship and money, he would have been with Dabran
right now, moldering on the bottom of the ocean. His own laziness had saved
him there, he had intended to use his inheritance to set himself up in some
comfortable business, which he would let employees run, rather than carrying
on in his father's rather strenuous trade. He had had no interest in going to
sea.
He remembered that awful day when the news of his father's death had
arrived. The weather had been horribly inappropriate, a beautiful sunny spring
day, the fields warm and green, the sky a perfect blue strewn with fluffy
white clouds. He had been lying on the hill behind the house, doing nothing in
particular, just lying there enjoying the weather, when his second cousin
Peretta had come trudging up looking for him, her hair tangled and her face
serious. He had known right away that something was wrong; Peretta was never
serious and would leave her hair unbrushed only for the direst of emergencies.
She had wasted no time, but simply announced, "There's bad news from
Shan. Your father's dead; a demon got his ship and pulled it under. There were
no survivors, and no salvage has been found; it's all gone."
He had stared at her, he recalled, just stared at her; her words hadn't
seemed real. Not until her parents packed up his meager belongings for him and
told him to be out by sundown did he really believe that his father was dead
and his old life gone. No one would have dared to offend Dabran while he was
alive, but when he was gone and no more support money was to come, they were
all too eager to be rid of his lazy, worthless son. Family ties don't count
for much, compared to silver.
That had hurt. One disaster had come right after another.
Well, he told himself as the flames roared loudly up among the