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

of her straight black braids. "Yeah. She's part of the King's
Household." She gathered the pottery dishes with their vivid glazes of
yellow and blue onto her tray and prepared to go. Sun Wolf dug into
his pouch and dropped a quarter of a silver bit into the empty bread
plate. The dark eyes raised to his, startled and shining.
"And where is the Fortress?" Sun Wolf got to his feet, readjusting
the set of the sword at his hip.
"You're not gonna go tonight"?" There was sudden, baffled fear
in the girl's plunging brows. "She's a wizard!" She used the shirdar
word for it, and there was loathing in her voice.
"Funny," Starhawk remarked later, as they walked up Main
Street, leaning into the steep slope of the hill upon which the town was
built. "Most of the people we've met on the road figured wizards are
something that died out a long time ago, if they ever existed to begin
with. But she was afraid."
With the final sinking of the sun, the hot blast of the desert daylight
had given way to dry and bitter cold. Dust hung in the air, the smell of it
a constant with which they had lived for days; it blurred the lights of the
inns and houses they passed, twinkling amber-gold in the ultramarine
darkness. They'd added sheepskin coats to their doublets and still felt
the thin lance of the desert night. They had left their horses behind at the
inn-it had been a long journey, and the beasts were badly overridden.
Above them, thready moonlight touched the gilded turrets of the
Cathedral of the Triple God, triumphant fingers stretching from the
highest peak of the town. Higher still, the jagged peaks of the Dragon's
Backbone loomed, massive granite domes and sugarloaves, with here
and there unscalable plugs of black basalt-dry teeth goring at the stars.
Sun Wolf nodded thoughtfully as they turned along the face of the
hill. Ahead of them, a mile or so from the town, the lights of the
Fortress of Tandieras winked against the rocky bulk of the spur-range
on which it was built. Like a moat, darkness lay before it where the
road dipped from the flank of Pardle Hill, a long stretch of gully,
boulder, and sand. From the dense shadows, the topmost twigs of a
desiccated acacia tree reached up into the moonlight like crooked
reeds above spring floods-for the rest it was pitchy dark. Starhawk's
every nerve came alert. It was a patch of road made for robbers.
"There may be a reason for it," Sun Wolf said after a few
moments. "But I'd fear Kaletha for different reasons. She's arrogant.
She's young, Hawk, younger than you. I'm not saying no wizard that
young can hold the kind of power she claims to hold, but, if one did, I
think I'd feel it." The rock shadows loomed darkly around them.
Starhawk's fingers touched the comforting hardness of her sword. Half
her mind turned from the Wolf's scratchy wheeze to the soft whisper of
shadow sounds. "She should still be a student, not claiming to be able
to teach the secrets of the universe to a bunch of fatuous disciples."
"If she teaches you anything," Starhawk pointed out, "she'll have ...
"
Sun Wolf's hand tapped her shoulder for silence a split instant
before she heard, faint and muffled, a man's cry and smelled the drift of
kicked dust and blood on the night wind. Then there was the ringing