"Barbara Hambly - A Night with the Girls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Starhawk wiped the goop from her eyes, and said, "Take a warning, pals." She fished in
pouch at her belt, and brought up the last brown-and-white fragment: a dog's footbone, she
guessed it was when she'd found it in the muddy farmyard. But at that distance, in the iron d
and flickering torchlight of pre-dawn, it looked sufficiently like the wight's teeth to pass for
one. Her heart hammered so loudly she was sure Cornmonger and Chare must hear it. She
turned the bone in her fingers, holding it up, molding her face into the expression of cold an
enigmatic arrogance Sun Wolf assumed when he was bluffing, and hoped to hell they bough
story. "Take a warning, and sign those Articles. Because I can bring her out of that pyre, as
easy as I sent her in, in a form you don't want to know about."

To her enormous surprise, they both signed. Elia and Councillor Toth made sure they sig
all six copies of the Articles, and took them away the moment the sealing-wax was set to se
them to various allies, so that neither side could repudiate without severe repercussions. Th
Chare went back to what was left of his tent to begin arrangements for paying off the
mercenaries and to order his servants to clean up the mess, and Cornmonger headed for to t
walls of Horran to let the people know that the siege was over. If they hadn't won all of the
independence, at least they wouldn't be sacked, or return to the absolute rule against which
they'd rebelled.

Dawn was coming up, gray and thin above the hills.

Starhawk sat down on a wagon-tongue and started to scrape the mud off her face and ha

"Sorry about the water." Dogbreath brought her a bucket. "You sure that thing's not gonn
back?"

"Pretty sure." Starhawk upended it over her head-she was past any consideration of
delicacy. She wondered if the stink would ever come out of her hair. "She got her teeth-tha
why she went into the pyre-and once she was there she incorporated what Teryne had broug
from the city tombs. That's what she's been wanting all this time."

"What was it?" Butcher came over, wringing out the tail of her shirt. "Teryne dug around
public catacombs for half an hour looking for it."

"The bones of Gillimer Cornmonger," said Starhawk. "Brannis Cornmonger's father-the
who seduced and betrayed her fifty-five years ago. That's what she wanted, all those years.
have him all to herself. And now she does. Once the flesh and the will were at rest, the wig
had no more power."

"And you learned that from reading Sun Wolfs magic books?" asked Battlesow
wonderingly.

Starhawk looked off across the jumble of burned-out farmhouses and trampled fields, to
where the small train of mayor and councillors and their bodyguard had reached the city ga
Cindery light showed the guards coming in from the siege machinery. Somewhere over the
camp someone set up a faint cheer, answered, still more faintly, from the cheering in the cit
behind its walls.

"It was just a guess," she said. "I learned that from the people who live in those cities I u
to help destroy." She unbuckled the spiked guards from her arms and neck. "It's not magic, a