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

"Are you all right?"
Rudy collapsed slowly back to a sitting position, his gloved hands pressed
tightly together to lessen their shaking. He managed to stammer, "Yeah,
fantastic. Just give me a minute, then I'll go leap a tall building at a single
bound."
The wizard knelt beside him, the full sleeves of his patched brown mantle
brushing against him again, warm and rough and oddly reassuring. In spite of the
cold, Ingold had pushed the mantle's hood back from his face, and his white hair
and scrubby, close-clipped white beard gleamed like frost in the ghostly light.
"You did very nicely," the old man said, in a voice whose mellow beauty was
overlaid by a grainy quality, scratchy without being harsh, and pitched, as a
wizard's voice could be, for Rudy's ears alone.
"Thanks," Rudy croaked shakily. "But next time I think I'll let you test out
your own new spells."
The white eyebrows quirked. Ingold's face as a whole was totally nondescript,
redeemed only by the heavy erosion of years and by the curious, uncannily
youthful appearance of his eyes.
"Well, I'm certainly not out here because it's the proper phase of the moon for
harvesting slippery elm."
Rudy colored a little. "Scratch that," he mumbled. "You shouldn't be out here at
all, man. You're the one the Dark Ones have been after."
"All the more reason for me to come," the old man said. "I can't remain walled
in the Keep forever. And if it is true, as I suspect, that somehow I hold the
key to the defeat of the Dark Ones, at some time or another I shall have to come
forth and meet them. I had best assure myself of the efficacy of my
cloaking-spells before that time."
Rudy shivered, awed at that matter-of-fact calm in Ingold's tone. Rudy feared
the Dark Ones, as all humankind must fear them: the eaters of the flesh and of
the mind, the eldritch spawn of the hideous night below the ground; and arcane
intelligence beyond human magic or human comprehension. But at least he was
reasonably certain that they did not know him—his name, his essence. He knew
that he was not the target of their specific malice. It was not his personal
flesh they sought. He stammered, "But Christ, Ingold, you didn't have to come
and check out the spell yourself. I mean, hell, if it works for me, it should
work for you."
"Possibly," Ingold agreed. "But that is something that no one can ever wholly
know." He drew his mantle closer about him. In the dim light, Rudy could see
that the wizard was armed; the billowing folds of his outer garment broke over
the long, hard line of the sword that he wore belted underneath. His right hand
in its faded blue mitten was never far from the sword's grip-smoothed hilt.
"Do you remember how," he went on in his mild voice, "in the mazes of illusion
that surrounded the City of Quo, you asked me once for a spell to break the wall
of fog?"
"You told me the one I was using already would work just fine," Rudy recalled.
"I can't say I was real pleased."
Calmly, the old man removed a speck of snow from his frayed sleeve. "If it is
ever my aim to please you, Rudy, shall certainly ask you what methods I should
employ." The gleam of mischief in his eyes turned his bearded face absurdly
young. "But what I told you then was true. The strength of any spell is the
strength of your magic—your spirit. Your power is shaped by your essence. You