"Brackett, Leigh - Skaith 2 - Hounds Of Skaith" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brackett Leigh)

I know. Touch him, Gerd.
Not hurt Wandsman.
No hurt. Touch.
Gerd's baleful gaze turned to the Wandsman. Vasth was stricken with a sudden trembling. He made a strangled sound and let the dagger fall.
"Stand quiet now," said Stark, and called. "Gerrith!"
There was a covered litter slung between two animals. She came from beside it, shaking back the fur hood that covered her head. The wind picked up thick strands of hair the color of warm bronze. She smiled and spoke his name, and her eyes were like sunlight.
"Come here by me," he said.
She reined her beast to the side away from Gerd. Her face had been thinned by the long journeying, all the way from Irnan, across the Barrens and through the haunted darklands to the Citadel. The fine bones were clear under honed flesh and taut skin colored by the winds of Skaith to a darker bronze than her hair. Proud and splendid Gerrith. Stark was shaken by a stabbing warmth.
"I knew you were coming, Stark," she said. "I knew the Citadel had fallen, long before Ferdias' messenger reached us. But we must go on now, quickly."
"I have no mind to stay." The wind had strengthened, driving the sand. The weapons were already half-buried. The world had become much smaller. The twilight had deepened so that even the faces of the Wandsmen and the Yur were indistinct. "Is Halk living?"
"Barely. He must have rest."
Ashton appeared dimly out of the murk with the led beasts. "Let them go, Simon," Stark said. "Gerrith, can you two handle the litter?"
They went at once and took the places of the two servants who had been leading the animals. Then they rejoined Stark.
"Gelmar. Tell your people to move."
The cavalcade moved, reluctantly, thinking of weapons left behind. Riders hunched in saddles, covered faces from stinging sand. Little drifts piled on Halk's litter.
They passed a marker, and Stark was squinting ahead trying to see the next one when Gerd said:
Humans. There.
Stark rode closer to Gelmar. "What humans? Hooded Men? The wayhouse?"
Gelmar nodded.
They went on.
When Stark reckoned they were far enough away from the buried weapons to make impractical any attempt to recover them, he reached out and caught Gelmar's bridle.
"We leave you here. Follow too closely and your servants die.
Kill Yur? Gerd asked hopefully.
Not unless I tell you.
"After you have secured the wayhouse," Gelmar said, "what then?"
"He will leave us to die in the sand," said Vasth. "May Old Sun shrivel the men from the stars!"
The cavalcade had halted, bungling together behind Gelmar.
"I would prefer to show you the same mercy you have shown us," said Stark. "But if you make it to the wayhouse, I'll not deny you shelter."
Gelmar smiled. "You could not. The hounds would force you to let us in."
"I know," said Stark. "Otherwise I might be less generous."
He rode away from the party, with Ashton and Gerrith and the litter.
Lead us to humans, he said to Gerd, knowing that Gelmar would be following the same mental beacon. They could forget about the markers.
They plunged on, across whaleback dunes that blurred and shifted shape beneath them. The litter swayed and jolted. Stark was sorry for Halk, but there was no help for it. The desert cried out in torment, a great hissing gritty wail rose and circled and fell away again to a deep moaning.
Then, abruptly, the wind dropped. The lower air cleared in the sudden stillness. Old Sun shone raggedly above. From the top of a ridge they saw the wayhouse half a mile or so ahead, a thick low structure of stone with a series of drift-walls about it to keep the desert out.
Ashton pointed away and said, "God Almighty."
A tsunami, a tidal wave of sand, rushed toward them out of the northeast. It filled the whole horizon. Its crest of dusty foam curled halfway up the sky. Below, it was a brightish ocher shading down through dirty reds and browns to a boiling darkness at the bottom that was almost black.
Stark saw a scudding of many shapes that ran fleetly before the edges of that blackness.
For the second time Gerd said, Things come.
Gelmar's party appeared on the back trail, clear in the placid air. They paused and looked northeastward, then came on again at a run.
Stark lashed the beasts forward. The wave had a voice, a roaring almost too deep for the human ear to register. The heart felt it, and the marrow of the bones, and the spasming gut. Even the animals forgot their weariness.
All at once Gerd spoke urgently in Stark's mind.
Wandsman says come, N'Chaka. Come now or things kill.
He turned with the pack and raced away down the back trail, answering Gelmar's call.
7
Stark said, Gerd, come back!
The hounds ran on.
Danger, N'Chaka. Guard Wandsmen. You come.
"What is it?" shouted Ashton, his voice a thin thread against the far-off roaring. "Where are they going?"
"To guard the Wandsmen." The overriding imperative, the instinct bred in the bone. And Gelmar's cry for help must have been urgent enough, what with his escort unarmed and the Runners coming. Stark swore. If he let the pack go without him, N'Chaka might never regain his authority. He could not make the hounds return to him. Neither could he afford to let Gelmar get control of them.
"I have to go with them." He waved the others on. "Get to the wayhouse, Simon." Gerrith's face, pale under the bronze, and framed in dark fur, stared at him. The litter careened wildly, the muffled form within it so still that Stark wondered if any life was left. "Go!" he yelled. "Go!" He reined his beast around and sent it staggering after the hounds, his thoughts as black as the base of the sand wave.