"Hambly,.Barbara.-.Darwath.5.-.Icefalcons.Quest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

"And with good reason, if legend is anything to go by." Maia stood in the doorway, his long face lined with concern. "How is he?"
"About the same." Gil shrugged, hiding fear and anxiety, as the Icefalcon did. "Maybe other people hid stuff, too, out of fear of the Church or of their neighbors. Now those places have been broken open, and nobody's keeping an eye on them anymore." She glanced sidelong at Maia.
"Why do you think Ingold's been in such a panic to find books and implements and whatever other apparatus he can?"
"There were certainly records in my episcopal palace of things I did not understand, hidden in places lost to anyone's memory," the tall Bishop agreed. "We do not even know what may still be hidden in this Keep, untouched since the Dark's first rising."
"And it's a good guess Govannin had a couple of secrets on hand. For all she carried on about mages being soulless tools of Evil, she was quick enough to use black magic in anything she considered a good cause. If Bektis ever did manage to break her hold on him, you can bet your best fur booties he'd help himself to whatever he could stick in his pockets."
"How soon will the storm clear?" Alde, who had sat all this while with bowed head in silence, now looked up at Wend. "How soon can a party go over the pass in pursuit?"
"I'll go out there in the morning," the physician promised. "Even the strongest spells disperse, if their maker is not there renewing them. I'm not the weather-witch Bektis is, but I should be able to hasten their breaking."
"How soon?" Her eyes were like the heart of the night, her voice porcelain, cold and friable, as if it would shatter at a touch.
"Tomorrow afternoon?"
She whispered again, "Thank you." Her small hands closed around Rudy's brown, cold fingers, seeking reassurance, perhaps hoping to hold his spirit to his flesh. She hadn't touched the tisane Linnet had brought, or the supper, either. Gil knew better than to think that she would unless forced.
I'd better get some sleep, thought Gil. And pack.
She remembered the three identical warriors. Were others waiting to join Bektis once he got over the pass? A dozen or a hundred, cookie-cuttered out of some unguessable spell? Ingold had never mentioned such a thing to her, nor Bektis' jeweled weapon, either.
How could she, and the Guards, and a novice like Wend cope with those and whatever else the sorcerer had up his fur-lined sleeves? But the concern turned out to be moot. An hour or so later Ilae put down her herbs and sat up straight, her hand going to her temple, her eyes suddenly flaring wide. "Damn," she said.
Alde, her hand still locked around Rudy's where she sat on the floor, a pillow at her back, looked up sharply at the note in the girl's voice. "What is it?"
"I . . ." Ilae hesitated, frowning, listening hard to sounds only she could hear. Then the witchlight brightened behind her head as she dug in the purse at her belt for a scrying stone, a ruby Ingold had found in the ruins of Penambra, which she turned and maneuvered in the sharp glint of the light.
"Damn," she said again, more forcefully, and pushed her rusty hair out of her eyes. "There're men coming up the road from the river valley, my Lady. Lots of men-horses-spears glittering in the moonlight..."
"What?" Alde surged lithely to her feet, crossed the room in a flurry of petticoats, and looked over Ilae's shoulder as if she too could see in the jewel. "Where?"
"They've just passed the wards we set up in the Arrow Gorge. Hundreds, it looks like. Carts and tents." She looked up into the Lady's face with baffled eyes. "It's hard to see in darkness, but I think they're black-faced, black-skinned, the men of the Alketch, and the brown men of the Delta islands with gold beads in their hair. They're coming fast."
Alde cursed, something she seldom did. "Send for Janus," she said. "We need to meet them at the Tall Gates and hold them there, if we can. Thank you, Ilae..."
Gil was already out of the room, striding down the Royal Way toward the Aisle and the lamplit watchroom of the Guards.

The Icefalcon and Loses His Way watched Bektis' camp through the night, turn and turn about with hunting small game in the coulee. They worked mostly in businesslike silence, though Loses His Way asked about the conditions of grass on the eastern side of the mountains, and the movements of mammoth and bison herds, always a fruitful topic among the peoples of the Real World.
