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

put the crystal away, then changed his mind and gazed into it again, bending his head and hunching his
shoulders to shield his eyes from the wind.
"Ingold?" he said softly. "You there, man?"
The merchant who had brought Ingold word of the library cache at Gae had said that it was in a villa on
the town's far side, an area largely under water now.
The Icefalcon had accompanied the wizard on last summer's quest-when Gil's baby Mithyas had been
only a few months old-and had familiarized himself with the city in its new state: sodden, ruined,
head-high with cattail and sedges and creeping with ghouls. The old man would have to watch his back.
Ingold was evidently there.
"Look, you got to get back here. A wizard showed up at the Keep-Bektis, the Icefalcon thinks, and I
agree with him. He's snatched Tir."
At least Ingold seemed to have no extraneous comment to make. "He's taking him over Sarda Pass. Me
and Gil and the Icefalcon are on their trail, and we're going to try to hold them until the Guards come up,
but it's gonna be rough. I don't know what's going on, but I got to get going now. I'll be in touch, okay?"
"How did he look?" Gil asked when they were climbing again. Rudy dimmed the glow of his staff to a
marshlight flicker, barely enough to permit his non-mageborn companions to see. There was no sense in
advertising their location, but no sense in getting lost either, and the night was without light. Flakes of
snow filled the air, blurring the donkey and boot tracks.
Women, thought the Icefalcon. They had to ask. Gil-Shalos was a fine warrior and had a logical mind,
but she was a woman to her bones when it came to matters concerning the man she loved.
"I would assume," he said, bending to examine what might have been marks of someone leaving the
party-they showed only the later investigation of that medium-sized black bear that laired on the other
side of the Squaretop Rocks-"that he looks like a man of seventy who has been sleeping on the ground
for three weeks without trimming his beard." Gil slapped his arm with the backs of her gloved fingers and
turned back to Rudy.
"Not bad. Couple of scrapes and cuts, and his left hand was bandaged, but it looked like he could use it
okay. What the hell is Bektis doing here anyway, Spook? I thought you said he was working as Bishop
Govannin's gofer down in Alketch."
"He was. God knows what influence she had over him, but she ordered him around like a servant.
Yori-Ezrikos-the Emperor's daughter-used his power, too; used her friendship with Govannin. But he
hated Govannin. I could see it in his eyes."
"He hated everyone," remarked the Icefalcon. Blown snow was swiftly obscuring the trail, but there was
nowhere to go in the pass but ahead if they wanted to get through before the storm closed it.
He wondered how long the Court Mage would keep up the illusion that Rudy was with the little party-if
that was in fact the glamour he had cast over Tir's mind-and that all things were as they should be.
Or had Tir realized already that the man he thought was his stepfather and mentor was in fact only a
ghost wrought by a mage's cleverness?
Tir had never seen Bektis-or at least he had been only an infant when the Court Mage had departed in
disgrace from the Keep, though he had heard his name.
He would understand soon enough that something was wrong, when the man he had seen first short and
pug-nosed gradually melted into another form, tall and thin with long white hair, an aristocratic, aquiline
nose, and haughty dark eyes. Why take him over the pass?
"Why take him over the pass?" That was Rudy.
Gil's reply came raggedly, her words fighting the storm winds. "They have to want him for what he
remembers from his ancestors. If it was just to cripple the Keep, they'd have killed him before they
reached the pass and split up to get out of the Vale undetected."
"But he doesn't remember everything!" protested Rudy. "And we don't know what he does remember!
Bektis should know that."
The Icefalcon led them into the lee of a small cliff under the Hammerking's flank, where the wind was less
and the snow thinner underfoot, allowing them better speed. Unseen above them the glaciers that