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

snakeweed. More barking, war-dogs terrified and confused by enchantment. Fire flashed, or perhaps
only the illusion of fire.
Tir, very sensibly, climbed a tree. The Icefalcon saw the boy's bright blue jacket sleeves among the limbs
of the cottonwood under which Bektis had built last night's fire. He was glad that someone-probably the
woman Hethya-had untied Tit's hands, and hoped none of the Empty Lakes People remained in the
coulee, which was just within bowshot of the hill. The boy probably knew that running away from Bektis
would be a waste of time.
Bide your time, son of Eldor. Watch for your chance.
The coyote who waits can eat the flesh of the saber-tooth who plunges ahead into a fight.
The attack was over before the shadows had shortened the last inch or so to noon.
Leaning up on his elbows, the Icefalcon watched the three black warriors load the bodies of the slain
onto the horses that remained in the grove and carry them out to the coulee to dump them. Then they
returned to Bektis' camp, tethered the captured horses, and set about gathering water and making lunch.
Thank you, thought the Icefalcon. Now stay put so I can eat, too.
He crawled through the grass-noting automatically that rains had been scanty here and so the herds
would not be plentiful later in the year-to the edge of the coulee, which at that point was some twenty feet
deep. Even a few years before, the stream at the bottom had been wider and stronger than it was now.
Barely a trickle flowed over gray and white rocks, and the sedge and cattail along its verge were thin
and weak, though on the whole the bottomland that lay for thirty or forty feet on either side of the water
was lusher than the prairie above. Cottonwood and lodgepole pine made light cover from bank to
waterside; lungwort, fleabane, and marigolds gemmed the grass.
The half-dozen bodies lay jumbled below in a clump of chokecherry. Their dogs had been thrown down
with them, the heavy-headed, heavy-shouldered fighting brutes of the Empty Lakes People.
The Icefalcon took a very cautious look around, then slithered down the bank some hundred feet from
the place, which he circled twice before coming close. Carrion birds were already gathered. He
wondered if Bektis would notice when they flew upward.
They settled again on the limbs of the cottonwood just above the bodies, below the line of the prairie's
edge.
There had been six in the scouting party. Five lay here, fairskinned like all the peoples of the Real World,
bronzed from the sun, their hair-flaxen or primrose or the gay hue of marigolds-braided and dabbled with
darkening blood.
Four had perished of stab wounds, and one bore the same lightning burns that had marked Rudy's face.
The sixth would be the man who ran out of the grove with his shirt burning, to fall in the long grass.
The Icefalcon waited, listening, for some little time more, then moved in and made from them a selection
of trousers, tunic, jacket, gloves, and cap wrought of wolf- or deer-hide, whose colors blended with the
hues of the prairie.
He changed clothes quickly and buried his black garments in a muskrat hole in the bank, piling brush to
conceal where he'd driven the earth in. His weapons and harness he kept; his boots as well, for none of
them had feet of his size, and boots would outlast moccasins on a long hunt.
He collected also all the food they carried, scout rations of pemmican, jerked venison and duck flesh,
pine nuts, and bison and raccoon fat sweetened with maple sugar. He hung the buckskin pouches and
tubes from his belt and shoulders, working fast, with one eye on the birds overhead.
When they flew up, he retreated, picking again the stoniest line of departure, which would show no mark
of his boots.
Rather to his surprise he knew the man who slipped down the bank from above and stole up on the
bodies, taking far fewer precautions about it than the Icefalcon considered necessary, but what could one
expect from the Empty Lakes People?
It was Loses His Way.
Loses His Way was a warchief and one of the most renowned warriors of the Empty Lakes People. He
had given the Icefalcon the scar that decorated the hollow of his left flank in a horse raid during the