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

she needed no teacher and that she herself was qualified to judge her
own progress and that of others-was precisely what he himself was
doing in refusing to accept her tutelage.
Beside him, Starhawk moved in her sleep, her arm tightening
around his ribcage as if she found reassurance in the touch. He stroked
her shoulder, the skin silky under his hand, and gazed out at the pink
reflections warming the upper edges of the ruined walls. A stir of wind
brought him the warm smell of the stables and the drift of baking bread
from the palace kitchens.
Then the wind shifted, and he smelled blood.
Whether Starhawk smelled it, too, and reacted with the
hair-trigger reflexes of a warrior in her sleep, or whether she simply felt
the stiffening of his muscles, he didn't know, but a moment later her
gray eyes were blinking up into his. She'd been in deep sleep a moment
ago, but she neither moved nor spoke, instinctively keeping silence
against any possible threat.
"Do you smell it?" he asked softly, but the wind had shifted again.
There were only the scents of burning wood and baking bread from the
kitchens. So it isn't just the smell of chicken-killing for tonight's
dinner, he thought to himself.
She shook her head. All the childlike helplessness of sleep had
dissolved into what it really was-his own fancies-and the woman who
had curled so trustingly into his shoulder had a knife in her hand, ready
for anything. Starhawk, the Wolf reflected with a grin, was the only
person he knew who could be stark naked and still produce a
concealed weapon at a second's notice.
"It's probably nothing," he said. "I heard jackals and pariah-dogs
out in the empty quarter last night ... " He frowned again and closed his
eye, stilling his mind as he had often done scouting, listening as a wizard
listens. The empty quarter was silent. No murmur of the doves that
must nest there, no shrill cries of swifts, though it was time and past
time when birds called their territories. Though the red trace of blood
touched his nostrils again, he could hear no stealthy pad of jackal feet,
no querulous snarls of scavenger rats. In the stables nearby a horse
nickered softly over its morning feed; a girl began to sing.
Soundlessly, the Wolf rolled out of bed, found his boots and the
buckskin trousers he'd worn down from Wrynde, his shirt and doublet,
and his belt with sword and daggers. When Starhawk moved to join
him, he shook his head and said again, "I don't think it's anything. I'll be
back."
The cold was sharp on his face and throat as he stepped out of the
little room, a cell in a line of low cells that could have been workshops,
guest rooms or makeshift prisons along a narrow, sandy court just off
the stables. A storm last week had drifted sand deep against the
eastern walls; the adobe faces of the buildings showed marks where
pebbles and flying chunks of stone had gouged the softer brick. The
other cells of the court were deserted. A pack rat went flicking around
the doorpost of one to the shelter of the shadows within.
 Cautiously, Sun Wolf moved into the empty quarter. He found the
place quite quickly, stalking through the silent maze of empty rooms