He asked, too, about the pedigrees of the horses at the Keep and shook his head sorrowfully when the Icefalcon informed him that the Keep horse herd had been acquired at random from the South and that even before the destruction of the original herd, the ancestry of horses was not a concern of most mud-diggers.
"It is very foolish not to know whether your horses are the sons and daughters of brave beasts or cowards," he said gravely, stripping the skin from a woodchuck he had shot while Yellow-Eyed Dog slaveringly feigned disinterest.
They sheltered in another bison wallow, not the one southeast of the hill but an older one to the southwest, full of curly buffalo grass and pennyroyal, with a good view over the broken lands to the south.
"How can you know what they will do if you don't know about their ancestors before them? These mud-diggers of yours want all the wrong things and don't know what is important."
"They are not my mud-diggers," pointed out the Icefalcon. "And I have told them this many times."
"Then why do you follow this shaman? This child is not your kin. He may even be your enemy." He used the word dingyeh, "notkin," oktep in the tongue of the Talking Stars, and set the strips of woodchuck flesh over the hot coals of last night's fire to roast.
"The child is ..." The Icefalcon was silent a moment, trying to phrase his relationship to Eldor-and to the people in the Keep-in terms that could be understood in the Real World. There was much about his new life that he could not explain in terms of the old.
At length he said, "The child's father helped me and gave me shelter when I departed from my own people."
"Did you need shelter?" asked Loses His Way.
"No. But for his sake I would not like to see the boy come to harm. What troubles me now, is that Bektis must be watching his back trail . . ."
And then they were no longer two, but three. The Icefalcon couldn't even tell how long she'd been there.
She was a diminutive woman, with the black hair that sometimes marked Wise Ones in the Real World. From babyhood her parents had shaved it off, so she had never learned to regard it. It was hacked off short now, straight as water and heavy as the hand of fate. When the Icefalcon had seen her last, it had not yet been touched by gray. Her eyes were black, too.
"Little brother," she said.
"Elder sister." He inclined his head. "You know Loses His Way, our enemy from the Empty Lakes People."
She nodded. Everyone in the Real World knew everyone else, pretty much, or at least knew of them.
"It pleases me to see that you were not devoured by the Eaters in the Night, o my sister. I had heard that they singled out the Wise."
She smiled, small but very bright, like a star. "Then I suppose I am not all that Wise."
She picked a pink-edged flower of bindweed and turned it in her fingers, smiling at the silkiness of the petals under her touch. "Do they still haunt the lands west of the wall of snows, little brother?"
He shook his head. "At the end of that first winter a Wise One there sent them away to the other side of Night, where no people live and it is night forever. They have not returned again."
"Good," said Cold Death briskly and worked the flower into the end of the Icefalcon's braid among the bones.
"I thought it must have been something of the kind. Now who is this Bektis, and why does it concern you that he watches his back trail?" She sat down crosslegged between them and picked the woodchuck's heart out of the coals, devouring it with an expression of ecstasy. "Was it he who slew five of the Empty Lakes People and put their bodies in the coulee, or was that you, little brother?"
"It was Bektis," the Icefalcon said a little grumpily because he loved woodchuck hearts with a great, strong love. "And those with him."
He gave her a quick summary of the events of the past four days, finishing with, "He is a fool, but not so much a fool that he would not watch his back trail, knowing that he was observed in carrying the boy away. He knows that the warriors of the Keep will bear stronger amulets against his spells of battle illusion and battle panic than the warriors of the Empty Lakes People, whose shaman Walking Eyes was killed by the Eaters seven years ago, yet he displays no concern over the matter. He waits here for something."
Cold Death tousled the dog's ruff. "For the rest of the black warriors," she said. The dog sniffed at her and licked her hand.
"T'cha!" scolded Loses His Way amiably. "You kiss your people's enemies, o my brother?"
"He tastes her that he may devour her later," explained the Icefalcon, and the warchief nodded.
"Very well, then."
"Ninety-eight of them are a day south of here," Cold Death went on. "Tonight you'll be able to see their fires. As for why he shows no concern about pursuit... "