"Barbara Hambly - Darwath 4 - Mother Of Winter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Darwath
Book 4


Mother Of Winter


BARBARA HAMBLY
PROLOGUE

In the moonstone dawn, the lone rider dismounted at the top of the steps, passed
through the black square open eye where the doors would one day be, and halted on
the edge of shadowed abyss. The woman who lay on the obsidian plinth in the
chasm's midst knew by the shape of his shoulders and back, by the way he carried his
head, who he was; there was in any case only one person he could be. The wind that
brought the smell of the glaciers down to her funneled past him through the
passageway and carried on it the stench of blood.
When he stepped clear of the gate's collected gloom, she saw he was covered with it,
as if he had lain down in a butcher's shambles. Some of it she knew was his, all mixed
with the nigrous grease of torch smoke; there was also mud on his bare left forearm
where he had fallen or been thrown from his horse, and on his bare knees above his
boot tops, as if he had knelt in gore-soaked earth-to raise someone in his arms,
perhaps.
The great clean-hewed pit of the foundation lay between them, deep as the cliffs that
surrounded the Vale, and filled with the night's last shade. The plinth that rose
through it, nearly to the level of the ground, was circled by half-made levels and
support pillars like the greatest trees in some primordial iron forest, dwarfed to
fragility by the chasm's sheer size. The machines that fused the black stone walls,
insectile monsters of crystal and meteor iron, stood quiescent on platforms in the
scaffolding; smaller slave-crystals and drones floated in the air between like
exhausted stars, and here and there great sheets of wyr-web flashed softly in the
nacreous light. Where the stairways and catwalks joined and crossed between the
greater platforms, sleeping figures could be seen, lying where they had collapsed
within the rings and spheres of silver dust, dried blood, smoke and light that trailed
off the fragile plank flooring to float like sea-wrack on the air.
He looked down to meet the woman's eyes.
Depleted by last night's Great Spell, she propped herself up with her hands and
coughed, feeling twice her sixty years. As the man picked his way across the
spiderweb lines of bamboo and planking, descended ladders and stepped over gaps
that fell away into a thousand feet of gloom, she saw that he, too, moved carefully,
holding to the ropes and stopping now and then to stand half bowed over, gathering
strength.
"It's all right," she said, when he looked down from a ladder at the intricate patterns
woven on the plinth's circular top. "The spells are accomplished, such as they are.
Stay between those two lines and all will be well."
He was a respecter of such things. Not everyone was these days. He looked around
him again, and she wondered if, from the plinth, he could see what she saw: the whole
of the future edifice called forth in those ghostly traceries, as if the fortress already
existed, wrought of starlight and future time.
Every Rune, every circle, every sigil and smoke-trace had been placed individually,