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

White and blue and lavender reflections blossomed forth around him like the three-dimensional tail of a celestial peacock. He shied back, shielding his eyes from the bursting fountain of light, then dimmed it, working awkwardly with the few light-spells he had been taught, like an artist's child with his first crayons. He suffused the crystal with a dim light and leaned over again to look inside, to the glittering bed of colored rock salts that lay at the bottom of their crystal cylinder.
A toy? A trip-light? An enchanted kaleidoscope? Or the magic tool to further magics?
Staring down into those bright depths, he relaxed his mind, slowly emptying his soul of all concerns for the Dark, for Ingold, for Alde, and for the answer to this riddle itself. He let the soft, bright glitter of the gems below have its way with him, to do whatever it did.
For a time the images confused him. He did not understand what they were-incoherent scenes of blowing sand, rock hills on which nothing grew, rolling seas of brown grass invisible in the overcast night. He sensed rather than saw a dark place take shape, roofed with clouds and drifted deep in snow, walled in by high cliffs of black rock crowned with twisted pines. Beyond the black clouds he sensed gorge-riven peaks, knife-edged heights, and the endless miles of glaciers where the ice winds skated, screaming . . .
Sarda Pass? he wondered. Tomorrow's road? The images grew clearer-ragged foothills and then an endless brown plain, with tawny grasses waving under the lash of the wind. A black sky was sheeted with cloud. A pale thread of road stretched out of sight into pitiless distance.
Frozen and bitter vastness swallowed his soul.
And, as if the images moved with his heart, he saw the soft glow of reflected candlelight and the starred embroidery on the changeable colors of a silken quilt. The colors shifted, aqua to teal to river-reed green, as they were shaken by the sobbing of the woman who lay there, her black hair thrown about her like scattered silk.
I can't leave her, he thought in despair. I've known her such a short time.
And miss Quo? the other half of his mind asked. And not speak with the Archmage? Not have Ingold teach you the ways of power?
He closed his eyes. Like a tingling through his skin, he became aware again of the Dark and the building fury of them, riddling the night like the coming of an electrical storm.
I have to go, he thought, with a sudden chill of panic. But still he stayed, paralyzed between his choices-Minalde on the one hand, Ingold and the Archmage Lohiro on the other.
He opened his eyes, and the image in the crystal changed again.
Small and distant, the stars were visible-more stars than he had ever imagined, filling a luminous sky that hung low and glittering over the endless roll of the blueblack sea. Their piercing brightness touched the curl of foam on the silver curve of the beach. Outlined against that burning sky, he thought he could make out the shape of a tower, looming storey on turreted storey from the trees that crowded an angular point of land thrusting out into the ocean.
But the tower seemed strangely elusive, slipping his eyes past it, turning them again to the stars. He tried to look inland, but found his gaze eluded there, too. Half-guesssed shapes of buildings clustered there, twining patterns of color on stone columns muted by darkness, briefly visible and then swallowed by mists. Try as he would to focus on the land, he found his eyes coming back to the sand, the sea, and the midnight sky, as if in a gentle refusal to answer his questioning.
Against the dark bulk of that square knoll and half-seen tower, he glimpsed the sudden flash of starlight on metal, winking momentarily and then gone. He looked again, releasing all thoughts of striving from his soul.
The metal twinkled once more, and he caught the long swirl of a cape brushing sand, the scuff of a foot above the tide line. Like a sudden wash of spilling opals, the stroke of a wave eradicated footsteps from the sand. The man whose prints they were walked slowly on, and Rudy could see the starlight now on his bright gold hair-hair the color of sun-fire.
It surprised him, for he had expected the Archmage Lohiro to be old. But this man wasn't. He was surely less than forty, with a young, clean-shaven face.
Only the firm lines of the mouth and the creases in the corners of eyes that were a flecked and changeable kaleidoscope blue betrayed the harshness of experience. His hand around the hard, gleaming wood of his staff reminded Rudy of Ingold's hand, nicked with the scars of sword practice, very deft and strong.
The staff itself was tipped with a metal crescent some five inches across, whose inner edge glinted razor-bright. The starlight caught in it, as it caught in those wide blue eyes and on the spun-glass glimmer of foam that washed the beach in a surge of lace and dragged at something half-buried in the sand.
Looking down, Rudy saw that it was a skeleton, old blood still staining the raw bones, crabs crawling gruesomely through the wet, gleaming eyes of the skull. The mage barely turned his steps aside from it. The hem of his dark cloak brushed over it as he passed and swept the sand as he went on down the beach.
Rudy sat back, cold with sweat and suddenly terrified.
The light died out of the crystal below him, leaving the room pitch-dark but for the bluish echo in its heart. Then he heard a sound, faint and distantly booming, a vibration that seemed to shake the Keep to the dark, ancient bones of its agelong foundations.
Thunder, Rudy thought.
Thunder? Through ten-foot walls?
His stomach seemed to close in on itself. He got up and headed quickly for the door. A second booming reverberated through the Keep, setting up a faint, sinister ringing in the metal junk heaped in the corners and shivering in the mighty walls.
Rudy began to run.




