The Wayward Knights

Начало книги

Torvik Jemarsson raised the dwarven-work telescope to his eye and peered northward, trying to pierce the haze. If they were not in sight of Suivinari Island-the Drowned Mountain, as some called it-then their navigation from Vuinlod had been fearfully inaccurate.

The young mate of the top would have wished for a spell in the telescope, to make it a mist- and fog-piercer. But it was only sound bronze and the best lens glass, worked with skills Torvik trusted, even though he had never met the dwarves who possessed them. Any dwarves who had won the confidence of both his father's old comrade, Sir Pirvan the Wayward, and his mother's present companion, Gildas Aurhinius, a retired Istaran general, had to be very singular dwarves indeed. Torvik would not have gone to sea in a vessel of dwarf making, for dwarves did not know the ways of water, but he would trust them for anything short of that.

He also did not wish for a wind to disperse the mist. This far north, it was summer or spring all the year round, with heat-spawned storms rising between one watch and the next, and reaching fearful intensity with hardly more warning. Torvik remembered an old desert barbarian saying:

Читать дальше →