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

northwest, seeking an inconspicuous place to regain the prairie above.
"I departed," said the Icefalcon. "Though I fail to see how my comings and goings are the affair of the
Empty Lakes People."
"Blue Child is now the warchief of the Talking Stars People," said Loses His Way. "Even before the
coming of the Eaters in the Night this was reason enough for concern among those of us who hunt the
same mammoth and pasture our horses in the same ravines. Now that the mammoth move south, and
white filth grows in the ravines of the homelands-now that the ice in the North rolls south to cover valleys
that once belonged to the Empty Lakes People-it is a matter for concern that she rules your people
instead of you."
The cliff was lower toward the northwest, and the Icefalcon recalled how squirreltail grass grew thicker in
that direction, amid stands of juniper brush that masked the cliff's rim from the direction of Bison Hill.
Under cover of these junipers the two men scrambled up and glided through the thickets to higher
ground.
At the cliff's top a dark shaggy shape rustled up to them out of the grass, a yellow-eyed war-dog, burned
like Loses His Way over his shoulders and back, like Loses His Way mourning his losses and his pain in
silence.
He licked the warchief's hand and wriggled with grateful joy to have his ears rubbed-sniffed the Icefalcon
suspiciously but followed in silence. The Icefalcon raised up on his knees to put his head above the
clusters of leaves but saw no sign of travelers as far as he could look west along the road.
They were evidently staying put for the day.
"For one thing, the Empty Lakes People never owned a thumbbreadth of the land in the North," he
pointed out. "The starlight wrote our names on forest and stone from the Haunted Mountain across to the
Night River Country, and ours it remains, Ice or no Ice, forever. Will these take you and your brother
here back to your people?"
He nodded to the dog and held out to Loses His Way two tubes of pemmican and one of the several
sacks of pine nuts. "I hunt this Wise One and his warriors, and in the North I am told the white filth grows
thick. There is no hunting in it. I need all I can carry."
The brilliant eyes narrowed. "You hunt this Wise One? I thought you had returned to find Gsi Kethko."
"Gsi Kethko?'' The name had two meanings. In the tongue of the Salt People it signified the
hallucinogenic pods of the wild morning-glory, but in the more melodic (and altogether more perfect)
language of the Talking Stars People it meant the Antlered Spider, one of the fifteen Dream Things that
sometimes carried messages from the Watchers Behind the Stars.
"The Wise One," Loses His Way amplified.
"He was a member of Plum's family," remembered the Icefalcon, not sure why the warchief thought he
should be interested. "A little man so high who dressed his hair with elm twigs. He stayed with us when
we camped on the Night River just before the Summer Moot, the year that I departed. I don't think he
was a very good Wise One. We nearly starved to death waiting for him to charm antelope, and his
information about the salt grass along the Cruel River left a great deal to be desired. Why would I seek
out the Antlered Spider?"
"I thought he might have spoken to someone else concerning the spells he laid on the dreamvine that your
old chief Noon took, at the Summer Moot in the Year of the White Foxes, the year that you left."
Loses His Way turned the end of one of his mustache braids around his finger, but his eyes did not leave
the Icefalcon's face in the piebald shadows of the thicket. The Icefalcon felt a coldness inside him, as if he
already knew what else his enemy was going to say.
"The draft is prepared on the night the chief takes it," the Icefalcon said, his soft, husky voice suddenly
flat. "He himself gathers the dreamvine before he goes up to the mountain. There can be no spells laid on
it since no one else touches the pods."
"According to Antlered Spider, Noon always gathered the pods in the same place," the warchief replied.
"Along Pretty Water Creek, between the white rock shaped like a tortoise and the three straight
cottonwoods."