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

An icy skiff of breeze dashed blown snow into his eyes; he thought he saw another shape, black-cloaked and small, standing in the vast shadows of the gates; but when he looked again, there was no sign.


?CHAPTER THREE

Forever after, Rudy's memories of the journey to Quo were memories of the wind. It never ceased, as integral a part of that flat, brown, featureless world as the endless ripple of the dried grasses or the bleak, unbroken line where the dark planes of ground and overcast sky met in an infinity of cold and emptiness.
The wind blew from the north always, as bitterly cold as the frozen breath of outer space. It streamed down off the great ice fields where, Ingold said, the sun had not shone in a thousand years and where not even the wooliest mammoth could survive. It roared like a river in spate down eight hundred miles of unbroken flatlands, to bite the flesh to the bone.
Ingold said that he could not remember a winter when it had blown so cold or so steadily, nor a time when the snows had fallen this far south. Neither in his memory, he said, nor in the memory of any that he had ever spoken to.
"If it's usually even half this bad, it's no surprise we haven't met anybody," Rudy commented, huddling as close to their wind-flattened fire as he could without the risk of self-immolation. They had made camp in a rolling depression of ground that Ingold identified as a beast wallow of some sort-bison or gelbu.
"Even without the Dark Ones, this part of the country would be a hell of a place to try and make a living."
"There are those who do," the wizard replied without looking up. Wind twisted their fire into brief yellow ribbons that licked the dust. By the restless light, only the prominences of his curiously reticent face could be made out-the tip of his nose, the wide-set flattened triangles of the cheekbones, and the close, secretive mouth.
"These lands are too hard for the plow and too dry for regular farming, but in the south and out in the deserts, there are colonies of silver miners; and here, close to the mountains, lie the cattle lands and the horse lands of the Realm. The plainsmen are a hardy breed," he said, strong fingers twisting at the leaves of the fresh-water mallows he was braiding into a strand, "as well they have to be."
Rudy watched him weaving the plants together and picked out by the leaping glow of the fire the shapes of the seeds, the petals, leaf and pod and stamen, identifying and fixing the plant in his mind and recalling what Ingold had told him about its curative properties.
"Are we still in the Realm of Darwath?" he asked.
"Officially," Ingold said. "The great landchiefs of the plains owed allegiance to the High King at Gae-in fact, as a legal entity, the Realm stretches to the Western Ocean, for the Prince-Bishop of Dele takes-took-his laws from Gae. But Gettlesand and the lands along the Alketch border have carried on a long battle with the Empire to the south, and I doubt that the breach will be healed, whatever Alwir's policies may be." He glanced up, a bright glint of crystal blue between the shadows. of his hood and the muffler that wrapped the lower part of his face, the firelight reddish gold on his long, straight eyelashes.
"But as you can see," he went on, "the plains themselves are all but deserted."
Rudy selected a long stick and poked at the tiny fire. "How come? I mean, I see all these animals, antelope and bison and jillions of different kinds of birds. You could make a pretty good living in this part of the country."
"You could," Ingold agreed mildly. "But it's very easy to die in the plains. Have you ever seen an ice storm? You get them in the north. Once in the lands around the White Lakes I found the remains of a herd of mammoth, chunks of frozen flesh scattered in head-high snow. The beasts had been literally ripped to shreds by the inferno of the winds.
''I've heard stories that the cold in the center of those storms is such that grazing animals will be frozen solid so swiftly that they do not even fall, but stand, turned to ice and half-buried in snow, with the flowers they were eating frozen in their mouths. And the storms strike without warning, out of a clear sky."
"That would sure kill the property values," Rudy assented with a shiver. But something undefined stirred in his memory, something he had read, or had heard read to him . . . Wild David's Body Shop in Fontana came back to him, with himself slouched in the erupted mess of split vinyl and filthy padding of David's old swivel chair, leafing through decayed copies of the Reader's Digest while a crowd of the local bikers argued profanely about what they wanted him to paint on the tank of somebody's Harley ...
"And if you haven't seen the effects of an ice storm," Ingold continued, "at least you have seen the work of the White Raiders."
An almost physical memory returned to Rudy in a rush-the sweetness of the opalescent mist of the river valleys below Karst, and the sour tang of nausea in his throat. The drift of smoke in the foggy air, the bloody ruin of what had been a human being, the raucous laughter of the carrion crows, and Ingold, like a gray ghost in the pewter light, his robe beaded with dew and a tag of bloody leather in his hands, saying to Janus,
"This is the work of the White Raiders...''
Rudy shivered. "Who are the White Raiders?" he asked.
