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

came to the open land that surrounded the Keep of Dare, the last refuge of humankind between the
Great Brown River and the glacier-rimmed horns of the Snowy Mountains, somber towers blotting the
western sky.
"You were fools not to come to the Keep when first you entered the valley." The Icefalcon glanced back
at them, man and woman, for the first time taking his eyes from the surrounding woods. "Where were you
bound? You must have seen it."
"Now listen here, boy-o," began the woman Hethya, apparently indignant at being called a fool, though
the Icefalcon would have been hard put to devise another term that covered the situation.
"No, niece, he's right," Linok sighed. "He's right." He straightened his bowed back-he was a little,
round-faced, stooped man, with blunt-fingered hands clinging to the ass' short-cropped mane-and
looked back at the Icefalcon walking behind them, long, curved killingsword still in hand.
"A White Raider, aren't you, my boy? And clothed as one of the King's Guard of Gae."
Civilized people, the Icefalcon had discovered, loved to state the obvious. In the improbable event that a
man of the Realm of Darwath-and they were a dark-haired people on the whole-had been flax-blond
and grew his hair long enough to braid, it was still unlikely in the extreme that he'd have had dried hand
bones plaited into the ends of it.
The bones were those of a man who had poisoned the Icefalcon, stolen his horse and the amulet that
guarded him from the Dark Ones, and left him to die. The Icefalcon saw no reason for civilized people to
be shocked about this, but mostly they were.
"Had you journeyed as far as we have, young man," Linok went on, shaking a finger at him, "in such
lands as the Felwoods have become in the seven years since the coming of the Dark, you'd beware of
anyone and anything you don't know, too. Cities that once were bywords of law and hospitality are nests
now of ghouls and thieves..."
His gestures widened to dramatic sweeps, like an actor declaiming. The Icefalcon wondered if Linok
sincerely believed that the Icefalcon had somehow missed these events or if he simply liked to hear
himself talk, a failing common among civilized people who didn't have to deal with the possibility of death
by starvation or violence as the result of ill-timed sound.
"The very Keeps themselves are no longer safe. Prandhays Keep, once the stronghold of the landchief
Degedna Marina, was breached and overtaken by outlaws who nearly killed us when we came there
seeking shelter. There is no trust to be found anywhere in this sorry and desolated world."
"Still," said Hethya softly, "it is not so bad as it was." Her voice altered, the broad dialect of the
Felwoods lands transmuting into something else, her carriage changing, as if she grew taller where she
walked at the donkey's head. "Nathion Aysas intios ta, they used to say: The Darkness covered the very
eyes of God."
The Icefalcon tilted his head at the unfamiliar words, of no language that he knew or had ever heard.
There was the echo of dark horror in the woman's eyes, and her whole face, in its frame of cinnamon
curls, grew subtly different.
"You mean in the days when the Dark Ones rose," he said.
Her laugh was soft, bitter, and strange, out of place in the lush-featured face. "Yes," she said. "I mean
when the Dark Ones rose."
Around them in the open meadow a half hundred or so sheep fled bleating, and the dozen cows raised
their heads to regard them with the mild stupid curiosity of bovine kind: all the livestock left to a
community of some five thousand souls.
The pasturage had been shifted again, as the rubbery, alien growth called slunch spread into what had
been the Keep's cornfields, and only a few of the fields themselves remained.
The ice storm that struck in the Summerless Year had accounted not only for most of the stock, but for
all but a few of the fruit trees as well, freezing them to their hearts.
Even the spells of the Keep's mages had been unable to revive more than a handful. Raised by magic
three and a half millennia ago, the black walls of the Keep itself stood isolated in the desolation.
Still, they stood, impervious to horror, night, and Fimbul winter in a world of glacier-crowned rock, and