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

from the sky. The broken statue of a female saint regarded them sadly from the mess:
Gil automatically identified her by the boat, the rose, and the empty cradle as St.
Thyella of Ilfers.
"Maia was always a scholar, and he knew that people were using fire as a weapon
against the Dark Ones. Whole neighborhoods gathered wherever they felt the walls
would hold-though they were usually wrong about that-and burn whatever they could
find, hoping a bulwark of light would serve should bulwarks of stone fail. They were
frequently wrong about that as well."
Gil said nothing. She remembered her first sight of the Dark. Remembered the
fleeing, uncomprehending mobs, naked and jolted from sleep, men and women falling
and dying as the blackness rolled over them. Remembered the thin, directionless
wind, the acid-blood smell of the predators, and the way fluid and matter would rain
over her when she slashed the amorphous, floating things in half with her sword.
They picked their way off the corpse of the building into a smaller court, its wooden
structures only a black frieze of ruin buried in weeds. On a fallen keystone the circled
cross of the Straight Faith was incised.
"Asimov wrote a story like that," Gil said.
" 'Nightfall.' " Ingold paused to smile back at her. "Yes." In addition to her historical
studies in the archives of the Keep of Dare, Gil had gained quite a reputation among
the Guards as a spinner of tales, passing along to them recycled Kipling and Dickens,
Austen and Heinlein, Doyle and Heyer and Coles, to ease the long Erebus of winter
nights.
And it's true," the old man went on. "People burned whatever they could find and
spent the hours of day hunting for more.'' His voice was grim and sad-those had been,
Gil understood, people he knew. Unlike many wizards, who tended to be recluses at
heart, Ingold was genuinely gregarious.
He'd had dozens of friends in Gae, the northern capital , and the Realm of Darwath,
and here in Penambra: families, scholars, a world of drinking buddies whom Gil had
never met. By the time she came to this universe, most were dead.
Three years ago she had gone with Ingold to Gae, searching for old books and objects
of magic in the ruins. Among the shambling, pitiful ghouls who still haunted the
broken cities, he recognized a man he had known.
Ingold had tried to tell him that the Dark Ones whose destruction had broken his mind
were gone and would come no more, and had narrowly missed being carved up with
rusty knives and clamshells for his pains. "I can't say I blame them for that."
"No," he murmured. "One can't." He stopped on the edge of a great bed of slunch that,
starting within the ruins of the episcopal palace, had spread out through its windows
and across most of the terrace that fronted the sunken, scummy chain of puddles that
had been Penambra's Grand Canal. "But the fact remains that a great deal was lost."
Motion in the slunch made him poke at it with the end of his staff, and a hard-shelled
thing like a great yellow cockroach lumbered from between the pasty folds and
scurried toward the palace doors.
Ingold had a pottery jar out of his bag in seconds and dove for the insect, swift and
neat. The roach turned, hissing and flaring misshapen wings; Ingold caught it midair
in the jar and slapped the vessel mouth down upon the pavement with the thing
clattering and scraping inside. It had flown straight at his eyes.
"Most curious." He slipped a square of card-and then the jar's broad wax stepper-
underneath, and wrapped a cloth over the top to seal it. "Are you well, my dear?"
For Gil had knelt beside the slunch, overwhelmed with sudden weariness and
stabbed by a hunger such as she had not known for months. She broke off a piece of