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

away from the black, half-liquefied remains, to Ingold's impassive face.
Darkness masked the wizard's features, but mageborn eyes could penetrate
ordinary night; Rudy could see no change of expression in that lined,
nondescript countenance.
But then, he supposed, after what had taken place in the ruins of the City of
Wizards, it was not likely that the old man would ever be shaken up by much of
anything again.
"We shall come out with the others, when the sun is in the sky, to burn what
remains," Ingold said quietly. "To do so now would only bring the Dark Ones once
more upon us."
He dropped what he held in his hand back onto the fetid little heap. Round,
discolored lenses flashed in the starlight in their twisted frames. Ingold said,
"It seems that I shall be visiting the Dark Ones at Gae, after all."
Dawn was just thinning the stygian overcast of the night when Rudy and Ingold
again reached the gates of the Keep. Against a charcoal sky, the ebony mass
reared like a small mountain, close to a hundred feet from the top of the rock
knoll on which it stood to its flat, snow-powdered roof and nearly half a mile
in length. Its black, windowless walls faintly mirrored the trampled snow and
dark trees that lay below it. Only its western face was broken by a gate and a
short flight of broad steps. From a distance, the torchlight flickering in the
square opening gave it the appearance of a single, small, baleful eye in the
midst of an otherwise utterly featureless face.
As Rudy climbed the muddy path past the goat pens and ramshackle workshops that
surrounded the Keep in a vast zone of trash, he could see most of the Wizards'
Corps assembled on the icy steps. He could pick out those who, like himself, had
spent the night outside. Kara of Ippit, tall and homely, in her threadbare
mantle and the two cardigans her mother had recently knitted for her. Thoth the
Scribe, called the serpentmage, sole survivor of the massacre at Quo, austere as
a bald vulture-god of antiquity, his topaz eyes illuminating his narrow white
face like a jack-o-lantern's. Dakis the Minstrel. A little fourteen-year-old
witch-child from the north called Ilae, her dark eyes peering from behind a mane
of red tangles. Others, a pitiful few, it seemed, huddling in the shadows like
refugees in an old photograph of Ellis Island. And behind them stood those
survivors of the massacre by the Dark who had been judged too lacking in power
to participate in this trial of spells: itinerant conjurers, spellweavers,
weatherwitches, and goodywives, the lower end of the spectrum of power that had
not answered the dead Archmage's fatal summons to the City of Quo.
Rudy's heart sank at the sight of them. So few, he thought. And what the hell
can we do, anyway, against the might of the Dark?
Other shadows appeared in the firelit tunnel that pierced the wall, leading from
the outer gates to the inner, their forms ghostlike in the steam where the
warmer air within came in contact with the outer cold—the day watch of the
Guards, rubbing their bruises from the morning's weapons practice and cursing
one another and their deceptively elfin instructor good-naturedly. The Keep
herdkids went tearing out in an enthusiastic boiling of infant energy to throw
snowballs and milk goats. Soap boilers, hunters, woodcutters, and tanners
emerged, men and women plying what trades they could from the scanty resources
of this bitter and isolated valley.
And among them were a dark-haired girl in a black fur cloak and a peasant
woman's rainbow skirts and a tall, rather gawky woman some five years older,