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

The moon rose late, meager as a sickly infant like to die; the muzzy stars watched through slitted yellow eyes. Between the second and the third hours of the night came the screaming.
The Icefalcon had seldom heard worse, even during the Long Sacrifice.
"Skinning?" he whispered to Cold Death.
"Sounds like it."
Pressed to the earth among the grass roots, he and Cold Death bellied as close to the camp as they dared. Something moved behind them in the darkness, a wisp of brightness glimpsed from the corner of his eye. When he turned it was gone-or had never been-but a few moments later the grass bowed in the starlight where no wind touched.
Demons.
The scream changed. The Truth-Finder must have tightened the screw on the gag.
"Is that how they sacrifice among the mud-diggers?" Cold Death wanted to know.
The Icefalcon shook his head. Out of academic curiosity he listened more closely, trying to sift sound from sound in the shuffle of hushed camp noise, but could hear nothing now from the black tent.
"The Truth-Finders work for men, not in the service of the Ancestors," he said. "The mud-diggers call their Ancestors 'saints,' and in the South they sacrifice to them by dedicating gladiators to their names, making them kill one another and letting these 'saints' of theirs choose whom they will take and whom they will spare. In the North, in the Keep of Dare, they only promise the 'saints' things, like money or certain acts."
"But why would their Ancestors want things?" asked Cold Death. "They're dead. And why would they care what their children do?"
The Icefalcon shrugged. "Their priests explained this to me, but it made no sense. There are those who will kill a goat, or a pair of pigeons, to these saints, but this they do secretly, and in the North not at all anymore, pigeons being hard to come by now. When I was in the South, I heard of those who killed human beings to appease demons or to bribe them for favors."
"You can't get favors from demons." Cold Death glanced over her shoulder, to where something riffled suddenly at the water down in the coulee, as if a thousand fish had all snapped at once. "They're bodiless, and you'd have to be a complete fool to trust them."
"People in the South are fools." The Icefalcon shrugged again. "Most people are, if they think they'll get their own wills."
The bright line slit the night again, a red malignant grin. Vair na-Chandros emerged, leading by the arm a man who walked uncertainly, like one whose legs trembled, but the Icefalcon was almost certain, as they passed the fire, that it was the first warrior who had gone into the tent.
Almost certain because the man was bald now and without the mustaches that he had worn. Vair's arm was around the man's shoulders, and though no words could be distinguished the tone of his harsh voice was soothing and kind. As far as the Icefalcon could tell the man made no reply.
Together they came toward the guard who stood just outside the ring of the wagons, within a dozen yards of the Icefalcon and his sister. "Drann," said Vair, greeting the man on guard; he went on in the ha'al tongue of the South, which the Icefalcon knew slightly, patting the man he led on the shoulder as he transferred the guard post from one to the other, then taking Drann by the arm. Drann looked back at the new guard and seemed to hesitate as Vair led him back across the camp to the black tent.
A finger of outstreaming light, and the silhouetted shape of the Truth-Finder inside. Then darkness.
There was no further outcry, but when the wind shifted the Icefalcon smelled blood.
The Empty Lakes People attacked at dawn. Halfway between midnight and morning the Icefalcon resigned himself to the fact that Cold Death was going to win two arrows from him. But then, he had never been able to win a bet with his sister.
The first he heard was an outcry among the mules, and the hard steely whap of the southern recurve bows, then shouting. He and Cold Death had moved two or three times during the night and were stationed now in a thicket of rabbitbrush between the camp and the first of the rolling hills.
They saw men running and struggling amid a tangle of mules, horses, and sheep within the circle of the wagons. Animals leaped over and crashed into the chain barricades, driven by howling war-dogs. Then the bulk of Barking Dog's riders swept up out of the coulee, striking like a spearhead at the wagons.
Arrows poured from behind the wagons. Riders plunged out, mounted and ready, dozens of them, old White Mustaches leading with curved sword upraised. When the warriors of the Empty Lakes came near to the wagons, men rushed from the cover of the heavy wooden wagon-boxes, swords flashing, Vair at their head, urging them on. Twenty, thirty, forty men ...
"Where were they hiding all night?" demanded the Icefalcon, startled. There were close to a hundred and fifty of the Alketch warriors, outnumbering their attackers where they had been outnumbered when the sun went down.
Equally nonplussed, Cold Death shook her head.
They were there, however, and when swords began to cleave and men to struggle hand to hand, it was clear they were no Wise One's illusion. After pushing back the initial charge they held their position between the wagons, refusing to be drawn out, striking only when the Empty Lakes People rode close enough to be hit.
The Alketch riders wheeled their horses, driving the attackers toward the spears. The Empty Lakes People promptly scattered in all directions for the hills. One nearly rode over the two watchers in their rabbitbrush blind.
"Can he make men from air?" the Icefalcon whispered. He saw enemies he knew-Gray Mammoth, Herd of Wild Pigs, Long-Flying Bird, and others-fall bleeding in the long grass. Saw, too, the sudden thrashing of the grass near the dying and the spots of trailed gore all around the bodies that spoke of demons.
"It seems he can," said Cold Death, bemused.
Not something that boded particularly well, thought the Icefalcon, for those under siege in the Keep of Dare.




?Chapter 8

"She says she has never heard of such a thing in her life."
The Icefalcon sniffed. It was true that Ilae's life had not so far been very long, but it was true also that Thoth Serpentmage had taught her for five years in the half-ruined Black Rock Keep in Gettlesand, where most of the world's few remaining wizards now dwelled. It was also true that she was Ingold Inglorion's student now.
"Ask her how it fares with the siege."
Over the wide plains the sun stood a few fingers above the mountains. Wood smoke gritted on the air, and the smell of corn porridge.
The elementals of earth and water that oozed forth at the stench of blood and pain had sunk away into their native stone and streams, and the demons faded into the bright air. The Icefalcon guessed they had not gone far. Could Cold Death see them, he wondered, as the great shamans could?
"It fares well, she says." A little frown puckered between Cold Death's sparse brows. "She says the southern warriors have not even essayed to break the Doors."
"Have they not?" The Icefalcon settled his back to one of the rocks among which they crouched, down in the coulee where the night lingered blue, and folded his long arms about his drawn-up knees.
He felt no surprise.
The merchant came to mind, the brown-faced southerner who had claimed to be from Penambra, the man who had told Ingold about the cache of books in the villa in Gae. He had spoken the name of Harilomne the Heretic. And Ingold had gone.
It didn't take a Wise One or a scrying glass to deduce that the man had been dispatched by Vair.
Overhead, vultures made a slow silent pinwheel above the bodies of the slain.
The Icefalcon plucked a little dried venison from his bag and chewed it thoughtfully. "How fares Rudy Solis?"
Cold Death relayed the query to Ilae. The Icefalcon imagined Ilae herself, sitting in all probability in the long double cell the wizards used as a workroom, with its battered table of waxed oak and its great cupboards filled with scrolls, tablets, books salvaged from every library and villa they could get to, from the western ocean to the Felwoods.
Rank after polyhedronal rank of record crystals glittered frostily on shelves, the images of the Times Before for all those who could read them. He wondered if Gil would be there, too, studying the crystals by means of the black stone scrying table in the corner, seeing in it the faces of the mages who by their spells and arcane machinery had raised the Keeps against the first incursion of the Dark.