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

steadily from its tip, as from a lantern-and pulled a knife from his belt, with which he
dug the mortar as if it were putty desiccated by time. As he tugged loose the bricks,
she made no move to help him, nor did he expect her to. She only watched and
listened for the first signs of danger. That was what it was to wear the black uniform,
the white quatrefoil emblem, of the Guards of Gae.
Ingold left the staff leaning in the corridor, to light the young woman's watch. As a
mage, he saw clearly in the dark.
Light of a sort burned through the ragged hole left in the bricks, a sickly owl-glow
shed by slunch that grew all over the walls of the tiny chamber beyond, illuminating
nothing. The stuff stretched a little as Ingold pulled it from the trestle tables it had
almost covered; it snapped with powdery little sighs, like rotted rubber, to reveal
leather wrappings protecting the books. "Archives," the wizard murmured. "Maia did
well."
The Cylinder was in a wooden box in a niche on the back wall. As long as Gil's hand
from wrist bones to farthest fingertip, and just too thick to be circled by her fingers, it
appeared to be made of glass clear as water. Those who had lived in the Times
Before-before the first rising of the Dark Ones, seemed to have favored plain
geometrical shapes. Ingold brushed the thing with his lips, then set it on a corner of
the table and studied it, peering inside for reflections, Gil thought. By the way he
handled it, it was heavier than glass would have been.
In the end he slipped it into his rucksack. "Obviously one of Maia's predecessors
considered it either dangerous or sacrilegious." He stepped carefully back through the
hole in the bricks, took up his staff again. "Goodness knows there were centuries-and
not too distant ones-during which magic was anathema and people thought nothing of
bricking up wizards along with their toys. That room was spelled with the Rune of the
Chain, which inhibits the use of magic ... Heaven only knows what they destroyed
over the course of the years. But this . . ." He touched the rucksack.
"Someone thought this worth the guarding, the preserving, down through the
centuries. And that alone makes it worth whatever it may have cost us."
He touched the dressings on the side of her swollen face. At the contact, she felt
stronger, warmer inside. "It is not unappeciated, my dear."
She looked away. She had never known what to say in the presence of love, even after
she'd stopped consciously thinking When he finds out what kind of person I am, he'll
leave.
Ingold, to her ever-renewed surprise, evidently really did love her, exactly as she was.
She still didn't know why. ''It's my job," she said.
Scarred and warm, his palm touched her unhurt cheek, turning her face back to his,
and he gathered her again into his arms. For a time they stood pressed together, the
old man and the warrior, taking comfort among the desolation of world's end.
They spent two days moving books. Chill days, though it was May and in times past
the city of Penambra had been the center of semitropical bottomlands, lush with
cotton and sugarcane; wet days of waxing their boots every night while the spares
dried by the fire; nerve-racking days of shifting the heavy volumes up the crypt stairs
to where Yoshabel the mule waited in the courtyard, wreathed in spells of "there-isn't-
a-mule-here" and "this-creature-is-both-dangerous-and-inedible." The second spell
wasn't far wrong, in Gil's opinion. On the journey down to Penambra she had grown
to thoroughly hate Yoshabel, but knew they could not afford to lose her to vermin or
ghouls.
Sometimes, against the code of the Guards, Gil worked. Mostly Ingold would send
her to the foot of the stairs from the stable crypt, where she listened for sounds in the