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

He was turning as he yelled, and his cry was the only reason the thing didn't take Gil
full in the back like a bobcat fastening onto a deer. She was drawing her own sword,
still on her knees but cutting as she whirled, and aware at the same moment of Ingold
drawing, stepping in, slashing. Ripping weight collided with Gil's upper arm and she
had a terrible impression of a short-snouted animal face, of teeth thrusting out of a
lifted mass of wrinkles, of something very wrong with the eyes ...
Pain and cold sliced her right cheek low on the jawbone. She'd already dropped the
sword, pulled her dagger; she slit and ripped and felt blood and intestines gush hotly
over her hand. The thing didn't flinch. Long arms like an ape's wrapped around her
shoulders, claws cutting through her sheepskin coat. It bit again at her face, going for
her eyes, its own back and spine wide open. Gil cut hard and straight across them
with seven-inch steel that could shave the hair off a man's arm. The teeth spasmed and
snapped, the smell of blood clogging her nostrils. Buzzing dizziness filled her. She
thought she'd been submerged miles deep in dry, living gray sand.
"Gil!" The voice was familiar but far-off, a fly on a ceiling miles above her head.
She'd heard it in dreams, maybe...
Her face hurt. The lips of the wound in her cheek were freezing now against the heat
of her blood. For some reason she had the impression she was waking up in her own
bed in the fortress Keep of Dare, far away in the Vale of Renweth. "What time is it?"
she asked. The pain redoubled and she remembered. Her head ached.
"Lie still." He bent over her, lined face pallid with shock. There was blood on the
sleeves of his mantle, on the blackish bison fur of the surcoat he wore over that. She
felt his fingers probe gently at her cheek and jaw. He'd taken off his mittens, and his
flesh was startlingly warm. The smell of the blood almost made her faint again. "Are
you all right?"
"Yeah." Her lips felt puffy, the side of her face a balloon of air. She put up her hand
and remembered, tore off her sodden glove, brushed her lips, then the corner of her
right eye with her fingertips. The wounds were along her cheekbone and jaw, sticky
with blood and slobber. "What was that thing?"
"Lie still a little more." Ingold unslung the pack from his shoulders and dug in it with
swift hands. "Then you can have a look."
All the while he was daubing a dressing of herb and willow bark on the wounds,
stitching them and applying linen and plaster-braiding in the spells of healing, of
resistance to infection and shock-Gil was conscious of him listening, watching,
casting again the unseen net of his awareness over the landscape that lay beyond the
courtyard wall.
Once he stood up, quickly, catching up the sword that lay drawn on the muddy marble
at his side, but whatever it was that had stirred the slunch was still then and made no
further move.
He knelt again. "Do you think you can sit up?"
"Depends on what kind of reward you offer me."
His grin was quick and shy as he put a hand under her arm. Dizziness came and went
in a long hot gray wave. She didn't want him to think her weak, so she didn't cling to
him as she wanted to, seeking the familiar comfort of his warmth.
She breathed a couple of times, hard, then said, "I'm fine. What the hell is it?"
"I was hoping you might be able to tell me."
"You're joking!"
The wizard glanced at the carcass-the short bulldog muzzle, the projecting chisel
teeth, the body a lumpy ball of fat from which four thick-scaled, ropy legs projected-
and made a small shrug. "You've identified many creatures in our world-the