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

the slunch, like the cold detached cartilage of a severed ear, and turned it over in her
fingers, wondering if there were any way it could be cooked and eaten.
Then she shook her head, for there was a strange, metallic smell behind the stuff's
vague sweetness-not to mention the roach. She threw the bit back into the main mass.
"Fine," she said.
As he helped her to stand, there was a sound, a quick, furtive scuffling in the slate-
hued night of the empty palace. The dizziness returned nauseatingly as Gil slewed to
listen. She gritted her teeth, fighting the darkness from her eyes.
"Rats, you think?" They were everywhere in the city, and huge.
Ingold's blue eyes narrowed, the small scars on the eyelids and on the soft flesh
beneath pulling in a wrinkle of knife-fine lines. "It smells like them, yes. But just
before you were attacked, there were five separate disturbances of that kind in all
directions around me, drawing my attention from you. The vaults are this way, if I
remember aright."
Since her coming to this world in the wake of the rising of the Dark, Gil had guarded
Ingold's back. The stable crypt opening into the vaults had been half torn apart by the
Dark Ones, and Gil's hair prickled with the memory of those bodiless haunters as she
picked her way after him through a vestibule whose mud floor was broken by a sea-
wrack of looted chests, candlesticks, and vermin-scattered bones. An inner door gave
onto a stairway. There was a smell of water below, a cold exhalation like a grave.
"When the vigilantes started hunting the city for books-for archives, records, anything
that would burn-Maia let them have what he could spare as a sop and hid the rest."
Ingold's voice echoed wetly under the downward-sloping ceiling, and something
below, fleeing the blue-white light that burned from the end of his staff, plopped in
water.
"He bricked up some of the archives in old cells of the episcopal dungeon and
sounded walls in the vaults to find other rooms that had been sealed long ago, where
he might cache the oldest volumes, of which no other known copy existed. It was one
of these vaults that he found the Cylinder."
Water lay five or six inches deep in the maze of cells and tunnels that constituted the
palace vaults. The light from Ingold's raised staff glittered sharply on it as Gil and the
old mage waded between decaying walls plastered thick with slunch, mold, and dim-
glowing niter. The masonry was of a heavy pattern far older than the more finished
stones of Gae. Penambra predated the northern capital at Gae; predated the first rising
of the Dark thousands of years ago- long predated any memory of humankind's. Maia
himself came to Gil's mind, a hollow-cheeked skeleton with arthritis crippled hands,
laughing with Ingold over his own former self, a foppish dilettante whose aristocratic
protector had bought the bishopric for him long before he was of sufficient years to
have earned it.
Perhaps he hadn't really earned it until the night he hid the books-the night he led his
people out of the haunted ruins of their city to the only safe place they knew. Renweth
Vale, and the black-walled Keep of Dare.
Before a bricked-up doorway, Ingold halted. Gil remained a few paces behind him,
calf-deep in freezing water, analyzing every sound, every rustle, every drip and dull
moan of the wind, fighting not to shiver and not to think of the poison that might be in
her veins. Still, she thought, if the thing's bite was poisoned, it didn't seem to be too
serious. God knew she'd gone through sufficient exertion for it to have killed her
twice if it was going to.
Ingold passed his hand across the dripping masonry and murmured a word. Gil saw
no change in the mortar, but Ingold set his staff against the wall-the light still glowing