"Barbara Hambly - Darwath 5 - Icefalcons Quest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Darwath
Book 5
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Icefalcons Quest

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BARBARA HAMBLY
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? Chapter 1

Had the Icefalcon still been living among the Talking Stars People, the penalty for not recognizing the old
man he encountered in the clearing by the four elm trees would have been the removal of his eyes,
tongue, liver, heart, and brain, in that order.
His head would have been cut off, and, the Talking Stars People being a thrifty folk, his hair taken for
bow strings, his skin for ritual leather, and his bones for tools and arrowheads. If it was a bad winter,
they would have eaten his flesh, too, so it was just as well that his misdeed occurred in the middle of
spring.
The Icefalcon considered all this logical and justified: the laws of his ancestors were not the reason that he
no longer lived among the Talking Stars People.
All the horror that followed could have been avoided had he minded his own business, as was his wont.
Sometimes he felt that he had spent entirely too much time living among civilized people.
It had been a bad year for bandits. The summer following the Summerless Year had seen more than the
usual bloody strife in the rotting kingdoms that once made up the empire of the Alketch in the South, and
bands of paid-off warriors, both black and white, drifted north to prey on the small communities along
the Great Brown River.
It was said they had penetrated far to the east, into the Felwoods, though few came so far north as the
Vale of Renweth. Now it was spring again. When a woman's screams and a man's thin cries for help
sliced the cold, sharp air of the Vale, the Icefalcon guessed immediately what was going on.
In the round clearing in the woods about three miles upslope from the Keep, he found pretty much what
he expected to find.
The scene was common in the river valleys these days: an old man lying with a great bleeding wound in
his head by the remains of a small campfire, a donkey squealing and pulling its tether, and a burly,
coal-black warrior of the Alketch in the process of dragging a buxom red-haired woman into the trees.
In the filmy eggshell brightness of the spring afternoon the old man's blood glared crimson, the warrior's
yellow coat in brilliant contrast to the emerald of the grass, the beryl of the close-crowding trees. The
knife in the woman's hand blinked like a mirror.
Seeing no point in making a target of himself by crossing the meadow openly, the Icefalcon ducked
immediately back into the belt of hazel and chokecherry that ringed the clearing and kept to cover as he
worked his way around.
The woman was putting up a good fight. She was as tall as her attacker and of sturdy build, dressed as a
man for travel in trousers and a padded wool jacket. Still, the man got the knife away from her, twisted
her arm behind her, and seized her thick braids.
The woman cried out in pain-she had not ceased to shriek throughout the encounter-and the Icefalcon
simply stepped from behind an elm tree next to the struggling pair, flipped one of his several poignards
into his hand, and slit the warrior's throat.
The woman saw him a split second before he grabbed the man around the jaw to pull his head back for
the kill.
She screamed in what the Icefalcon considered unreasonable horror-what did she think he was going to
do?-as the man's blood soused over her breast and belly in a raw-smelling drench, and jumped away as