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

Starhawk smelled the thing before she saw it. The stench of old blood and maggots, of d
and burned hair; the stink of rat-piss and grimy beggar-rags. It seemed to come from
everywhere, disorienting, drowning the night-if she hadn't been aware that the wind was
onshore she would have thought it was only the stink of the city under siege. There was a
sound, too, just briefly: a clicking, knocking clatter squishily muffled.

Then a whitish blur near a barn's broken wall.

Butcher brought her mouth almost to Starhawk's ear. "It's got someone."

Starhawk looked again, straining to see in the starlight. After a moment she signed the ot
two to stay close, and moved towards the place. Butcher generally didn't carry a sword but
could use one, and had strapped hers on for the occasion. Battlesow had, in addition to her
four-foot broadsword Daffodil, a halberd with cross-guards on the blade like a boar-spear
and an iron war-club that could have brained a horse. Before leaving Butcher's tent all thre
women had geared up with what meres called dogfight leathers, armbands and collars brist
with spikes, mailed gloves and scouting-weight cuirasses of leather and plate. Starhawk
reflected uneasily that the outpost guard she'd seen at the infirmary had almost certainly wo
something similar. It was unlikely he'd taken it off for a scratch and been ambushed at just
precisely the wrong moment, oh darn.

The bam had been burned during the initial fighting around the walls; roof and rafters ha
fallen in. In the Gwarl they usually dug root cellars underneath the barns. If the thing was
seeking a lair it-

They came around the corner of the wall and it was there.

It struck unbelievably fast, Starhawk slashing for the dripping pits where eyes had once
been. It was worms, she thought: they burst through the curtain of filthy rags that covered th
squirming globby flesh, huge as serpents, their round reddish heads groping blind. She pivo
sidelong-the thing faced around and as Battlesow rammed it back with the halberd, it opene
its mouth and extruded something that looked like a maggot the size of a hosepipe, snapping
reaching. It had hands, though, human or once-human, like the head. They grabbed the halbe
shaft and wrenched it free of Battlesow's grip-Battlesow who could break a cow's neck wi
punch-and lunged at the big woman. Nothing daunted, Battlesow waded in with a
leather-wrapped and mail-shod right hook that sent the creature spinning into the night.

Starhawk and Butcher closed up on either side of their friend, fast, a triangle facing thre
ways out. Three swords, three daggers ready-not that swords or daggers had done the outpo
guards a whole lot of good. Starhawk panted with shock and exertion, the adrenaline-rush o
combat making her hands shake, but for a long time the dense blue-black shadows around th
were still, chancy in the glimmer of the stars.

"Holy pox and cow-pies," said Battlesow, and leaned from the spiked defensive ring to
up the lantern. Starhawk smelled the rank cheap oil and realized that the stench of the creatu
had faded.

"And Ari's still getting guys willing to stand perimeter guard out here?" Starhawk shook
head. "I underestimated his powers of persuasion-or overestimated the intelligence of some