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

with the eyes of a ninja, glanced nervously over her shoulder.
"Smell, hell," rumbled Tomec Tirkenson, landchief of Gettlesand, a big craggy
plainsman whose domains lay on the other side of the mountains. "It's like the
nights when the cattle stampede for no reason."
The Icefalcon glanced coolly across at Ingold. "Can they break in?" he asked, as
if it were a matter of no more moment than the outcome of a race on which he had
bet only a small sum.
"I don't know." Ingold shifted his weight on his perch by the hearth and folded
sword-scarred hands on his knee. "But we can be certain that they will try.
Janus, Tomec— I suggest that the corridors be patrolled, on all levels, to every
corner of the Keep. That way…"
"But we haven't the men for it!" Melantrys protested.
"We've enough for a patrol of sorts," Janus admitted. "But if the Dark effect an
entrance, it's sure we've not enough to fight at any one place, spread so thin."
The Icefalcon cocked a pale eyebrow at the wizard. "Are we going to fight?"
"If we can," Ingold said. "Your patrols can be eked out with volunteers, Janus.
Get the Keep orphans as your scouts. They're always into everything anyway; they
might as well be put to use. We need to patrol the corridors, simply to know if
and where the Dark break in. It isn't likely that they can," he went on gravely,
"for the walls of the Keep have the most powerful spells of the ancient world
woven into their fabric. But whether the spells have weakened, or whether the
Dark have grown stronger in the intervening years, I do not know." Despite the
calm in that deep, scratchy voice, Gil thought he looked grim and driven in the
uncertain flicker of the hearth-light. "But I do know that if the Dark Ones
enter the Keep, we shall have to abandon it entirely, and then we will surely be
lost."
"Abandon the Keep!" Janus cried.
"It stands to reason," the Icefalcon agreed, leaning back against the wall
behind him. He had a light and rather breathless voice that sounded
disinterested even when discussing the loss of the last sanctuary left to
humankind. "All those little stairways, miles of empty corridors… We could never
drive them out." The captains looked at one another, knowing the truth of his
words.
"It's not only that," Gil put in quietly. Their eyes turned to her, a quick
glitter in the room's shifting shadows. "What about the ventilating system?" she
went on. "The air in here has to travel somehow. The whole Keep must be
honeycombed with shafts too small for a man to fit through. But the Dark can
change their size as well as their shape. They could fit through a hole no
bigger than a rat's, and, God knows, we have rats in the Keep. All it would need
would be for one of them to get into the ventilation—the thing could attack at
will, and we would never be able to find it."
"Curse it," Janus whispered, "that the Dark should rise at the start of the
worst winter in human memory. If we quit the Keep, those as aren't taken at
first nightfall would freeze before they came to shelter. These mountains are
buried in snow."
"Rats…" Tirkenson said softly. "Ingold, how do we know the Dark aren't lurking
somewhere in the "upper levels already? The Keep stood empty for nigh two
thousand years."
"We would have known," the wizard said. "Believe me, we would have known by this
time."