"Barbara Hambly - Darwath 4 - Mother Of Winter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

by her hand or the hands of those who slept all around her huddled in the lee of the
Foci, broken by what they had done.
And to no avail, she thought. To no avail. She asked him, "Are they dead?"
He nodded.
"All of them?"
"All."
It was not the worst thing she had ever borne, but in some ways more painful than the
knowledge that the world's end was coming sooner than anyone had reckoned. She
had loved many of those who died last night.
"You should have asked our help."
He was unshaven under the filth; even the ends of his long hair, by which he was
nicknamed at Court, were tipped with grue. "It was the only chance you had, of
raising the power to do this." He had a voice like gravel and clinkers in an iron pan.
"The locking point of sun, moon, and stars, you said. The time of greatest power." He
swallowed, fighting pain. "It was worth what it cost."
She folded her arms across her breasts, bare beneath the midnight wool of her cloak.
The morning was very cold. Below her the murmur of water was loud where springs
had been broached in the rock. The smell of wet earth breathed up around them. Far
down the Vale where the trees grew thick at the head of the pass, birds were waking.
"No," she said. "For we failed. We put forth all our strength, and all our strength was
not enough. And all this-" The movement of her hand took in the half-raised walls,
the silent machines, the chasm of foundation, the whisper of water and of that half-
seen skeleton of light. "-all this will pass away, and leave us with nothing."
Her head bowed. She hadn't wept for years, not since one night when she'd seen a
truth too appalling to be contemplated in the color of the stars. But her grief was a
leaden darkness, seeming to pull them both down into the beginning of an endless
fall. "I'm sorry."
Book One


Fimbultide
Chapter One

"Do you see it?" Gil Patterson's voice was no louder than the scratch of withered
vines on the stained sandstone wall. Melding with the shadows was second nature to
her by now. The courtyard before them was empty and still, marble pavement
obscured by lichen and mud, and a small forest of sycamore suckers half concealed
the fire-black ruins of the hall, but she could have sworn that something had moved.
"Feel it?"
She edged forward a fraction of an inch, the better to see, taking care to remain still
within the ruined peristyle's gloom. "What is it?"
The possibility of ghosts crossed her mind.
The five years that had passed since eight thousand people died in this place in a
single night had been hard ones, but some of their spirits might linger.
"I haven't the smallest idea, my dear."
She hadn't heard him return to her from his investigation of the building's outer court:
he was a silent-moving man. Pitched for her hearing alone, his voice was of a curious
velvety roughness, like dark bronze broken by time. In the shadows of the crumbling
wall, and the deeper concealment of his hood, his blue eyes seemed very bright.
"But there is something."