"Cook, Glen - Darkwar 02 - Warlock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cook Glen)

WARLOCK
by
Glen Cook
Book Two of The Darkwar Trilogy

BOOK THREE:
MAKSCHE



Chapter Fifteen
I
Bullets hammered the north wall of the last redoubt, Akard's communications center. Mortars crumped. Their bombs banged deafeningly. Bullets leaking through the two small north windows had made a shambles of the communications gear.

Marika had done what she could to stem the nomad tide, and she had failed. She had only two regrets: that her pack, the Degnan, would go into the darkness unMourned, and that for her there would be no journey to the Reugge cloister at Maksche. For her there would be no next step on the road that might have led to the stars.

The hammer of savage weapons rose to an insane crescendo. The nomads were closing in for the last kill. Then the uproar ended. Braydic, the communications technician, whimpered into the sudden silence, "Now they will come."

Marika nodded. The last minutes had arrived. The inevitable end of the siege had come.

Marika did something never done before. She hugged the only surviving members of her pack, the huntresses Grauel and Barlog. The scent of fear was heavy upon their rough fur.

Pups of the upper Ponath packs hugged no one but their dams, and that seldom after the first few years.

The two huntresses were touched deeply.

Grauel turned to the tradermale Bagnel, who was teaching her to operate a firearm. His comrade, last of those who had survived last week's fall of the tradermale packfast Critza, had fallen defending one of the north windows. Someone had to hold that against the savages. Grauel's heavy spear was too unwieldy.

"Wait!" Marika gasped. Her jaw went slack. "Something . . . "

The universe of the touch, the ghost plane into which silth like Marika ducked to work their witchery, had gone mad. Some mighty shadow, terrible in its power, was raging up the valley of the Hainlin River, which this last bastion of the fortress Akard overlooked. For a moment Marika was paralyzed by the power of that shadow. Then she flung herself to a south-facing window.

Three great daggerlike crosses stormed up the frozen river. They drove into the fangs of the wind in a rigid V. That fierce and dreadful shadow-of-touch preceded them, flaying the mind with terror. Upon each cross stood five black-clad silth, one at each tip of each arm, the fifth at the axis. The incessant north wind howled around them and tore at their dark robes. They seemed to notice it not at all.

"They are coming," Marika shouted to Grauel and Barlog, who crowded her against the windowsill.

An explosion thundered out behind them. It threw them together. Marika gasped for breath. Grauel turned, pointed her rifle. It barked in unison with that of the tradermale Bagnel as savages appeared in the dust swirling in the gap created by the explosion.

Marika clung to the windowsill, looking out, waiting for death.

The rushing crosses rose as they neared Akard, screaming into lightly falling snow, parting. Marika slipped through her loophole into the realm of ghosts and followed them as they plunged toward the attacking nomads, spreading death and terror.

Grauel and Bagnel stopped firing. The nomads had fled the breach. In minutes the entire besieging horde was in full flight. Two of the flying crosses harried the savages northward. The third returned and hovered over the confluence of the forks of the Hainlin, above which Akard brooded on a high headland.

Akard's pawful of survivors crowded the window, staring in disbelief. Help had come. After so long a wait. In the penultimate moment, help had come.

The cross drifted closer till the tip of its longest arm touched the fortress on the level above the communications center. Marika pushed weariness aside and went to meet her rescuers. She was only fourteen, as yet far from being a full silth sister, but was the senior silth surviving. The only silth surviving. Through eyes hazed with fatigue and reaction, she vaguely recognized the dark figure which came to meet her. It was Zertan, senior of the Reugge Community's cloister at Maksche.

It looked like she would get to see the great city in the south after all.