"Paul B.Thompson, Tonya R.Carter. Darkness and Light ("DragonLance Preludes I" #1) (angl)" - читать интересную книгу автора

heavens. "Paladine, Mishakal, Branchala," she said, naming
each constellation in turn. "Do you know the sky?"
"My boyhood tutor, Vedro, was an astrologer," Sturm
said, not really answering. He lifted his eyes. "It is said that
the will of the gods can be divined by the movement of the
stars and planets."
"What gods?" Kitiara replied lazily.
"You don't believe in the gods7"
"Why should I? What have they done for the world
lately? Or for me ever?"
Sturm could tell she was baiting him, so he decided to
drop the subject. "What is that group there?" he asked.
"Opposite Paladine?"
"Takhisis. The Queen of Darkness."
"Oh, yes. The Dragonqueen." He tried to see the author-
ess of evil, but to him it was only a spatter of stars.
The white orb of Solinari climbed above the horizon. In
its glow, the sandy hillocks and solitary pines were pale
ghosts of their daytime selves. Not long after, in the middle
quadrant of the sky, a red glow of equal size appeared.
"Now that I know," said Sturm. "Lunitari, the red moon."
"Luin to the Ergothites, Red-Eye in Goodlund. A strange
color for a moon, don't you think?" said Kitiara.
He tossed the naked mutton bone aside. "I didn't know
there were proper colors for moons."
"White or black are proper. Red means nothing." She
propped her head up so that Lunitari was directly in her line
of sight. "I wonder why it's red?"
Sturm reclined on his bedroll'. "The gods ordained it so.
Lunitari is the abode of neutrality, of neutral magic and illu-
sion. Vedro theorized that the color came from the blood
sacrificed to the gods." He offered this cautiously. "Other
philosophers claim the red color represents the heart of
Huma, the first knight of the Dragonlance." There was only
silence from his companion. "Kit?" he said quietly. A rasp
from the shadows revealed the result of his lecture. Kitiara
was asleep.

The village of Zaradene was a low, brown smudge on the
gray-white shore. There were perhaps fifty weatherworn
houses of varying size, none with more than two stories.
Sturm and Kitiara rode down the face of a steeply sloping
dune toward the village. On the way, they had to thread
through lines of sharpened stakes, buried in the sand with
the points slanting out. Here and there the stakes were
scorched by fire.
"A hedgehog," Kitiara remarked. "A defense against cav-
alry. The villagers must have been raided not long ago."
Behind the stakes was a shallow trench, which was spotted