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

hearth in the main guardroom threw a feeble reflection into the cell shared by
the women of the day watch. It touched anonymous shoulders, shut eyes, tangled
hair, the black cloaks with the simple white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards,
and the hard gleam of steel. By that faint suggestion of light, she pulled on a
shirt and breeches, wrapped herself in her cloak, and slipped from the room. The
floor was icy to her bare feet as she made her way between the bunks in the
guardroom beyond. She guessed it to be midway through the deep-night watch, the
watch between midnight and morning, but time was different in the windowless
Keep.
She pushed aside the curtain at the far end of that room.
Ingold the wizard was not in his so-called quarters. Actually, the wizard slept
in a sort of cubbyhole that the Guards used to store part of the food supplies
they'd scrounged, salvaged, and defended against all comers in the wreck of the
Realm. The feeble gleam of the light from the hearth showed Gil a hollow in the
sacks of grain piled in the back of the closet, a couple of moth-eaten buffalo
robes, and a very grubby patchwork quilt, but no wizard. His staff was gone,
too.
She moved quickly back through the guardroom, through the outer chamber used for
storing weapons and casks of Blue Ruin and bathtub gin, and out into the
cavernous depths of the Aisle. The great central hall of the Keep stretched
nearly a thousand feet from the double gates at the west end to the dark,
turreted wall of the administrative headquarters at the east. She might almost
have been outside, for the featureless black walls that bounded the Aisle on
either side stretched up out of sight, supporting a ceiling whose shadows had
never been dispelled. Across the broad floor murmured the deep, black water
channels, spanned by their tiny bridges; around her the stillness was like the
great silence of the snowbound mountains outside. But instead of moon or stars,
the darkness was lighted by torches that flickered on either side of the dark
steel of the gates. The dim orange flame defined a small double circle on the
smooth blackness of the polished floor and touched fiery echoes in bolt, brace,
and locking ring.
Where the two halos of red flame merged, a man stood, his rough white hair
fringed by the fire in a line of burning gold.
She called out softly, "Ingold!"
He turned and lifted an inquiring eyebrow. Gil pulled her cloak more tightly
around her shoulders and pattered up the broad steps to the gate. Since she had
crossed the Void in his company, to come unwillingly to this other universe, she
couldn't remember a time when she had been warm.
"Yes, my dear?" he asked, in a voice like raw whiskey and velvet. The face
revealed by the restless light had never been more than nondescript, but
sixty-odd years of existence had given it an extremely lived-in look, seamed and
wrinkled and mostly hidden behind a close-clipped, rather scrubby white beard.
When she stood beside him, her eyes were level with his.
"What is it?" she asked him quietly.
He only said, "I think you know."
She glanced nervously over her shoulder at the dark steel of the gates. Here the
horror was stronger, a sense of brooding malevolence in the night. Here she felt
the strange, chill terror, the irrational sensation of being watched from across
unknowable gulfs of time by a malign and incomprehensible intelligence. "They've
come," she whispered, "haven't they?"