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

Janus and Caldern worked the locking-rings and opened the inner Doors. Sketh and Melantrys emerged from the glowstone-lit passageway between the outer Doors and the inner, Sketh blanched and trembling with shock, Melantrys pulling a crimson-feathered arrow out of the extravagant hide flap of her boot-top.
Their feet crunched on the dry hay and tinder with which the gate-passage was heaped. Gil guessed his Lordship's pallor was due in part to fear that Ilae would get his signals wrong and prematurely ignite this last-ditch incendiary defense.
"Satisfied?" demanded Janus, who hadn't forgotten Barrelstave's imputation of warmongering.
Minalde hurried forward and took Lord Sketh's hands. "Thank you, my Lord," she said, lifting her voice just a trifle so all around the gate could hear. "That took courage, braving the enemy. So now we know."
"They never even listened," whispered Lord Sketh. He looked about to be sick. Lady Sketh hurried up, a stout blond woman almost as tall as her husband, the decoration and jewelry on her clothing making Alde look like a poor relation. "Never so much as paused. The moment I stepped forth, they started shooting, ran up the steps, swords drawn, with no intent to parley."
"Now we know," repeated Minalde, patting his hand like a sister. Janus muttered sotto voce to Gil, "Like we didn't know before. They pounding at the Doors now, Ilae, me love?"
The mage shook her head, still standing under the nearest glowstone basket, scrying stone cupped in her palm. "They didn't even come up to them. The minute they closed, they stopped."
Janus whistled through his front teeth, eyebrows raised. "So what then?" he asked. "They know there's but the one entrance. What're they waiting for? Someone inside to betray us?"
He looked around, his reddish-brown eyes questing the faces of the Guards, of Lord Sketh, of Enas Barrelstave, who stood nearby looking equal parts shaken and indignant, and Lady Sketh who, in the process of enfolding her husband in several acres of fur-lined sleeves, was careful to include Minalde in the embrace as well.
Gil was silent, a thought coming to her, but she said nothing until she and Minalde were walking back to the Royal Sector through the vast near darkness of the livestock-scented Aisle.
As they crossed the last of the railless stone bridges, turned their steps toward the laundry-hung arch of the Royal Stair, Gil said softly, "Alde, we're always hearing how the Doors are the only way into the Keep-how the Keep was built that way to be the perfect defense against the Dark Ones. Do we know those are the only doors?"
"Yes," said Minalde, startled. She stopped at the foot of the Royal Stair, plum-dark eyes wide, pinpricks of reflection swimming in them from the votive lamps of St. Prool's statue in a niche. "I mean, Eldor said ... All the records of the Keep say that it was built that way to keep the Dark Ones from entering..."
"I know," said Gil. "But we don't have records from the building of the Keep. Only traditions, and hearsay, and tales." She folded her arms and glanced back toward the Doors, where the Guards still crowded around Ilae. Men and women kept coming up to them, weavers and tub-makers and gardeners, asking questions and divesting themselves of their opinions with much arm waving and jostling. "Are we sure there's no other way in? Because those people outside the gate sure act like they think there is."

"It's nothing to worry about." Bektis carefully replaced his scrying ball in its bags of silk, fur, and velvet, folded up the silver tripod, and stroked his milk-white beard. "Lord Vair was delayed by a White Raider attack on his camp, that's all. They're on the road again and should be with us by sunset."
Hethya started to look around her, but the wizard said casually, "Oh, I'm sure the other two have succumbed as well." Tir looked around, too, and indeed neither of the other Akulae were in sight. But his movement caught Bektis' attention: "And what is that child doing with his hands free?"
"I took him into the woods to pee," said Hethya, eyes flashing with annoyance. "I was never more than a foot and a half from him." Under Bektis' cold glare she led Tir back to the sycamore tree where he had been tied, put his hands behind his back and bound them carefully tight, then ran through them the rawhide rope whose other end was knotted to the trunk. "Stuck-up old blowhard. Are you all right, sweeting?"
"I'm fine," said Tir, sitting down tailor-fashion and trying not to look conscious of the dagger in his boot. "Are the other Akulae dead?"
"Looks like." Seeing the fear in his eyes, she stroked his hair and added, "It's nothing for you to worry over, honey. Nobody killed them. And they weren't . . ." She hesitated, searching, Tir thought, for an explanation that wouldn't explain too much.
"They weren't really people," she said at last. "They-the things they are-don't live very long, and they didn't hurt or anything when they died."
