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

people were it winter, or their summer hunting camps wherever they might be, depending on the rains and
the grass.
Therefore he knew exactly where the lightning-scarred elm tree and its three sisters lay.
And above them, there were no carrion birds.
Scrupulous bandits? In his experience bandits didn't even bury their camp garbage, let alone their dead.
When he wanted to, the Icefalcon could travel very swiftly, but the terrain here was rough, cut with
streams and dotted with pale boulders among the trunks of pine and fir. It took him over an hour to reach
the place, and when he did the sun was barely a hand span above the marble-white knife of the Great
Snowy Mountains in the West.
The bandit still lay at the meadow's edge, arms flung wide, head twisted over to the side. Both face and
head had been shaved a little less than a week before, and though the man's face was young, the beard
and hair stubble were white, a common color among the Black Alketch.
No bird had torn his eyes or his belly, no fox chewed the soft parts of his face. Nothing, as far as the
Icefalcon could see, had invaded the gaping flesh of the severed throat or begun to eat at the corpse. It
had simply rotted where it lay.
In four hours?
He knelt beside it, pulled off his glove to touch the cheek. Liquefying flesh had already begun to drip
away, showing the pale jawbone and teeth.
Plague?
Not a pleasant thought. Particularly not with Ingold a week's journey off in Gae seeking Harilomne the
Heretic's books. This man had seemed healthy enough to try to rape Hethya, if that had indeed been his
intent.
He pulled off the man's glove, and most of the hand's flesh came with it. The odor alone told him that all
was not as it should be. The wars with the other peoples of the northern plains, the torture sacrifices by
which his people periodically communicated with the Ancestors, the hunts of mammoth and dire wolf and
yak, would have been enough to teach him the stench of the dead, without the Time of the Dark when
corpses lay like windfall plums in the streets.
This stink was only vaguely similar, not like human flesh at all. He sat back on his heels. Birds were
beginning to cry their territories before settling in for the night. A squirrel ran up a tree.
The bandits had gone.
The sun slipped behind the white horns of the glaciers that shawled Anthir, northernmost of the three
peaks that guarded Sarda Pass. Blue shadow poured east to drown the Vale, though light still filled the
sky. The Icefalcon rose and traced the bandit's prints back into the trees.
Here, where the yellow pine-straw covered the ground, there was no good surface for tracks, a situation
not helped by the fact that the bandit had not worn boots. Like the poorest beggars in Gae before the
Dark Ones came, he had wrapped his feet in strips of hide. Still, where the man's marks crossed one of
the dozen meltwater streams, the Icefalcon found in the mud of the water's verge the tracks of three
others.
All four had stood there together, not long before the one bandit had gone to meet Hethya, Linok, and
his destiny in the clearing. The other men had gone southwest.
The Icefalcon frowned. The light was sufficiently dim that he had to crouch for a closer look.
There was no mistaking it. All four men were the same height, judging by the length of their strides, and
all four exactly the same weight.
The Icefalcon had grown up able to differentiate between the tracks of his grandfather's white mare
Blossom Horse and those of his cousin's mare Flirt and those of any other horse owned by anyone in the
family. He had been able to recognize the prints of individual dogs, of anyone in the family or in the larger
People, and of many of the members of the wild herds of reindeer, yak, bison, and mammoth as well.
Tracks, and scat, and individual habits of beasts were the topic of most conversations around the
longhouse fires in winter and under the summer stars while hunting in the Cursed Lands or the Night River
Country. They were the heart and business of the Real World, told over the way civilized people told