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

enemy party, and the tracks of Bektis and Hethya weren't going to fly away. He shaved-his beard had
not begun when he'd first crossed the mountains and he'd never liked going furry-and tried to bring down
one of the raccoons that came to thieve his fish but failed in the endeavor.
The sun was high before he filled his water bottle and Rudy's from the spring and set out on what he
already knew would be a long pursuit.
He'd taken three horses when he left the Talking Stars People, Little Dancer, whom he had owned for
years, Sand Cat, and Dung For Brains. Sand Cat had been shot under him in a brush with Gettlesand
bandits, and Dung For Brains he had killed himself when the animal went lame.
His dog, Bright Feet, had also been killed by the bandits in Gettlesand: the spirit-bag he still wore under
his clothing, next to his skin, contained some of Bright Feet's hair.
He found horses corraled near the shining jet walls of the Keep, his first day in Renweth Vale. Stealing
two was no difficult matter. These he'd named Brown Girl and Wind.
Then, knowing he was going to live east of the wall for some time, he set himself to observe the
mud-diggers who lived in the Vale. It became obvious to him at once that these were a war party of
some sort, though he could not determine who their enemy was and where they lay.
They had neither flocks nor herds (except for their horses), nor did they plant fields of the corn, cotton,
and beans that grew in the mud-diggers' settlements in the South. They had a few dooic as slaves-the
slumped, hairy semihumans that the Talking Stars People would have killed out of hand-but he did not
see children among them, or old people, though that could have been accounted for by famine or plague.
The men and women of the Keep, back in that far summer, wore either black clothing marked with a
small white four-petaled flower or red with one or three black stars. There was a tall man who wore red
much of the time and sported a chain of blue gems around his neck and a long black cloak that spread
about him like wings when he walked, and he seemed to be in command of the men and women in red.
It was a day or so before the Icefalcon realized that another man-equally tall but thin, clothed no
differently from all the other wearers of black, save that the emblem on his breast was an eagle worked in
gold-was commander over them all.
This man was the one they called Eldor, or Lord Eldor, and this was the man who, the Icefalcon realized
on his second day in the Vale, was stalking him.
"It only needed that!" stormed Blue jewels on that second day, when the two horses were reported
missing. He made a great expansive angry gesture that would have startled game and drawn enemies for
miles around, and Eldor folded his long arms and regarded him in self-contained quiet, his head a little on
one side.
"Bandits in the Vale! I told you how it would be did you reopen Dare's Keep, Lord Eldor. It dominates
all the valley for miles. Instead of expending effort and supplies to make it fit for a larger garrison which I
understand, with the depredations of the bandits growing in the West-you would do better to leave it
locked and expand the fortifications at the western foot of the pass."
His deep, melodious voice carried easily to where the Icefalcon lay along the limb of the great pine tree
that still grew between the Keep and the stream. It was the custom of the Talking Stars People
periodically to send warriors south to kidnap men from the settlements, whom they kept as prisoners for
a winter to teach the children the tongue of the Wathe.
These men they usually initiated into one or another of the families so that when the time of the spring
sacrifices came nobody who had actually been born into the families had to be tortured to death, though
the hair of such men usually wasn't long enough to make good bowstrings.
"As sure as the Ice in the North," Blue jewels went on, "if you leave the Keep open, either bandits will
take it as a hold or some troublemaker landchief will."
"If it was bandits." The tall Lord Eldor followed the offending sentry back to the horse lines, speaking to
Blue jewels as they walked. "Tomec Tirkenson tells me bandits as a rule are too greedy for their own
good. They'll lift the whole herd, not two out of the middle where they wouldn't be noticed until the
count."
After a little more bluster, Blue Jewels-whom the Icefalcon later knew as Alwir of the House of Bes, one