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

mouth formed the words "I'll report that! I'll report you both!" without a sound.

Elia stepped in with a low clean sidelong slash, cutting the thing's right leg out from und
it; it fell, and ran along the ground at them with its three arms like a spiders legs. Teryne cr
"This way!" and flew back up the farm-path like a bundle of blown rags, the other women
running for their lives in her wake.

There were tombs along the city wall, doors gaping, the black charnel-smell flowing for
Teryne plunged unerringly up the steps of one, slipped through its half-open grille of iron b
and slammed it shut again as the last of the women bolted through. The lantern flung jolting
shadows over low granite walls, niches filled with broken coffin-wood, cobwebs, nasty lit
messes of hair and cloth and bone.

"This way," the old woman panted. "It's the entry to the catacomb of the House Toth. Th
other end comes out in the ruin of what used to be their town house. This is how she's been
coming and going. Her own tomb's near by."

Starhawk looked around. Every niche was barred with a line of silver spikes, every
keystone written with warding-signs that she recognized from Sun Wolf's books, every corp
surrounded by crystals of salt. "I thought so," she panted. "The whole countryside must be
infested with wights, the way in some places tapeworms dwell in the water and the earth. Y
say you knew her?"

"Everyone in the Seven Streets quarter knew her." Teryne sniffed contemptuously. "She
always a soured and bitter woman, ever since Gillimer Cornmonger-Brannis' father-threw
over for someone prettier and with a bigger dowry. I was little more than a child myself in
those days. But even after all these years, when Brannis Cornmonger spoke of making a wig
there was only one person so poison-filled and spite-riddled in anyone's memory, that coul
its steed. All this…" she gestured at the ward-written tombs "… is for naught, really. The g
need not fear for wights inhabiting their bones."

"Well, there's two schools of thought on that one," said Starhawk, "but I won't argue abo
now. Butcher, you go with Teryne. I think the wight'll come after me rather than her, but I do
think anybody should be walking around alone tonight. Those bars look pretty sturdy…" Sh
sheathed her sword, and reached out to grip the iron grillework of the tomb door. "They sho
hold our girlfriend off for awhile, at least until Elia and Battlesow and I take care of what w
need to take care of in town tonight."
 As Starhawk feared it would, the wight attacked their party when they emerged from the
again in the dead stillness halfway between midnight and morning, and they were hard put t
drive it back. It had increased in size again, having killed, it was clear, another outpost
guard-clear because pieces of the man were visible among the bones and rags and threshing
darting worms of its original form. "Holy Three!" whispered Councillor Toth, who had join
Starhawk's party after minimal arguement when she, Elia, and Battlesow had rousted him fr
his bed. "Is that the creature you were proposing to waken, and set upon our enemies?" He
turned in outrage and disgust upon Mayor-Excuse me, thought Starhawk,
PRESIDENT-Cornmonger, who had also been persuaded to accompany the expedition, thou
he had not, as Toth had, been given the option of refusing to come.

"Aren't we being nice in our choices of weapon?" retorted Cornmonger sarcastically. H
was a handsome man in his mid-fifties who even in an expensive yellow silk bedgown, tas