"Hambly,.Barbara.-.Darwath.3.-.Armies.Of.Daylight.e-txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

abyss of darkness which had never seen light. At the touch of it, his heart
seemed to lurch, then hammer chokingly. His intelligence screamed at his
instinct to run, telling him that, even if he ran, even if he made the half-mite
dash through the ice-locked drifts of the buried meadow to the windowless Keep
of Dare, they would never let him in. Once the cyclopean doors were sealed at
sunset, Keep Law forbade that any should open them before dawn.
So he drew the veils of alien illusion more firmly about him and prayed that
they all were right—Lohiro, Ingold, and Thoth—when they said that this kind of
spell would guard his body from the inhuman hungers of the Dark.
He could feel the Dark Ones coming closer; he sensed their coming in the change
of the air. Close by him a little skiff of snow whirled up, as if stirred by
wind, but no wind riffled now in the fur of his collar. In all directions the
snowy landscape rolled like a frozen, silver sea; yet from the corner of his
eye, he glimpsed movement, a sudden flurry that vanished, as things did in
dreams. In the shadows of the trees before him, he thought he saw something
shift, though not a branch stirred.
They were all around him—he knew it, but their illusions screened them from his
eyes as he prayed that his own covered him. He felt their stirring, though there
was nothing that he could fix his eye upon—just a gleam of starlight on
something that pulsed wetly and the sudden glitter of acid on chitinous claws.
There was a buzzing, humming sensation in his brain… a drift of wind that stank
of rotten blood…
Then suddenly it was above him, a delirium-vision of an obscene, squamous bulk,
fifteen feet from the tucked, slobbering tentacles of that drooling mouth to the
wriggling tip of the spined cable of tail. Huge, clawed legs dangled down, like
the feet of a wasp; from them, acid dripped to smoke on the snow.
Rudy shut his teeth hard on a scream. Sweat was freezing on his face, and every
muscle in his body fought to remain still against the instincts that shrieked at
him to run. The effort and the revulsion at the nearness of that filthy dripping
thing brought nausea burning to his throat. More than its evil, more than the
terrible danger that breathed like smoke over him, he was filled with sickened
loathing of its otherness—its utter alien ness to the world of the visible, the
material. . the sane.
Then it was gone. The wind of its departure kicked a stinging gust of snow over
him as he slowly folded to his knees in the drifts.
How long he knelt there in the darkness he didn't know. He was trembling
uncontrollably, his eyes shut, as if to blot out the memory of that hideous,
slobbering bulk swimming against the stars. Stupidly, he recalled a night last
spring, a warm California evening, when he and his sister had been headed down
the Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles, and the old Chevy had a blowout in
the fast lane of the interchange. His sister had managed to pull the veering car
under control, to force it out of the hammering madhouse of sixty-mile-an-hour
traffic and over onto the shoulder. Then she'd gotten out, calmly checked to see
if the rim had been damaged, asked him if he was okay—and folded up on the car's
steaming hood and gone into violent hysterics.
Rudy suddenly found himself in sympathy with how she had felt.
Something brushed his face, and he swung around, the cold searing his gasping
lungs.
Behind him stood Ingold Inglorion, looking quizzically down at him in the faint
blue starlight.