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

face, the air burning the wound in his back, and all around him those white-
robed riders who never spoke. He'd fainted once, and the shirdar had whipped
their horses to a gallop and dragged him a dozen yards before stopping to kick
and flog him to his feet; he was fighting hard not to faint again.
Think! he ordered himself blurrily. Yirth of Mandrigyn taught you rope-
breaking spells, dammit ... But the words of them couldn't rise through the
pain and the dull buzzing in his ears; only Yirth's face, dark and ugly, with
hook nose and brown birthmark and the glow of those jade-green eyes as she'd
taught him spell after spell on the single night he'd spent in her teaching,
patterns of power sketched in the air or on the floor; words whose sounds
bridged the gap between Nothing and Something; healing, illusion, scrying,
weatherspinning ...
And how far do you think you'd run if you could remember one? he demanded
grimly. At the moment he was perfectly well aware that the rawhide rope that
dragged so excruciatingly at his wrists was the only thing holding him up.
He tried to think like the wizard he now was instead of the warrior he had
been for the whole of his life. Summon fire ... confusion ... steal a horse
... And the warrior in him asked cynically, And which one of these gruts are
you going to talk into helping you mount?
Yirth's image melted, blended in his delirium with that of Kaletha of Wenshar,
the only other teacher he'd been able to locate in a year of seeking, coldly
beautiful in the dappled shade of the public gardens where he'd seen her
first. Then that image, too, darkened, changed before his eyes to blood
splattered on a mosaic floor, to screams in darkness, and to the chittering of
the demons of Wenshar ...
He must have fallen. In the drugged black deeps of exhausted unconsciousness,
he became aware that he wasn't walking anymore, but lay on his back, stripped
to the waist, flesh cold with the bitter chill of the desert night and crying
out with a hundred abrasions, as if he'd been beaten with hammers of flint.
In his dreams he could feel the horror in the ground.
He had always dreamed vividly-his father, he remembered, had beaten him when
he'd caught him in daytime reverie, trying to recapture the colors of the
previous night. Since the ordeal of the Great Trial whereby the magic born
into his flesh, the magic he had all his life denied, had blossomed in a rose
of fire, his dreams had been clearer still.
He lay on the ground, cold sand gritty beneath his lacerated back and arms,
the blood of the arrow wound still seeping thickly into the earth. His arms
and legs were spread out, and he couldn't move, though whether this was
because he was still unconscious or because he was tied that way he didn't
know. By the utter silence, he knew it was the hushed hour preceding dawn,
before the hum of insects wakes the desert. The smell of dust and blood filled
his nostrils, and another smell that sent his mind screaming at him to wake
up, wake up! as if his bound flesh could feel through the earth on which it
lay what was beneath it.
They, too, were waking.
In dreams he saw them, blackish-red clots like dark raspberries in the winding
night of their tunnels, huddled together and stupid with cold. As big as a
man's thumb, they were like armored horses with their malignant eyes and
dangling mandibles-tunnels, chambers, the caverns where bloated queens sat
dully squeezing out eggs. The distant sun was already beginning to warm them.