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

It was during this time, too, that he became acquainted with Bektis, who was much more a fixture at
court than Ingold. Ingold was in and out of the city, but Bektis had a suite of chambers in Alwir's palace
in the district of the city called the Water Park-less crowded and smelly than the rest of Gae, which had
taken the Icefalcon years to get used to.
Bektis scried the future and the past (he said) and learned through magic of things far away, and he also
worked the weather for court fetes and advised Alwir about shipping ventures, something that made the
Wise Ones mistrusted by merchants and farmers throughout the civilized realms.
Shamans among the Icefalcon's people also worked the weather, insofar as they would avert the worst
of the storms from the winter settlements and the horse herds, but such workings were known to be
dangerous. Besides, working the weather might let enemies guess where you camped.
Alwir and Bektis referred to the Icefalcon as "Lord Eldor's Tame Barbarian" and made little jests about
the things that were, to him, simply logical, like always having weapons and a day's supply of food on his
person, keeping to corners and never being where he could not immediately get out of a room. Their
jokes did not offend him. Merely they informed him that they were fools, as most of the people of the
straight roads were either mad or fools.
And most of them died with the coming of the Dark Ones.
Wind moved over the land, bitterly cold. Above the overcast that veiled the sky most nights now, the
waning moon was a ravel of luminous wool. It had taken the Icefalcon most of a year to separate the
reflexive terror about being outdoors after nightfall, developed by those who had passed through the
Time of the Dark, from the reasonable wariness he had possessed before.
Now he listened, identifying sounds and smells, gauging the scent of greenery and water somewhere
beyond the slunch to the northwest that meant he might hunt tomorrow, measuring it against the certainty
that there would be predators there as well. A small glowing thing like a detached head on two legs ran
by along the top of the ditch-most slunch-born things glowed a little. A night-bird skimmed past, hunting
moths.
Tir was out there in the dark, in the camp with Bektis and Hethya and those three identical black
warriors.
Eldor's son.
Eldor was not the kin of the Icefalcon's ancestors. By the standards of the Talking Stars People, he
would be considered an enemy. But he had not been. And he was the only person in Gae-the only
person in all that new life the Icefalcon had lived among civilized people for four years-to whom he had
spoken about why he had left the Talking Stars People and why he could not go back.
Speaking to him had made him less of an enemy. But what he would be called, the Icefalcon did not
know.

The Dark Ones ringed this place.
Tir forced his eyes open, forced himself to look out past the campfire that seemed to him so pitifully
inadequate; forced himself to look out into the darkness.
They aren't really there.
He had never actually seen the Dark Ones. Not that he remembered by himself-his mother had told him
they'd all gone away when he was a little baby. Sometimes in nightmares he'd be aware of them,
amorphous waiting stirrings in the shadows and a smell that scared him when he smelled things like it
sometimes, some of the things the women of the Keep used to clean clothing with.
He saw them now. The memory was overwhelming, like a recollection of something that had happened
to him only yesterday: clouds of darkness that blotted the moon, winds that came up suddenly, seeming
to blow from every direction at once, carrying on them the wet unnatural cold, the blood and ammonia
stink.
On this very stream bank-only the gully wasn't this deep then, and the stream's waters had lain closer to
the surface, gurgling and glittering in the light of torches, a ring of torches-he had watched them pour
across the flat prairie grass like floodwaters spreading and had felt his heart freeze with sickened horror