"Jones, J V - Sword Of Shadows 02 - A Fortress Of Gray Ice V2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones J. V)

“Morgo?” came a weak murmur. “Is that you?”
Raif peered into the shadows in the corner behind the portal. Someone, a knight, lay fallen in a pool of blood. He saw immediately that the man was not dressed like other knights, in fine armor and cloth of purple, but was unarmored and mantled in a cloak of skin. Dimly, Raif remembered that as the Forsworn rose through the ranks they cast more and more of their worldly possessions aside, until they were left with nothing more than their swords and what clothes they could stitch with their own hands. That meant this man lying before him was of a high order, possibly the commander of the fort.
Raif dropped to his knees by the knight. The man’s wounds were terrible to see. His left hand was gone and his left thigh had been laid open by a series of chopping blows. His skull had taken a slicing cut, and part of his right ear hung from a flap of skin. The same purge fluids that leaked from the other knights’ wounds leaked from his, mingling darkly with his blood. On his right side lay a sword not unlike Raif’s but of finer make, with a bluish crystal surmounted on the pommel. The sword’s edge was warped and blackened, as if it had been held to a flame and burned.
The knight’s face was gray. His lips were parched, and bits of skin flaked from them as he spoke. “Morgo?”
“Hush,” Raif said, not gently, stripping off his inner coat of seal fur and bundling it to form a pillow for the knight’s head. “I’ll bring water.”
“No,” murmured the knight, suddenly agitated. “Don’t leave me.”
He had once been powerful, Raif saw, with the lean muscle of one who fights rather than trains. He was not young, for there was much gray in his close-cropped hair, but his strength of will persisted. Gods alone knew how he still lived. Raif tore a strip from the soft rabbit fleece he wore next to his throat. Almost he did not know where to begin to tend this man, but he could not leave him like this.
The knight, seeing what Raif meant to do, waved him away. “No.” He paused for breath. “You cannot save me, not this way.”
Gray eyes dull with pain met Raif’s, and Raif found he could speak no lie. Silently, he let the rabbit strip fall to the floor. “What happened here?”
“Evil walked amongst us . . . broke down our door.”
“How many attacked?”
The knight’s eyes clouded. His fist clenched and unclenched. After a time he repeated, “Morgo?”
Raif folded his own fist around the knight’s, forcing his flesh to be still. Helplessness roughened his voice. He was clan, and every clansman knew what was owed to a fatally wounded man. “No. Not Morgo. A friend.”
“Then why do you have Morgo’s sword?”
Raif felt the world switch beneath him. He glanced at the sword Sadaluk had given him, resting now on the plank floor, well clear of the knight’s blood.
The knight’s gaze sharpened. “Tell me you did not kill him.”
“I did not.” Raif thought quickly. “Morgo lost his way on his journey to the Lake of Lost Men. The Ice Trappers found his body, and gave me his sword.” He had no idea how long the Listener had held the sword, but he’d imagined it lying in that foreign-made chest for decades. He asked, because he could not help himself, “Who is Morgo?”
The knight’s throat began working but words took long to come. “. . . took the Lost Trail. A boy . . . only fifteen. I told him to wait. Wait.”
Something in the knight’s voice made Raif say, “He was your brother.”
“Dead now, long dead.”
Forty years dead, Raif guessed, feeling weary and suddenly old. “Rest now,” he murmured. “I’ll watch you.”
Time passed as the knight slept. Raif crouched by his body, thirsty and hungry, but unwilling to move away. The font in the center of the room cast a shadow that circled the chamber as the night passed. Sometimes the water rippled and plinked, though Raif could detect no breeze. The knight rested fitfully, jerking and shivering, each breath gurgling wetly in his throat. He awakened before dawn, and Raif could see the livid fever lines spreading up his neck.
“Only one,” the knight rasped. “A shadow that was not a shadow, bearing a sword as black as night.”
Raif felt his gooseflesh rise. The knight was answering his question from earlier, and the words of Heritas Cant sounded in his head. They ride the earth every thousand years to claim more men for their armies. When a man or woman is touched by them they become Unmade. Not dead, never dead, but something different, cold and craving. The shadows enter them, snuffing the light from their eyes and the warmth from their hearts . . . Blood and skin and bone is lost, changed into something the Sull call maer dan: shadowflesh.
Slowly Raif’s hand rose to his lore. When he looked up he saw the knight watching him.
“Take me,” he said. “Before the shadows can.”
Raif breathed and did not speak. Although he had not wanted to see it, he knew that the purge fluids had collected in the knight’s wounds, sending tendrils of darkness smoking across his skin. Oh gods. The other knights are lost.
But not this one, not yet. Raif found his strength and his voice. “Tell me one thing. Why did you build this place?”
The knight raised his curled fist. “We search.”
“For what?”
“The city of the Old Ones. The Fortress of Gray Ice.”
Raif felt himself begin to shake, not strongly but intensely as if something within him were vibrating. As he looked on, a wisp of shadowy fluid rolled over the knight’s eye, and he knew it was time to reach for his sword.
The knight knew it too, and drew himself up a fraction against Raif’s coat. Raif hefted the sword, testing its weight. Drying blood sucked at the soles of his boots as he took his position above the knight. He was still shaking, but he didn’t think it was from weakness or fright. Gravely, he raised the point of his sword to the knight’s chest. The knight’s eyes were open, and they were clear and shining, and Raif found a measure of understanding there.
