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

saddle to squint at the ground as they came clear of the canyon's shadows into
the heartbreaking, liquid brilliance of the desert moon. The tracks were
harder to follow now as the deep sand gave way to coarse gray pebbles that
crunched under the hooves. "He's supposed to have summoned demons. They made
pemmican of the poor bastard."
Leaning down, scanning the shapeless earth for the scuffy trail of unshod
hooves and the occasional dark blood spoor, she still felt the look that
passed between them over her head.
"He-he really did turn into a hoodoo, then?" The word Firecat used was merc
slang, with all its lower-class connotations of dowsery and love drops and
murder in the night. "Not that he offed that grut," she hastened to add. "But
I mean-they seem to think he could have."
"Yeah." Starhawk straightened in the saddle, and something within her cringed
from speaking of it to these friends who wouldn't understand. "Yeah, he's a
wizard."
The silence was awkward, as if she'd admitted he'd suddenly developed a
romantic attachment to boys, something they would at least have encountered
elsewhere. They'd heard it last spring, when she and the Wolf had returned
from Mandrigyn and the horrors of the citadel of the Wizard-King Altiokis, but
she knew they hadn't really believed it then. And why should they? For as long
as any of them had been alive, no wizard had dared risk murder by the Wizard-
King by revealing himself; for at least three generations, fewer and fewer of
the mageborn had lived long enough to pass their teachings on.
They knew he had changed. He'd been in their winter camp in Wrynde for a week
or so before Ari, the troop's new commander, had led that band of killers
south to the newest war, and he'd been very quiet then, still dealing with the
fact that he would not, after all, be their commander, their Chief, anymore.
Even the most disbelieving of the troop would admit that more had befallen him
than the loss of his left eye and the breaking of his voice, of which now
little more was left than a scraped, metallic rasp. In his remaining eye, cold
amber under the long tufts of brow, was the haunted look of one who has leaned
drunk over a ditch to vomit and found himself looking straight down to the
bottommost depths of hell.
But knowing that he had changed, and believing what he said he had changed
into, were different things.
It was clear to Starhawk from the reactions of her friends in the troop that
they did not realize that she, too, had changed. But that, she reflected, was
probably just as well.
Choirboy's puzzled voice broke into her thoughts. "If he's a hookum," he
asked, "why can't he just make the shirdar all disappear?"

The same thought had crossed Sun Wolf's mind.
How long he'd been walking he didn't know; the moon had set, but through the
feverish blur of pain and semi-consciousness he kept a wizard's ability to see
in darkness, though some of the things he was beginning to see he knew weren't
real. Poison on the arrow, he thought groggily; toadwort or poppy, something
that would cloud the mind but not kill.
That, too, was a bad sign.
Other shirdar had joined the men who'd captured him; now and then he seemed to
emerge from a black tunnel of hazy agony to find the night freezing on his