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

of the wealthiest and most powerful lords of the Realm-ordered out a party of his red-clothed warriors to
search the Vale, and the Icefalcon made his leisurely way back to his camp near the standing-stones, to
move it before they got there.
He later came to know both Eldor and Alwir well, but it sometimes seemed to him that all the years of
acquaintance only deepened, rather than altered, his initial impression of them: Alwir declaiming and
jumping to an incorrect conclusion, Eldor standing a little distance from him, withholding judgment, an
expression of observation and a detached amusement in his steel-colored eyes.

Winter still held the land below the pass. The Real World that stretched between the Snowy Mountains
and the Seaward was an unforgiving land, a land of little water in most places and few trees, a land of
hard, steady winds punctuated by summer tornadoes and, so he had heard, of winter ice storms these
past ten years that tore man and beast to shreds and froze them where they fell.
Herds of bison and antelope wandered the open miles of grassland, and as the winters lengthened and
deepened, mammoth, yak, reindeer, and rhinoceri joined them, followed by the great killers: dire wolves,
saber-teeth, horrible-birds. Since the Summerless Year slunch had spread, the wrinkled, rubbery, faintly
glowing sheets of it swallowing the ground for miles, sucking the life from any plant it engulfed. The slunch
in its turn put forth a kind of life, strange creatures that wandered abroad but did not appear to either eat,
or seed, or excrete. These things died and rotted with a strange, mild, sweetish stench and left patches of
slunch where they lay.
The Icefalcon's hackles raised like a dog's to see how the slunch and the cold had altered the land. Many
of the groves that dotted the western foothills were now dead, buried under the whitish masses. As he
followed the westward road that first day, the stuff stretched on both sides, in patches or in sheets miles
broad, and neither rabbits, nor lemmings, nor antelope moved over the dying grass that lay between.
By the debris left where Bektis and his party stopped to rest, the Icefalcon learned that in addition to
what Bektis and Hethya had carried on their two donkeys they'd helped themselves to the Keep's stores
of dried meat, cheese, and potatoes. With his sling he killed two kites that came down after the cheese
rinds and potato parings and added their meat to his satchel, and the rinds and parings as well.
With slunch growing abroad in the lands food would be even more difficult to find, and he knew he could
waste none. Only in the camps did he see Tir's tracks and guessed by the marks in the thin dust that they
were keeping the boy's hands tied.
In a way it was just as well, he thought. Whatever Gil might say, the boy might have tried to escape while
the mountains still loomed in the east, and his chances of survival would be nil in these desolate lands.

After black-cloaked Alwir with his blue jewels had declared him to be a bandit, hunting parties went out
to search the Vale of Renweth for the Icefalcon for three days running. The Icefalcon had been more
amused than anything else, patiently moving his camp every few hours-the invisible camp of the peoples
of the North, which left no sign on the land-and watching them.
He watched, too, the trains of mules that came up the gorge of the Arrow River through the smaller range
of peaks west of the Vale, food and seed and saplings; watched the training of the black-clothed Guards
under the tutelage of a little bald-headed man with a hoarse voice; watched Alwir and Eldor walk around
the walls of the Keep and the edges of the woods that surrounded its knoll, talking and making notes on
tablets wrought of wood and wax.
Alwir continued to complain of the size of the Keep and its uselessness as a garrison against the
Gettlesand bandits. "In times of siege it's a jail!" he declared, striding up and down the shallow steps that
led to its single pair of dark metal Doors. "To be sure, no one can get in, but the defenders are trapped!
Unless there's a secret way out? A tunnel for sorties, perhaps, or a hidden door?"
His blue eyes glinted eagerly. He was a man who loved secrets, thought the Icefalcon, lying in the long
grass beside the stream. Himself, he would never have entrusted any secret to this Alwir, who seemed to
consider himself above the laws of common men by virtue of his descent from the lordly House of Bes.
"None that I know of," replied Eldor calmly and went on with his surveying, knee-deep in the long