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

services to the power-mad Archbishop Govannin, had followed her to the Alketch and, so rumor said,
had assisted her when she carved an unshakable sphere of influence in those war-torn lands.
"What does Bektis have to do with Tir being gone?"
The Icefalcon hadn't even broken stride, forcing Rudy and Gil to fall into step with him as he led the way
fast through the knee-deep ground fog and on toward rising ground, the shouldering bones of the hills that
guarded Sarda Pass and the road down into the West.
"We have been had for dupes." The Icefalcon's voice was bitter, anger at himself tempered by fear.
"Made fools of by a shaman's illusion. The old man Linok was Bektis the Sorcerer. I thought I
recognized his voice and the way he stroked his beard. Were we to waste time going back across the
meadows we would find his tracks-long and thin, not the tracks of the little short-legged man we saw.
The whole thing was a fakement, a lure, a tale, so that he could get into the Keep."
Gil swore. Rudy, who was a little slower on the uptake, said, "Well, I'll be buggered. But he isn't in the
Keep. He and that broad Hethya disappeared about two hours ago..."
Gil concluded for him, guessing, but at the same time sure. "And they took Tir with them."
? Chapter 3

"I was a fool," said the Icefalcon.
It didn't take them long to cut Bektis' tracks. Snow still lay thin where the shadows of the Hammerking
mountain fell on the trail, and the prints of the old man's boots were there, long and narrow, with the heel
and nail-work characteristic of Alketch bootmaking.
Prints that had to be Hethya's mingled with the wizard's, along with the marks of a second donkey, and
the three identical bandits with hide wrapped around their feet.
"Where's Tir?" Rudy held his staff close to the sparkling ground. The magelight playing around the
pronged metal crescent at its tip glittered on the crisp edges of the new prints.
"On a donkey." Gil forestalled the Icefalcon's reply. Night wind coming down cold off the glacier tore
long wisps of her smoke-black hair where it escaped from the leather cap she wore.
"We're lucky the herdkids were just bringing in the horses from pasture when Bektis was getting ready to
get out of there, or we'd have lost a couple for sure." She bore a lantern and a firepouch like the
Icefalcon's, though the lantern was dark; like the Icefalcon, Gil believed in never making assumptions
about who she'd be walking with or what she might need.
Some way farther, they saw Tir's tracks where he'd gotten off the donkey to relieve himself behind a
boulder.
"Are they keeping a guard on him?" The Icefalcon scanned the ground by the witchlight's glow, seeking
other tracks near the small boot prints, the little puddle of frozen urine.
"My guess is Bektis has an illusion on him." In the bluish witchlight Gil's thin face, scarred across cheek
and jaw, was impassive, her gray eyes steely-cold. "He probably thinks Rudy's with him and that
everything's okay."
Rudy cursed. He'd been silent most of the way up the glacis, but the Icefalcon knew that the Prince was
like a son to the young wizard and that Alde would be frantic with anxiety for her child.
Winds blew down the peaks, pregnant with the scent of coming snow. Not unusual for this time of year,
reflected the Icefalcon bitterly, but too useful to a Wise One fleeing over the pass to be accidental.
"I should have known him," he said grimly, "long before they reached the Keep."
Gil regarded him in surprise. "How could you?" she asked. "Wend and Ilae-even Rudy-didn't see through
the illusion. I didn't, and I saw him just two years ago in Khirsrit."
"Neither Wend nor Ilae ever saw him before the Wizards Corps was organized for the war against the
Dark." He moved off again, leaning a little against the iron hammer of the wind, a bleached, silent moving
animal in the wild dark.
"Nor did you, or Rudy, know him much longer. Not to know his voice, or his manner of movement. Not
to recognize the way in which he speaks. As court mage to Lady Alde's brother he was about the palace
from the time of my coming there. I knew him well. And in any case," he added dryly, realizing too late