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

yet another truth, "why would they have camped for the night within five miles of the Keep they claimed
to be seeking? I should have recognized a fakement when I saw one."
"Bektis is a wizard," retorted Gil. "It's his job to deceive. Don't be so hard on yourself."
She tucked her hands under her armpits, cold despite the gloves she wore. She was a thin woman, all
bone and leather; cold until you saw her smile. Many of the Guards had affairs with the women of the
Keep, the weavers and brewers and leather workers and those who tended the hydroponics gardens.
The Icefalcon's affairs, when he had them, tended to be with women in the Guards or in the military
companies of the other Keep Lords. At one time he had considered Gil, though it had been obvious to
him from the first that her heart was given elsewhere. His only serious love, many years ago, had been so
also, and this time he had not deceived himself.
Now he returned her gaze with some surprise. "I speak only truth," he said. "Had I gone about my
business and left these people to their own devices, the Keep would not now be in danger of losing its
link with the memories of its Ancestors."
The pass had grown steeper, Gil and Rudy falling behind the IceIalcon's swifter strides, though Rudy was
tough, as most wizards were, and Gil a proven warrior. From the top of the boulder-strewn slope the
pass ascended, a narrowing corridor of gray-black cliff and blacker trees, losing itself in night.
Wind bellowed in the pines and all the world smelled of snow, hard spinning granules of it flying through
the white circle of the staff's light. The ki of Sarda Pass were said to be capricious, malignant, and stern,
hating equally mud-diggers and the People of the Real World.
Rudy propped his staff against a juniper in a boulder's shelter and fumbled through the slits in his
overmantle to get to the pockets of his vest. Carefully-his hands awkward because of his gloves-he drew
out the slip of amethyst that served him for a scrying stone and tilted it back and forth a little until the light
of his staff caught in its central facet.
"Wend?" he said. "Wend, can you hear me?"
Watching shamans and Wise Ones communicate always reminded the Icefalcon vaguely of the games
children played. Evidently the priest-wizard replied, speaking in Rudy's mind, for after a time Rudy said,
"Look, we've found Tir's tracks. Linok and Hethya took him. Linok put a spell of some kind on him to
get him to go with them. The Icefalcon says Linok is actually Bektis, and, you know, looking back I think
he's right."
There was a pause, occupied, the Icefalcon presumed, by Brother Wend's exclamations of
astonishment-useless in the circumstances. Spits of snow stung his cheek.
"Tell Minalde what's going on." Rudy scrubbed a nervous hand over his face. His profile, a little craggy
with the bump of an old break in his nose, cut blue-black against the witchlight, flat white triangles of
which reflected in his eyes.
"Tell her he seems to be okay. Whatever they want him for, it isn't to kill him, or they'd have done it
already. They're taking him over Sarda Pass and calling down a storm to close the pass behind them."
The Icefalcon could well imagine Minalde's reaction to that information. She loved both her children with
a passionate ferocity: he clearly recalled, during the last desperate stand against the Dark Ones in the
palace at Gae, her holding Ingold against a wall, the tip of some dead man's sword pressed against the
wizard's breast, crying that she'd kill him if he did not save her child's life.
Bektis did well, he thought, to summon the anger of the snows. It was certain that nothing less would stop
her.
"Gil and the Icefalcon are with me," Rudy went on. "We're going to try to overtake them and hold them if
we can. Tell her to get Janus and a party of Guards out after us ASAP."
He used a colloquial shortening of the phrase as soon as possible transliterated from their outland
tongue-the outland trick of using the initial letters of each word in a phrase to represent the phrase itself
was one that was creeping steadily into the Wathe as well.
"Tell her not to worry." Another foolishness, in the Icefalcon's opinion. "We'll bring him back."
Given that Rudy was a seven-year apprentice in arts that Bektis had studied through his lifetime, the
statement was wildly optimistic to say the least, but the Icefalcon did not remark on it. Rudy started to