"Dan Parkinson. The Gates of Thorbardin ("DragonLance Saga Heroes II" #2) (angl)" - читать интересную книгу автора

"Theirs and yours?" As the kender asked the question,
his bright eyes were darting from one side to the other,
looking for a clue as to who was talking to him.
For a moment there was silence, then the silence whis-
pered, "Death and birth. Go and see." And a few yards
away, just where the trees began, there was a brief shift-
ing of light - as though the air there had moved.
"Probably something truly dreadful over there some-
where," Chess decided. "Maybe even a deathtrap for
kender. I guess I had better go and see."
He turned his back on the black road and entered the
verge of forest where the odd shifting of air had been. A
few feet into the woods he saw it again - a little way
ahead and beckoning.
"Ogres, maybe," the kender told himself cheerfully. "A

beckoning vesper to lead the unwary into a nest of ogres.
Or hobgoblins, perhaps? No, probably not. They aren't
smart enough to think of something like that." He paused
for a moment, searched in his pouch, and withdrew a
sling - a small, soft-leather pocket with elastic loops at-
tached to either end. He secured the loops to the ends of
the fork on his hoopak, kicked around in the fallen
leaves until he found a few good pebbles, then hurried
on, following where the vesper had been. He went on,
not seeing the strange air-shift again, but keeping to its
original direction.
After a time the forest broke away, and Chess found
himself on a low, broken ridge with a clearing extending
from its base. A great shallow bowl of ground, broken
here and there by groves of trees and grassy knolls, the
clearing extended into distances where herds of animals
grazed. Beyond them, forests rose toward the tumbles
and steeps of the valley's east wall.
Nearer, though, in the bottom of the bowl, was a wide
field of what looked like ice - flat around the edges, but
distorted within by many random shapes and lumps that
seemed to grow from it.
The kender scrambled down the ledge and approached
the field of ice. All around it, the air was cold and silent.
"Old," the silence seemed to say.
"Right," the kender agreed. He knelt at the edge of the
field and rapped at it with his staff. The stuff looked and
sounded like ice, and when a sliver of it broke away he
tasted it. It was ice. "It's ice," he said.
"Fire and ice," the silence seemed to say. "Old."
Encouraged, Chess wandered out onto the ice. A few
steps brought him to the nearest of the weird shapes - a
tangled mound of crystals and spires higher than his
head and twenty feet long. He knelt, looking into it, see-