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

limited time remaining to him in this universe, he would rather seek the sources
of his own power and the teachings that Ingold and the other wizards could give
him than remain with the woman he sincerely loved.
Why did I have to find them both at the same time? he wondered miserably. Why
did I have to choose?
Even her understanding of his choice was like gall in the raw wound of his
guilt.
Yet there had been no possibility of another choice.
He stopped at the head of the main east stairway, leading down to the first
level.
The sensation of wrongness, of unnamed horror lurking in the black mazes of the
Keep, was stronger now, teasing at him like a half-heard sound. He shivered like
a dog before the thunder, the hair at the nape of his neck prickling. All around
him silence seemed to move through the branching corridors. Glancing nervously
behind him, he started down the stairs.
Somewhere below him, a door must have been opened. Faint as a drift of incense,
he caught the sound of chanting, the sweet murmurous richness of monks' voices
singing the offices of the deep-night. Rudy paused on the stairs, remembering
that the Church headquarters lay directly below the Royal Sector and that, to
the fanatic Bishop of Gae, wizards were anathema.
As far as he knew, his love for Alde was unknown to any, except perhaps his
fellow exile Gil. He doubted anything serious could happen to Alde because of
it— she was, after all, Queen of what was left of Darwath, and the King had
perished in the holocaust of the burning Palace at Gae. But he knew too little
of the mores and taboos of this place to want to risk discovery. And hell, he
thought, maybe there's some kind of noninterference directive in force, since
I'm from another universe and really shouldn't be here at all.
But if there was, he did not want to know.
At the moment it wasn't critical—there were plenty of other stairways down. Some
of them had been part of the original design of the Keep, built like the walls
of black, massive, obsidian-hard stone. Others had evidently been rigged
millennia ago by ancient inhabitants who had simply knocked holes in the floors
of the corridors where it suited them and let down jerry-built steps of wood.
The same process had clearly been in force with the walls and cells of the Keep,
for in places the black walls marched into darkness in rigid rectilinear order,
while in others makeshift chaos prevailed. Passages had been blocked to build
cells across the right of way, access routes had subdivided other cells, and
partitions of brick, stone, and wood had chopped the original plan into
literally thousands of self-contained units whose forms had shifted with their
functions, with a result, over three thousand years, that would have challenged
the most worldly rat in all of B. F. Skinner's laboratories.
Optimistically, Rudy set off into the maze.
"I feel nothing," Janus of Weg said quietly. The big Commander of the Guards of
Gae sat on the edge of a bunk near the guardroom hearth, his face grave in the
loose frame of coppery-red hair that surrounded it. He glanced across the hearth
at Ingold. "But I trust you. If you say the Dark are outside, I would believe
you, even if the sun were high in the sky."
There was a stirring among the other captains and a murmur of assent. The
Icefalcon, like a foreigner among the Guards with his long white viking braids,
said softly, "The very smell of the night is evil." Melantrys, a diminutive girl