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

his memories with his bloodline and eventually have created the child Tir.
And that would have been tragedy.
The wizard in Rudy noted the details remembered about the palace, identifying
flowers in the garden, birds and beasts glimpsed in the trees, picturing clearly the
place that he himself had only seen in ruins.
But mostly what fascinated him were the workings of that far-off child's life and
family, how cruelty had meshed with cruelty, how anger had answered angers formed
by fathers and grandfathers; how constant suspicion and unlimited power had resulted
in a damn unpleasant little brat who quite clearly worked hard to make everyone
around him as miserable as he possibly could.
No wonder Tir's eyes were a thousand years old.
"Rudy?" A tousled blond head appeared around the doorway after a perfunctory
knock. "M'lord Rudy," the boy hastily amended, and added with a grin, "Hi, Tir. M'
lord Rudy, Her Majesty asks if you'd come to the Doors, please. Fargin Graw's giving
her a bad time," he added as Rudy reached for his staff and started to rise.
"Oh, great." Fargin Graw was someone whose nose Rudy had considered breaking for
years. "Thanks, Geppy."
"May I go play with Geppy, Rudy?"
"Yeah, go ahead, Ace. If I know Graw, this'll take a while." With Geppy and Tir
pelting on ahead of him, Rudy walked down the broad main corridor of the royal
enclave-one of the few wide halls in the Keep not to have been narrowed millennia
ago by the owners of cells breaking walls to cadge space from the right of way-and
down the Royal Stair.
Someone had taken advantage of the draught on the stair and stretched a clothesline
across the top of the high archway where the stair let into the Aisle, the black-walled
cavern that ran more than three-quarters of the Keep's nearly half-mile length.
Rudy ducked under the laundry, scarcely a wizardly figure in his deerskin breeches,
rough wool shirt, and gaudily painted bison-hide vest, his dark hair hanging almost to
his shoulders. Only his staff, pale wood worn with generations of hand grips and
tipped by a metal crescent upon whose sharpened points burned blue St. Elmo's fire,
marked him as mageborn.
The Aisle's roof was lost in shadow above him, though pin lights of flame delineated
the bridges that crossed it on the fourth and fifth levels. The glasslike hardness of the
walls picked up the chatter of the launderers working in the basins and streams that
meandered along the stone immensity of the open floor; some of them called
greetings to him he passed.
Fargin Graw's voice boomed above those homier echoes like flatulant thunder on a
summer afternoon.
"If we're supporting them, they'd damn well better earn their keep!" He was a big
man-Rudy could identify his silhouette against the chilly light that streamed through
the passageway between the two sets of open Doors while he was still crossing the
last of the low stone bridges over the indoor streams.
"And if they're not earning their keep, which I for one can't see 'em doing, then they
better find themselves a useful trade or get out! Like some others I could name sitting
around getting fat ... There's not a man in the River Settlements who doesn't get out in
the fields and pull his stint at guarding-"
"And boy, after all day in the fields, they must be just sharp as razors on night-
watch." Rudy hooked his free hand through the buckle of his belt as he came out to
join the little group on the Keep's broad, shallow steps, blinking a little in the pallid
brightness of the spring sun.