?CHAPTER TWO

"Damn the boy," Ingold whispered, and Gil thought that he looked very white in the wild jumping of shadows. The first blow of that incredible power smashing at the outer gates had jarred the torches in their sockets, and they guttered nervously, as if the light itself trembled before the coming of the Dark. Behind her in the Aisle, utter chaos prevailed.
Men with torches ran to and fro, calling mutually contradictory rumors to one another and brandishing makeshift weapons in frightened hands. Little flocks of children and old people, the nuclei of small families, huddled like frightened birds along the watercourses, as close to the center of the great space as they could get, having fled their cells in terror when the pounding started.
Others, mothers and fathers who had left their dependents back in the close darkness of their cells, crowded around Janus and the small knot of Guards who had remained in the Aisle, waving their arms, demanding what was being done, pleading for even lying assurances of safety. Janus towered above these lesser people in the torchlight, his voice deep and intense, allaying fears and recruiting patrols as best he could in that whirling chaos of noise and lamplight
It was a scene out of Dante's Hell, Gil thought, with darkness like velvet and a random frenzy of flickering light.Thank God, the Keep is solid stone. Maybe we can get out of this without immolating ourselves by morning.
If the Dark don't get us first, she added.
But Ingold was there, and Gil had never found it possible be truly afraid when she was at the wizard's side.
So she felt only a kind of cold detachment, though her blood rushed violently through her veins and her body tingled with a cold excitement. The separation was physical as well as emotional, for she and Ingold stood together on the steps before the gates, with the pounding, sounding roar of the beaten steel at their backs; none would come near them there.
The noise in the Aisle was tremendous, the repeated bellowing clang mingling with the wild keening of voices, to rise and ring in the huge ceiling vaults until the whole Aisle was one vast sounding chamber. Men and women rushed wildly about, purposeful or aimless, the bobbing of the torches and lamps in their hands like the storming of fireflies on a summer night. Behind Gil, the pounding of the Dark upon the gates was a bass vibration that sounded in her bones.
Ingold turned to her and asked quietly, "Is Bektis here?" He named the Court Wizard of the Chancellor Alwir, the only other mage in the Keep.
"Surely you jest," Gil murmured, for Bektis had a most solicitous concern for his own health. Ingold did not smile, but the quick fiicker of amusement that lightened his eyes turned his whole face briefly, elusively young. It was gone as quickly as it came, the lines of strain settling back again.
"Then I fear that I shall have no choice," the wizard said softly. The blue-white glow from the end of his staff touched his face in shadow; the flicker of the torches beyond might have been responsible for the illusion Gil had of bitter self-reproach in the old man's expression, but she could not be sure.
"Gil, I had not wanted to ask this of you, far you are not mageborn, and the danger is very great."
"That doesn't matter," Gil said quietly.
"No." Ingold regarded her for a moment, and a curious expression that she could not read overlay the serenity of his face. "No, to you it would not."
Taking her hands, he placed his staff in them. The wan white glow remained at its tip, though she felt no sense of power or vibration in the staff itself. It was only wood, grip-smoothed over decades of use, and now warmed from his hand.
"The light may fade if the spells of the Dark draw off too much of my power," he warned her. "But don't desert me."
"No," Gil said, surprised that he should even mention the possibility.
Ingold smiled at the self-evident tone in her voice. "I am not saying that either of us will survive this," he went on. "But if the outer gates go, the inner ones will crumple like thin tin. Icefalcon!" he called, and the thin young captain ran to them from where he had been among Janus' Guards.