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

her attacker collapsed between them. The Icefalcon had already turned, sword in hand, to scan the
woods behind.
"Shut up," he instructed. "I can't hear anything." A single bandit was even rarer than a single cockroach.
But there was no second attack. No sound in the woods, at least as far as he could tell over the woman's
hooting gasps.
He glanced back at her after the first quick check and pointed out, "Your companion is hurt."
"Oh!" she cried. "Oh, Linok!" and rushed across the clearing to where the old man lay.
After looting the fallen body of weapons, the Icefalcon followed more slowly, listening, watching all
around him, tallying sounds and half-guessed movements in the shadows of the trees. She'd made noise
enough to have brought the armies clear from the Alketch, let alone from higher up the Vale.
He came up on her as she was dabbing clean the old man's scalp. The cut looked ugly, blood smeared all
over the round, brown, wrinkled face and matted dark in the salt-and-pepper hair. "Hethya?" moaned
the old man, groping for her arm with a shaky hand.
"I'm here, Uncle. I'm all right." Her jacket had been pulled nearly off her shoulders in the struggle, her
tunic torn to the waist. She made nothing of her half-bared breasts, round and upstanding and white as
suet puddings under the terra-cotta spill of her hair.
The Icefalcon put her age at perhaps thirty, a few years older than himself. She had a red full mouth and
the porcelain-fair skin of the Felwoods and an easterner's way with vowels as well.
"We're all right for now," corrected the Icefalcon, still listening to the too silent woods. "Your visitor's
companions will be along at any time. How is it with you, old man? Can you back the donkey?"
"I-I believe so." Old Linok had the well-bred speech of the capital at Gae, before the Dark Ones
destroyed it along with most of the rest of the works of humankind. He sat up, clinging to his niece's
fleshy shoulder for support. "What happened? I don't..."
"Your niece will explain on the way to the Keep." Impossible that the bandit's companions weren't only
minutes away-the Talking Stars People would have already left the old man behind.
The Icefalcon had with some difficulty been taught to follow the dictates of civilized people about those
too infirm to look out for themselves, but he still didn't understand them.
"Get him on the beast and don't be a fool, woman," he added, when she turned to gather up bedrolls and
packs. "'The bandits will have those one way or the other."
"But we carried those clear from..."
"No, no, Hethya, the boy is right." Linok struggled with maddening slowness to get himself upright.
"There will be others. Of course there will be others."
The Icefalcon already had the donkey over to them. He reminded himself that among civilized people it
was not done to grab old men by the backs of their clothing and heave them onto pack-beasts like killed
meat, no matter how much more efficient such a procedure might be for a speedy getaway.
His sword was in his right hand, his attention returning again and again to the place in the trees where the
birds were silent-somewhere between the big elm with the lightning scar and the three smaller elms close
together.
"You're from the fortress, aren't you, young man?"
"Be silent, both of you." He was too preoccupied with trying to track potential attackers by sound to
inquire where else they thought he might have emerged from, if not the monstrous black block of the
Keep, whose obsidian-smooth walls were visible from nearly any point in the lower part of the Vale.
They were there. He felt their presence as one sometimes felt the spirits of holy places, felt their eyes on
the little party with all the training of his upbringing in the Real World, the empty lands beyond the
mountains. He'd killed their companion and was in charge of two and perhaps three sets of weapons and
a donkey, far rarer than gold in this devastated world. He and his companions were outnumbered... So
why didn't they attack?
And why didn't these two idiots he'd rescued shut up?
But they didn't. And the bandits kept to the trees, invisible and unheard. As far as the Icefalcon could tell,
they didn't even follow them as they moved from clearing to clearing down the ice-fed stream, until they