"Barbara Hambly - Sun Wolf 2 - Witches of Wenshar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

cottonwood poles, Sun Wolf could see through the half-open shutters
of the window a broken labyrinth of crumbling adobe walls, fallen
roofs, and scattered tiles-what had once been garrison quarters for the
troops of Dalwirin, seige housing for the population of their
administrative town, and barracoons for hundreds of slave miners. It
was deserted now, covering several acres of ground; among the many
things his father had considered unmanly for a warrior to possess had
been an aesthetic sense, and Sun Wolf seldom admitted to anyone that
he found such things as the stripped shapes of rock and wall or the
sculpted dunes carved by the will of the wind beautiful.
Extending his senses, as he had learned to in the meditations
Starhawk had taught him, he could feel life stirring in the ruins still.
Somewhere desert rats scrabbled over crumbled bricks; somewhere
snakes lay dreaming in old ovens, waiting for the sun to warm their cold
blood. He felt the quick, furtive flick of a jerboa heading for its burrow.
Though it was light enough now to make out the fallen bricks, the
dun-colored walls with their drifts of piled sand, and the thrusting black
spikes of camel-thorn and bullweed against them, there was not yet any
sound of birds.
Traveling along the hem of the desert, he had grown familiar with
all of them-sand warblers and wheatears and the soft, timid murmur of
rock doves. The wells in the empty quarter should have drawn them by
the hundreds.
He frowned.
Against his shoulder, Starhawk still slept, all her cheetah
deadliness loosened and her thin face peaceful, her short crop of
white-blonde hair ruffled and sticking up like a child's. The Wolf liked
to think of his relationship with this woman whom he had known so
long as one of equals, warriors of matched strength and capability. But
at times like this, he was conscious of feeling toward her a desperate
tenderness, a desire to shelter and protect, wholly at odds with their
daytime selves or the lion-like lusts of the deep night. He grinned a little
at himself-Starhawk was probably the least protectable woman he'd
ever encountered.
I'm getting old, he thought ruefully. There was no fear in it, though
a year ago it would have terrified him; he felt only amusement at
himself. Old and soft.
Like the ruins, Starhawk's was a beauty of rocks and bones and
scars. Moving his head a little, he kissed the delicate curve of bone on
the outer corner of her eye.
Still there was no sound of birds.
His sleep had been unrestful, troubled by inchoate dreams. His
anger at Kaletha had bitten deep; he realized that the anger was also at
fate, at his ancestors, and at the fact that he'd had to go cap-in-hand to
a woman and swallow her self-righteous insults, because only she could
give him what he needed. In Wrynde, he remembered, it had been
whispered that, like the mad God of the Bards, he had traded his eye
for wisdom-he only wished that had been the case.
Yet he knew that Starhawk had been right, as she usually was.
What angered him most about Kaletha-her arrogant assumption that