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

mammoths, the bison, the horrible-birds, and even the dooic-as analogous to those
things that lived in your own universe long ago. I hoped you would have some lore
concerning this."
Gil looked down at it again. Something in the shape of the flat ears, of the fat, naked
cone of the tail-something about the smell of it-repelled her, not with alienness, but
with a vile sense of the half familiar. She touched the spidery hands at the ends of the
stalky brown limbs. It had claws like razors.
What the hell did it remind her of?
Ingold pried open the bloody jaws. "There," he said softly. "Look." On the outsides of
the gums, upper and lower, were dark, purplish, collapsed sacs of skin; Gil shook her
head, uncomprehending.
"How do you feel?"
"Okay. A little light-headed."
He felt her hands again and her wrists, shifting his fingers a little to read the different
depths of pulse. For all his unobvious strength, he had the gentlest touch of anyone
she had ever known.
Then he looked back down at the creature. "It's a thing of the cold," he said at last.
"Down from the north, perhaps? Look at the fur and the way the body fat is
distributed. I've never encountered an arctic animal with poison sacs-never a mammal
with them at all, in fact."
He shook his head, turning the hook-taloned fingers this way and that, touching the
flat, fleshy ears. "I've put a general spell against poisons on you, which should
neutralize the effects, but let me know at once if you feel in the least bit dizzy or short
of breath."
Gil nodded, feeling both slightly dizzy and short of breath, but nothing she hadn't felt
after bad training sessions with the Guards of Gae, especially toward the end of
winter when rations were slim. That was something else, in the five years since the
fall of Darwath, that she'd gotten used to.
Leaving her on the marble bench, with its carvings of pheasants and peafowl and
flowers that had not blossomed here in ten summers, Ingold bundled the horrible kill
into one of the hempen sacks he habitually carried, and hung the thing from the
branch of a sycamore dying at the edge of the slunch, wreathed in such spells as
would keep rats and carrion feeders at bay until they could collect it on their outward
journey.
Coming back to her, he sat on the bench at her side and folded her in his arms. She
rested her head on his shoulder for a time, breathing in the rough pungence of his
robes and the scent of the flesh beneath, wanting only to stay there in his arms,
unhurried, forever.
It seemed to her sometimes, despite the forty years difference in their ages, that this
was all she had ever wanted.
"Can you go on?" he asked at length. Carefully, he kissed the unswollen side of her
mouth. "We can wait a little."
"Let's go." She sat up, putting aside the comfort of his strength with regret. There
was time for that later. She wanted nothing more now than to find what they had
come to Penambra to find and get the hell out of town.
"Maia only saw the Cylinder once." Ingold scrambled nimbly ahead of her through
the gotch-eyed doorway of the colonnade and up over a vast rubble heap of charred
beams, shattered roof tiles, pulped woodwork, and broken stone welded together by a
hardened soak of ruined plaster. Mustard colored lichen crusted it, and a black tangle
of all-devouring vines in which patches of slunch grew like dirty mattresses dropped