Kill an army for me, Raif Sevrance.
Putting the weight of his body behind the blow, Raif thrust his sword through the heart.
He must have lost time after that, for he could not remember freeing the sword from the knight’s flesh, or closing the man’s eyes, or entering the main hall and taking the purple cloth from the altar and laying it over the knight’s corpse. He remembered only a feeling of terrible weariness and, as he stumbled over a pallet in the main hall, deciding then and there he needed rest. He remembered the luxury of curling up in wool blankets, and then nothing but the deadness of sleep.
When he woke many hours later sunlight was streaming down on his face. For a long moment he did not open his eyes, merely lay and enjoyed the play of light and warmth on his eyelids. How had he not noticed such a beautiful thing before? Hunger and the need to relieve himself eventually roused him, and he swung his feet onto the floor and looked out across the hall.
All that remained of the bodies were skeletons and gristle. Long bones were darkly stained, and the tendons still attached at their heads curled strangely in the freezing air. Wisps of smoke rose from the rib cages like fumes. Seeing them Raif thought he must be the greatest fool in the North. How could he have fallen asleep here? It was madness. And for some reason he found himself thinking of Angus. His uncle had once told him that the best way to stay alive in a hostile city was to walk through its busiest streets jerking your arms and muttering wildly to yourself. No one would interfere with a madman. Perhaps not even fate.
Feeling strangely light-headed, Raif skirted the knights’ remains and made his way outside.
Retrieving his pack near the gate, he decided to walk the short distance to the trees. The sun was low and weak, but it felt good on his back. It felt good also to drink the meaty-tasting water from his seal bladder, and to feast on the Ice Trappers’ peculiar idea of travel rood. There were cakes of caribou marrow streaked red with berries, rolled strips of seal tongue, and the last of the boiled auks. He sat down amidst the pale gray needles of the dragon pines and ate and rested and did not think. Overhead the sky was the rich blue of twilight, though it was barely midday. An osprey was rising on thermals channeled by the lake, and the warning cries of small birds pierced the calm.
Raif packed and stowed his provisions. He was feeling the lack of his inner coat now as the bitter cold sank against his chest. He didn’t want to return to the redoubt and had no intention of retrieving his seal coat from its position beneath the dead knight’s head, but he had to know if the knight had been saved the fate of his companions. And he had to bear witness for them all.
In the low light that passed for day the redoubt looked little more than a fortified cabin. Eight men had crossed hundreds of leagues to build here, and now they lay dead. What had the knight said last night? We search. Raif felt the sadness of those words. And the hope. Grimly, he crossed the defensive ward and reentered the main hall.
The cold, otherworldly odor his slumbering body had grown accustomed to rose to meet him anew. It was subtly changed now, staler and less concentrated, like smoke dissipating after a fire. The knights’ remains had stained the timber flooring in dark, man-shaped patches. Raif thought he would like to torch this place, but the knights were not clan and he did not know if such an act would honor or further defile them. The marrow had been sucked from their bones, and their skulls were hollow except for the black liquid trickling from their teeth and eye sockets. It was hard to believe these men had been dead less than a day. Raif thought about the blessings he’d spoken over them, and then quickly turned away. I arrived too late.
The knights’ souls were already gone. Taken.
Crossing to the stone and timber altar, he raised a hand to touch the Eye of God. Its price was unimaginable, so heavy and pure was the gold that surrounded it, yet it seemed to Raif that it would be safe here. It would cost a man much to walk through this hall and steal it in sight of the dead. The crystal in the Eye’s center sparkled so brilliantly Raif wondered if it might be a diamond, but he had little knowledge of gems and doubted if something the size of a sparrow’s egg could be anything other than rock crystal. Hesitating at the last instant to touch it, Raif stepped back. He already knew what it would feel like: ice.
His gaze found the carved wood of the dragon-pine stand, and the book laid open upon it. The book was very old, bound in animal hide that had been inexpertly tanned so that a nap of fine hair remained. The pages were yellow and warped, and their edges had been darkened by countless generations of fingerprints. The book was opened to a charcoal drawing of an ice-bound mountain and a passage of ornately rendered script. Meg Sevrance had taught both her sons to read, but Raif still had difficulty deciphering the words. They were set down in High Hand, an archaic written form of Common, and they bore little resemblance to anything he’d learned at his mother’s knee. Mountain, he thought he recognized, and the phrase North of the Rift, but the script was too stylized to read much more. Frowning, he turned his attention to the drawing. It was of no peak he had ever seen, craggy and spiraling, with nothing green or living upon it.
He thought about turning the pages and seeing what else the book held, then decided against it. It seemed to him that while he stood here, first at the altar, now at the bookstand, the hall was changing around him, settling into the silent deadness of a tomb. This place should be sealed.
Suddenly eager to be gone, he went to fulfill his final obligation.
The small chamber the head knight had fallen in was so cold Raif’s breath whitened as he entered. The water in the font should have been frozen, but it wasn’t. Raif worked to keep his gaze from settling upon the gently rippling liquid. He did not want to see what it showed.
The knight lay where Raif had left him, his body wholly covered by the altar cloth. Taking the corner of the cloth in his fist, Raif began naming the Stone Gods. Ganolith, Hammada, Ione, Loss, Uthred, Oban, Larannyde, Malweg, Behathmus. Please may this man be whole.