The old man shrugged. "What can I tell you of them?" he replied. "They are the People of the Plains, the kings of the wind. They say that once upon a time their home was only in the far north, in the high meadows along the rim of the ice. But they haunt all the northern plains now and, as we have seen, have begun to invade the river valleys at the heart of the Realm."
On the edge of the narrow circle of the firelight, the donkey Rudy had named Che Guevara snorted and stamped at some sound in the distant night, his long ears laid back along his head. Distantly, Rudy caught the howling of prairie wolves.
"You know," he said with forced casualness, "I don't think the whole time we were on the road down from Karst I ever actually saw a White Raider. I knew they were following the train, but I never saw one."
"Well, they're most dangerous when you don't see them." Ingold smiled. "And you're wrong, in any case. You did see one. The Icefalcon is a White Raider."
Of course, Rudy thought, more surprised by the fact that the Raiders didn't resemble the Huns or the Sioux than he was to learn that the Icefalcon was a foreigner among the dark-haired, blue-eyed people of the Wath. And now that he came to think if it, the Icefalcon wasn't of Bishop Govannin's Faith; at least he'd only sniffed in disdain at Gil's question on the subject. Rudy remembered the farmhouse in the mists again and shuddered.
"That's the chief reason Alwir sent him on the mission to Alketch," Ingold continued, setting aside his herbs and rising. "Of anyone, a Raider would have the best chances of surviving the journey." He picked up his staff, preparing to make his usual brief inspection of their campsite before settling down to guard duty.
"Yeah, but if he's the enemy, how did he get to be a Guard?" Rudy protested uneasily, and Ingold paused in the act of turning away, a shapeless dark blur against the paler sand of the bank beyond,
"What is an enemy?" His scratchy voice seemed to come disembodied from the surrounding darkness. "A great variety of strange people find their way into the Guards. I'm sure if the Icefalcon wanted you to know, he would tell you."
And though Rudy could not see him move, the wizard seemed to fade from sight.
Rudy shook his head in a kind of amazement. Ingold could be the least visible man he had ever met, seen when he wanted to be seen and otherwise all but invisible. It wasn't that he was shy, Rudy knew. The wizard observed the world like a hunter from an unseen blind; concealment appeared to be his second nature. Rudy wondered if all wizards were like that.
He huddled, shivering, next to the tiny fire. The cold of the night was so intense that he could feel only a little of the fire's warmth, even at a distance of twelve inches. Already in the treeless plains, wood was scarce, and they were burning brushwood and buffalo chips. Unlike the more volatile wood fires, the chips gave off a steady, cherryred glow, and the heart of the fire was like a rippling amber well of heat.
In that well, images took shape under his idle attention-the jeweled darkness of Aide's rooms at the Keep, with the single sphere of gold floating around the flame of the candle as pure and beautiful as a fruit of light or a single note of music, and Minalde's face, bent over a book, the sudden gleam of a tear on her cheek.
Although he was fairly certain the tear was not for him, but for the fate of the heroine of her book, Rudy still ached to go to her, to be with her and comfort her. At first he had shied from seeking her image in the fire this way, not wanting to spy on her. But his longing to see her, to know that she was all right, had proved too much for him. He wondered if Ingold knew.
For that matter, had Ingold ever sought the image of a woman he loved in the fire?
Sudden wind lashed at the fire, tearing the image from its heart. Like ripped silk in a cyclone, the fire twisted first one way, then another . . . And Rudy realized that the wind was not from the north. It came from no direction-thin, cold, twisting. He looked up, light-blinded, at the sky; but by the time his eyes adjusted, he could see only the chaos of darkness. He started to rise, and a voice said quietly behind him,
"Stay where you are." Somewhere in the night, he saw the flutter of trailing muffler ends and the glint of eyes. Wind stirred at the fire once more, and the renewed light flashed in the burro's glassy green stare and picked out the shape of Ingold's cloak. Turning his eyes skyward again, Rudy saw them, black against the black of the churning sky, a sinuous ripple of movement and the glint of claws and wet, shining backs. The Dark Ones rode like a cloud, north against the wind.
Rudy realized his hand had gone to his sword hilt and slowly released it as they passed on by. His heart was hammering irregularly, his flesh cold.
"We were lucky," he whispered.
"Really, Rudy." Ingold stepped from the darkness to join him. "Luck had nothing to do with it."
"You mean you made us invisible?"
"Oh, not invisible." The wizard settled down by the fire and set his staff within easy reach of his hand. "Merely, persistently unnoticed."
"Hunh?"
Ingold shrugged. "Surely you've had the experience of not noticing someone? Perhaps you turned your head, or were momentarily distracted by something else, or dropped your keys, or sneezed. It is very easy to arrange for that to happen."
"To all of them at once?" There was something a little awesome in such a collective lapse of vigilance.
Ingold smiled. "Of course."
Rudy shivered. "You know, those are the first ones we've seen on the plains?"