Читать онлайн «The Wayward Knights»

Автор Роланд Грин

Roland Green

The Wayward Knights

So much history passed from human knowledge during the Cataclysm that we find it hard to realize just how much was lost. This is particularly true of the last few centuries before the dire event. Knowing what came to pass, we tend to ignore the whole era and fail to assemble even the few bits of knowledge we have into the best picture we can build.

A classic case: Sir Pirvan, called the Wayward, Knight of the Rose, and his associates, some of whom have come down only as names.

Various chroniclers have placed him at various times during the millennium before the Cataclysm. The best evidence, however, suggests that he was some thirty years old when he made his first appearance on the rolls of the Knights of Solamnia, in 181 PC. This would place his date of birth somewhere before 210 PC.

Such as Pirvan are undeservedly forgotten. When they were born, the kingpriests were not yet a menace. When they died, the kingpriests had become tyrants. During their lives, they carried the weight of the fight against that tyranny. They lost, but had they not fought at all, one wonders if the gods would have spared any part of their creation when their wrath descended upon Krynn.

-From the Yellow Codex of Shtrenisalasandar Half-Elf, also known as the Palanthus Chronicler

Prologue

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:

"Be careful what you beg of the gods. They may send it. "

So he would not risk the gods sending more wind than Kingfisher’s Claw could endure. In these waters the reefs, the mists, and the minotaurs were enough danger.

"Ahoy, the foretop!" came the hail from the deck. "What do you make out?"

Being mate of the top, it had been only plain sense for Torvik to station himself atop the first of the ship's three masts. It had also put a safe distance between him and Yavanna, mate of the deck. She was half again his size and twice his age, and thought that his rank owed more to his lineage than to his skill. Most of the time she stayed within the bounds of manners, but sometimes she brooded until there was an edge in her voice, as there was now.