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

the guys in the troop, I'm not sure which." She settled into flanking position behind Butcher
the physician followed the dribbled slime-trail the thing had left, back towards the barn. "D
Prince Chare know about this?"

"Ari brought him into the infirmary this morning, while the guy you saw was still alive.
Chare kept talking about resistance fighters from the countryside and what horrible weapon
they carried that could do that, and how we'll all just have to be more careful."

"Weapons my ass. Yike!" she added, as Battlesow slipped the lantern-slide and raised t
lantern to throw yellow light into the root-cellar before them. "He can't be one of ours," she
added, studying the youthful, snub-nosed face-what could be seen of it under the blood-and
expensive if tattered clothing.

Butcher shook her head. "Look at his hands. He was somebody's clerk, or a student. He
even wearing a sword, look. Poor sap must have just been walking home." She looked arou
her at the darkness. "What the hell is it, Hawk? Sun Wolfs been learning hoodoo for two ye
now, and that things hoodoo if I ever saw it."

"I'm guessing it's a wight of some sort," said Starhawk. "According to the books the Chie
picked up in Vorsal they're usually hungry like that. When they meld into corpses they often
have some kind of vague memories or thoughts picked up from the brain of the corpse, but
they're not bright enough to take orders or anything. And if it is a wight, we'd better make
ourselves scarce, because wights are-"
 Her hand flipped up for silence and in the same instant, it seemed, Butcher rapped shut t
lantern-slide. The three warriors pressed automatically back against the wall and slid along
getting clear of the boy's corpse, swords held low in the shadows beside them but ready ag

The stink of the wight was like drowning in rotting glue.

White movement where the starlight struck, in front of the ruined barn. A vast obscene
wriggling under the filthy shroud. Bony hands groping over the ground.

Battlesow leaned to breathe in Starhawk's ear, starlight slipping over the shaved curve o
her head, the glister of the five-carat diamond in her earlobe. "What's it looking for?"

"Probably," breathed Starhawk back, "its teeth." She'd seen several go flying when
Battlesow decked the wight.

The bony fingers fumbled something up from the mud, traveled to the slobbery mouth. Th
back to the earth, picking at pebbles, old nails, miscellaneous animal-bones and snail-shell
Looking more closely, Starhawk saw how the thing's head was wrapped in a sort of dirty
turban, beneath which wisps of hair hung down, faded in the blanched light like frost-painte
grass. Butcher raised her sword a little-she could amputate a leg in fifteen seconds-and
Starhawk touched her hand, and shook her head.

"Cutting it to pieces won't help," she breathed. "It'll still come after us."

"If this situation gets any better I'll burst into song. Where's Sun Wolf when you need him

"Where's any man when you need him?" muttered Battlesow.