"Hambly,.Barbara.-.Darwath.2.-.Walls.Of.Air.e-txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

playing pool in the back. Rudy Solis swigged off his second beer of the evening
and watched the room. There was something he had lost, something that had been
taken from him, but he no longer remembered what it had been. Only a numb ache
was left.
He was out of money and not nearly drunk enough yet. Behind the bar, Billie May
moved back and forth along the shelf of empty glasses and bottles of beer, her
reflection trailing her in the flyspecked mirror, showing her black eye make-up
and the red lace of her bra at the low neck of her sweater. The mirror revealed
all the usual Saturday night crowd, people Rudy had known since high
school—since childhood, some of them: Peach McClain, the fattest Hell's Angel in
the world, with his old lady; Crazy Red, the karate instructor; Big Bull; and
the gang from the steel mill. But it was as if they were strangers. He made a
gesture with one hand, and a beer bottle levitated from the shelf before the
mirror and drifted across the intervening space to his hand. No one noticed. He
poured the beer and drank, hardly tasting it. From the jukebox, the tinny whine
of steel guitars backed a syrupy nasal voice hymning adultery. The hurt of the
loss within him was unbearable.
He let go of the bottle in midair a foot above the surface of the bar and made
it stay there. Still no one noticed, or no one cared, anyway. Rudy stared past
it at his own reflection in the mirror—the sharp bone structure and backswept
eyebrows in their frame of long, reddish-black hair. His fingers were stained
with car paint and grease, and his name was tattooed across a flaming torch on
his wrist. Behind him, the plate glass window had grown suddenly dark, as if all
light had died outside.
He turned, chilled with a horror he could not define. No streetlights were
visible outside, no sheen of neon, only darkness that seemed to press against
the window, soft and living—darkness that stirred with a restless movement, as
if creatures impossibly sinuous haunted its livid depths. He tried to cry out,
and his voice was only a kind of feeble rattle in his throat. He tried to point,
but the people in the bar ignored him, as if he were not there. A bolt of energy
or power from outside struck the wall of the bar like a monster fist, caving it
in amid an explosion of shattering bricks. Through the torn wall, darkness
rolled like a wave.
"Rudy!" Cold hands caught his flailing wrist. "Rudy, wake up! What is it?"
He woke gasping, sweat icing him to the bone. In the darkness of the room, his
wizard's sight showed him Minalde, Queen of Darwath and mother of the heir,
sitting up in bed beside him, the starred silk of the counterpane gleaming
around her shoulders and the fear in her wide iris-dark eyes making her seem
younger than her nineteen years. The warm, still blackness of the room smelled
of beeswax and of the perfume of her tumbled hair. "What was it?" she asked him
again, her voice very low. "Was it a dream?"
"Yeah." Rudy lay back beside her, shivering, as if deathly cold. "Only a dream."
In the lightless barracks of the Guards on the first level, Gil Patterson woke,
her dreams of quiet scholarship in another universe called California broken by
an unshakable sense of impending horror. She lay on her narrow bunk for a time,
listening open-eyed to the small sounds of the fortress Keep of Dare, and to the
hammering of her own heart. The Keep was safe, she told herself. The one place
in the world where the Dark Ones could not break in. But the terror of the
dreams grew rather than diminished in her heart
At last she rose, soundless as a cat. The dim yellowish glow from the banked