"What are they?" Tir didn't know if this information would make him feel better or worse. When Toughie, matriarch of the Guards' cats, died, his mother had comforted him by telling him that cats didn't live as long as people, which to Tir's mind was awful. The thought that there were things that looked like people but weren't people scared him, too.
He saw her eyes shift again and knew this was a secret she couldn't tell him. "Don't worry yourself with it, sweeting." She walked back to Bektis, scooping up a big handful of her curls and twisting them out of her way on top of her head with one of the jeweled bronze hairpins she carried in the pockets of her coat.
She kept her voice down talking to the wizard, but by her gestures she was angry, angry and scared. She was a person who talked with her hands, and the wave of her arm at the pale-trunked cottonwoods on two sides of them, the slash of her hand across her throat, told Tir as if he'd been at her elbow what she was talking about.
White Raiders had come at them once. Bektis shook his head and made his little pooh-pooh flick with his fingers, as if brushing gnats aside, and touched the crystal device that hung by golden mesh straps at his belt.
But Tir had heard enough stories from Ingold, from Rudy, from Janus and the Icefalcon, to know that the White Raiders were still watching Bison Hill.
Their dead were rotting in the coulee away from the camp-birds hung over the place-but they wouldn't simply say, "Those people are too strong for us, let's leave them alone." White Raiders never left anyone alone.
But it wasn't the White Raiders who rode out of the southern badlands with the sinking away of day.
Bektis was impatient by then, pacing around and snapping at Hethya; it was Hethya who did all the camp work. She fetched water and made food at noon, though Tir, still tethered under his tree, noticed that she didn't go far into the trees.
She brought up the horses, too, and Bektis laid spells around them: Tir thought Ingold's method of keeping horses from running away or being stolen was more efficient, but didn't say so.
He noticed Bektis slipped the bright-flashing handgear of crystals on to execute the guarding-spell, and to make the fire, too, and wondered a little about it because Rudy had told him that those kinds of spells didn't take much magic.
When the light turned red-gold and the shadows grew long, Bektis walked to where the slope sank away toward the grassy prairie, the gems still on his hand, and shaded his eyes to gaze to the south.
"Ah," he said, pleased. "At last."
I have to be brave, Tir told himself, watching the line of riders, the swaying dark tops of tall wagons, the double file of men with weapons glittering in the harsh dry fading light.
I have to be brave.
It was an army, bigger than the biggest band of outlaws Tir had ever seen. They were all men-unlike the Guards and the bandit troops Tir had heard about-and they were mostly black-skinned, some with white hair, some with black, some bald as eggs as the Akulae had been.
Tir remembered Rudy's description of the black-skinned prince who had offered to marry his mother, back when the lands of the Alketch still had an emperor.
Remembered, too, the name of the Alketch general with a silver hook where his right hand should have been. He had betrayed the armies of daylight when they went against the Dark Ones in their Nests, pulled his men out of the fighting so that he could have his own army strong, left the men of the Keep to be killed. There were a lot of orphans in the Keep whose fathers and mothers had died there in the holocaust of fire and shadow.
The man in the long white cloak who dismounted his horse and walked up the hill to meet Bektis had such a hook, though that was not the most fearful thing about him. He had yellow eyes that did not care whether you lived or died.
"My Lord Vair." Bektis' voice had a caressing note, as if Vair were the most important person in the entire world, and he made the formal salaam that mostly only the Keep Lords made.
"You have the boy?" A voice like rocks rubbing over each other.
(I have to be brave)
"We have him safe and sound, illustrious Lord. I behold within my scrying crystal that your forces surround the Keep of Dare."
This was a shock to Tir, another cold drench of panic. "It is well done."
Lord Vair gestured impatiently. "Were you followed?"
"Only as far as the crest of the pass, my Lord. The wizard Ingold not being at the Keep, they sent another of the Keep mages after me. I slew him with the lightning of my hands and buried the pass under a blizzard of snow." The final sunlight leaped and sparkled from his flourishing hand.
"Daily since then have I scried the pass. The spells I laid on it still hold strong."
"And Ingold?" His words came out like slaps in the face. His speech, though recognizably the words of the Wathe, had a different intonation, the sounds bent and changed and the accents differently placed.
"He is in Gae still."
Tir's heart sank, but he bit back tears. Those cold wolf eyes cut over toward him, measuring him as they measured all things and, as they found all things, finding him wanting.
"Demon-fornicating son of Evil. And the wench?"