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

reached out and took her hand and squeezed it hard enough to hurt.
Later she asked, "Did you see Tir?" and Gil shook her head.
"I heard him call out Rudy's name," she said. In the soft double glow of lampflame and witchlight, Alde's
face seemed thin and old, an echo of the old woman she would one day be.
A woman who had lost the husband she adored and feared, and had seen the brother she had
worshipped turn tyrant and monster, who had survived the crumbling of her world and found in its wreck
a love like the rising of the stars.
"We saw his tracks a couple of times, when they let him off the donkey. I think that Hethya woman must
have gotten him out of the Keep to look at the caves along the north side of the Vale, and Bektis put a
glamour on one of those warriors he had with him to make Tir think it was Rudy."
Alde only nodded, her face an ivory death mask.
"I never thought Bektis would possess the power to hold storms so long after he had gone." Brother
Wend turned on his three-legged stool, drying his hands on a coarse hempcloth towel, a dark-haired little
man whose priestly tonsure had grown in when he left the Church, only to be replaced by his hairline's
early retreat. "Of course, he will always be a greater wizard than I, but..." He shook his head.
"He had a ... a device of some kind," said Gil. "This kind of crystal thing strapped on his hand. It may just
have been reflection, but it looked like it lit up when Bektis threw lightning or defended himself against
Rudy's spells. He's a stronger wizard than Rudy is anyway, but if it was a magnifier or amplifier of some
kind..."
Ilae looked up from grinding dried purple-bead roots in the mortar. "Does such a thing exist?"
"Who knows?" Gil replied. "We don't know what's been stashed away all these years, left over from the
Times Before. Ingold is always finding references to stuff the Church confiscated and hid and never
talked about."
"And with good reason, if legend is anything to go by." Maia stood in the doorway, his long face lined
with concern. "How is he?"
"About the same." Gil shrugged, hiding fear and anxiety, as the Icefalcon did. "Maybe other people hid
stuff, too, out of fear of the Church or of their neighbors. Now those places have been broken open, and
nobody's keeping an eye on them anymore." She glanced sidelong at Maia.
"Why do you think Ingold's been in such a panic to find books and implements and whatever other
apparatus he can?"
"There were certainly records in my episcopal palace of things I did not understand, hidden in places lost
to anyone's memory," the tall Bishop agreed. "We do not even know what may still be hidden in this
Keep, untouched since the Dark's first rising."
"And it's a good guess Govannin had a couple of secrets on hand. For all she carried on about mages
being soulless tools of Evil, she was quick enough to use black magic in anything she considered a good
cause. If Bektis ever did manage to break her hold on him, you can bet your best fur booties he'd help
himself to whatever he could stick in his pockets."
"How soon will the storm clear?" Alde, who had sat all this while with bowed head in silence, now
looked up at Wend. "How soon can a party go over the pass in pursuit?"
"I'll go out there in the morning," the physician promised. "Even the strongest spells disperse, if their
maker is not there renewing them. I'm not the weather-witch Bektis is, but I should be able to hasten their
breaking."
"How soon?" Her eyes were like the heart of the night, her voice porcelain, cold and friable, as if it would
shatter at a touch.
"Tomorrow afternoon?"
She whispered again, "Thank you." Her small hands closed around Rudy's brown, cold fingers, seeking
reassurance, perhaps hoping to hold his spirit to his flesh. She hadn't touched the tisane Linnet had
brought, or the supper, either. Gil knew better than to think that she would unless forced.
I'd better get some sleep, thought Gil. And pack.
She remembered the three identical warriors. Were others waiting to join Bektis once he got over the