"Barbara Hambly - Sun Wolf 3 - Dark Hand of Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Starhawk was riding back already, the captured horse on a rein, weaving and
ducking the arrows that flashed around her-a tallish, rangy woman in her late
twenties whom most men were blind and stupid enough to call plain. She still
wore the metal-studded green leather doublet of the King of Wenshar's guards,
in which she'd lately been employed; short-cropped hair the color of old ivory
whipped in strings across a face that was thin, cool, and marked with an old
scar down one cheek and a blackly recent bruise the width of a sword blade.
Their stay in Wenshar, southernmost of the Middle Kingdoms, had been brief but
wildly eventful.
Her distance to him shortened. So did the shirdar's. This was going to be
close. There was just time, he thought, if he could mount fast and unaided.
With two horses they should be able to hold that slim lead over the lizard-dry
mountains to the more settled lands of Dalwirin to the north, where the
shirdar dared not hunt.
Gathering his limbs under him, he reflected, with grim detachment, on what a
hell of a word "if" was.
It wasn't his wizardry, but thirty years of soldiering that got him on his
feet, breathless with pain as the arrow grated in the wound-a massive, tawny,
craggy-faced man with a broken nose that jutted like a granite cliff above an
unkempt gold mustache and a buckskin patch covering the empty socket of his
left eye. His right, under a long brow the same dusty hue as his thinning,
shoulder-length hair, was cold and yellow, a wolf's eye, gauging the
equidistant approach of rescue and death. He was perfectly well aware that the
pain of the arrow in his back was a mosquito bite compared to what the shirdar
would do to him if they took him alive.
The horses were still fifty feet away when Starhawk's mount went down. Sudden
though it was, Sun Wolf thought the beast hadn't been shot-had only tripped in
some unseen pocket of the deep sand. But the result was the same. Starhawk was
flung clear as the horse somersaulted, dust and sand flying everywhere in a
yellow curtain. The lead horse skidded, balked, head up and eyes white, then
veered away like a startled gazelle. The Wolf made two steps of a staggering
run to catch Starhawk's fallen mount before it scrambled to its feet and
followed, then nearly fell himself. Around him the yells of the shirdar
bounced shrilly from the rocks as they drew near. Though he stood in the open,
they weren't shooting at him-a very bad sign. They knew he was theirs.
He glimpsed Starhawk's body lying like a broken marionette, twenty feet away,
unmoving in the sand.
Vision darkening and legs turning watery, he tried to remember some spell that
would get him out of this and failed. Magic was a newfound art to him, an
unknown and scarcely comprehended power that had blossomed, late and
agonizingly, barely a year ago. For most of his forty years, he had made his
living by his sword. As the mounted shirdar closed around him, he groped
blindly for his weapon, knowing what they'd do to him and determined, if
possible, to get himself killed in the ensuing fray. But he didn't have any
luck with that, either.

"She's coming around ... "
The voice was directly above her, Starhawk thought. Eyelids shut, she kept her
breathing slow, the deep breath of unconsciousness. The speaker was kneeling
beside her, at a guess. She could tell she lay on sand, likely still in the