He rubbed his eyes and stood up—and froze, and his chest went icy hollow, for a rowboat had been moored to one of the willows while he’d been looking away, and a tall, burly man was climbing sturdily up the slope, a sheathed sword swinging on his right hip.
His right hand fluttered over his stomach, and he wondered which patch of presently healthy skin would soon be parted to admit several inches of cold steel.
Ashbless squared his shoulders and stepped off the crest of the rise and walked down the path toward the river to meet his murderer halfway.
The man looked up, and seemed startled to see Ashbless coming toward him.
When they were still a dozen yards apart Ashbless stopped. “Good morning,” he called, and he was proud of how steady his voice was.
The other man blinked and grinned craftily, and Ashbless realized with a chill that the man was insane. “You’re him,” the stranger said in a cracked voice. “Ain’t you?”
“I’m who?”
“Doyle. Brendan Doyle.”
Ashbless answered, in a tone that concealed his surprise, “Yes … but it’s a name I haven’t used for thirty-five years. Why? Do we know each other?”
“I know you. And,” he said, drawing his sword, “I’ve come to kill you.”
“I guessed,” said Ashbless quietly, stepping back and drawing his own blade from its sheath. The wind whispered in the tall grasses. “Any use asking why?”
“You know why,” the other man replied, lunging fast as a whiplash on the word know; Ashbless managed to parry it with a wild outside flail in sixte, but he forgot to riposte.
“I really don’t know why,” he gasped, trying to get a firm footing on the muddy ground.
“It’s because,” the man said as he launched a quick feint and disengage that Ashbless barely avoided with a screeching circular parry, “while you’re alive,” the man’s sword sped up out of the bind and darted in at Ashbless’ chest, so that Ashbless had to hop back out of distance, “I can’t be.” As he recovered from his lunge his blade flicked sideways at Ashbless’ forearm, and Ashbless felt the edge cut right through his jacket and shirt and grate against the bone.
Ashbless was so stunned that he almost forgot to parry the next lunge.
“Yield now or die,” Ashbless called almost merrily to his opponent.
“It’s you that’s to die,” the tanned man muttered, starting a lunge and then abruptly halting halfway through it, so as to provoke Ashbless into a premature parry; but Ashbless didn’t fall for it, and caught the end of his opponent’s blade with the forte of his own, and lunged forward with a strong bind that drove his point corkscrewing in to poke, and then deeply stab, the tanned man’s belly. He felt the narrow blade stop and constrictedly flex against the spine.
The man sat down on the wet grass, clutching himself with hands already slick with blood. “Quick,” he gasped, pale under his tan, “me be you.”
Ashbless just stared down at him, his exhilaration suddenly gone.
“Come on,” grated the man on the ground, dropping his sword and beginning to crawl. “Do the trick. Switch.”
Ashbless stepped back. His opponent crawled forward for a yard or two, then fell forward onto the grass.
Хаос в Ваантане нарастает, охватывая все новые и новые миры...
Александр Бирюк , Александр Сакибов , Белла Мэттьюз , Ларри Нивен , Михаил Сергеевич Ахманов , Родион Кораблев
Фантастика / Исторические приключения / Боевая фантастика / ЛитРПГ / Попаданцы / Социально-психологическая фантастика / Детективы / РПГ