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

"Oh, yes." Ingold Inglorion, Archmage of the wizards of the West, had a way of
listening that seemed to touch everything in the charred and sodden waste of the city
around them, living mid dead. "I suspect," he added, in a murmur that seemed more
within her mind than outside of it, "that it has stalked us since we passed the city
walls."
He made a sign with his hand, small, but five years travel with him in quest of books
and objects of magic among the ruins of cities populated only by bones and ghouls
had taught her to see those signs. Gil was as oblivious to magic as she was to ghosts-
or fairies, or UFOs, for that matter she would have added-but she could read the
summons of a cloaking spell, and she knew that Ingold's cloaking spells were more
substantial than most people's houses.
Thus what happened took her completely by surprise.
The court was a large one. Thousands had taken refuge in the house to which it
belonged, in the fond hope that stout walls and plenty of torchlight would prevent the
incursion of those things called only Dark Ones. Their skulls peered lugubriously
from beneath dangling curtains of colorless vines, white blurs in shadow.
It was close to noon, and the silver vapors from the city's slime-filled canals were
beginning to burn off, color struggling back to the red of fallen porphyry pillars, the
brave blues and gilts of tile. More than half the court lay under a leprous blanket of
the fat white juiceless fungus that surviving humans called slunch, and it was the
slunch that drew Gil's attention now.
Ingold was still motionless, listening intently in the zebra shadows of the blown-out
colonnade as Gil crossed to the edge of the stuff.
"It isn't just me, is it?" Her soft voice fell harsh as a blacksmith's hammer in the
unnatural hush.
"It's getting worse as we get farther south." As Gil knelt to study the tracks that
quilted the clay soil all along the edges of the slunch, Ingold's instruction-and that of
her friend the Icefalcon, rang half-conscious warning bells in her mind. What the hell
had that wolverine been trying to do? Run sideways? Eat its own tail? And that
rabbit-if those were rabbit tracks ... ? That had to be the mark of something caught in
its fur, but ...
"It couldn't have anything to do with what we're looking for, could it?" A stray breath
lifted the long tendrils of her hair, escaping like dark smoke from the braid jammed
under her close-fitting fur cap. "You said Maia didn't know what it was or what it did.
Was there anything weird about the animals around Penambra before the Dark
came?"
"Not that I ever heard." Ingold was turning his head as he spoke, listening as much as
watching. He'd put back the hood of his heavy brown mantle, and his white hair, long
and tatty from weeks of journeying, flickered in the gray air. He'd trimmed his beard
with his knife a couple of nights ago, and resembled St. Anthony after ten rounds with
demons in the wilderness.
Not, thought Gil, that anyone in this universe but herself and Ingold, because she'd
told him-knew who St. Anthony was. Maia of Thran, Bishop of Renweth, erstwhile
Bishop of Penambra and owner of the palace they sought, had told her tales of
analogous holy hermits who'd had similar problems.
Unprepossessing, she thought, to anyone who hadn't seen him in action. Almost
invisible, unless he wished to be seen. "And in any case we might as easily be dealing
with a factor of time rather than distance." Ingold held up his six-foot walking staff in
his blue-mittened left hand, but his right never strayed far from the hilt of the sword at
his side. "It's been ... Behind you!"