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

The renewed glare showed up Bektis, tall now and thin in Linok's rough furs and quilted trousers, arms
uplifted on the rock pinnacle beyond the ice-locked falls.
The bandaged head wound-an illusion from the first-was gone. Now his head was flung back, his long
white hair and patriarchal beard transformed to flags by the battering wind, and lightning laced his fingers
in blue-glowing flame that hurt the eyes.
Rudy shouted a word of stillness, swept away and drowned. The storm winds took the fire he threw and
hurled it in all directions, and boulders rained down out of the sudden fall of renewed night, crashing
against the walls of the gorge.
The Icefalcon, very sensibly, flattened into the overhang of the eastern cliff and stayed there. Levin-fire
ripsawed the blackness, granting brief visions of Rudy and Bektis, and it seemed to the Icefalcon that
Bektis wore a device of some kind on his right hand, a thing of crystal and gold that caught and focused
the searing light.
When Rudy threw answering fire, the jewels seemed to engulf the old man in a protective coruscation of
rainbows.
The Icefalcon did not watch the battle. Rather, with every explosion of brightness he worked his way a
little distance farther toward the donkeys, the warriors, and Tir. They'd all be watching Bektis, too.
It might give him a chance.
The Icefalcon was not a believer in luck. No one was who had been raised in the Real World. He knew
Rudy's chances of defeating the more experienced wizard were negligible, and it was doubtful that he
could even hold him in combat long enough for the Icefalcon to get in bowshot of Tir's captors. Thus he
was neither disappointed nor angry when a final incandescence smote the night behind him, a riven cry
and the sound of falling rock. He thought he heard Tir scream, then the wind's force smashed the pass
with redoubled fury, burying all in night.
The Icefalcon wedged himself into a crevice and waited, conjuring in his mind the slow progress of Bektis
down the ice-slick boulders on the other side of the rock-spur, across the winter-locked stream. The
temperature, falling all this while, plunged still further.
He unslung his blanket from his back to wrap around him like a cloak, his gloved fingers aching and
clumsy. There were broken brush and branches within the crevice, sheltered from the storm and still fairly
dry, enough to form a crude torch, though it took him a long while to break kindling into suitably tiny
fragments and he had to wait to open the firepouch until the winds eased somewhat for fear of killing the
flame within. When he got a torch kindled at last-the Icefalcon was a patient man-he raised it high.
Gil's voice called out, "Here!"
By the sound she was at the edge of the drop-off into the gorge. Black lines of charring scored the rocks
and earth, as if the ground had been beaten with red-hot rods. Despite the snow already filling the scars,
the air stank of burning and coals winked in the ruins of blasted firs all around.
The pattern showed clearly how Bektis had driven Rudy leftward to the cliff's edge, until he could retreat
no more. Gil had kindled her lantern, and its feeble glow revealed a great final scorch on the rocks above
the gorge, the boulders themselves split with the heat. Snow hissed and melted as it touched them. The
wind's main force was easing, but the snow came down harder now. The pass would be choked long
before day.
It took Gil and the Icefalcon nearly two hours to work their way down into the defile. Rudy lay on
ice-sheeted rock beside the still obsidian ribbon of the stream. He had dragged himself to the shelter of a
toothed overhang, where spruces clustering on the rock above further broke the wind and snow.
Remnants of a heat spell lingered in the place, melting the snow where it skirled around his body.
"You still with us, punk?" Gil pulled off her gloves to touch the long-jawed face with its bent nose,
brushed back the blood-matted hair. Her face was expressionless as bone, but she had gentled, the
Icefalcon thought, since the Summerless Year. "Don't check out on me now."
They had been friends for seven years, coming together from that other world where Ingold had found
them, unthinkably different from both the Real World and the world of the civilized mud-diggers in their
cities and their palaces.