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

out indefinitely.
A couple of women were arguing about whose turn it was to shovel sheep dung. A man who hadn't been
in the battle was explaining to Lord Ankres how the attack could easily have been turned. Rishyu
Hetakebnion, hair a shambles of sweat and smoke, was quietly throwing up in a corner.
Minalde glanced back over her shoulder, at Melantrys and Janus setting the locking-rings of the inner set
of Doors. "And now we wait," she murmured. She rubbed her hand over her forehead-Gisa pulled on
her other hand, wanting as usual to dart away into the doorways that led to the compounds where cattle
and sheep were housed. "As soon as the storms clear, Yar will send men to help the Icefalcon..."
"If he needs it." Gil grinned, and Minalde was surprised into a wan answering smile. "It can't possibly be
more than a day or two, till they can start. Meanwhile Yar and his boys can give the guys outside a hard
time. We'll be okay."
"We'll be okay." She repeated the words as if forcing herself to believe and drew a long, shaky breath.
"And in time, these people ... What can they do? They can't get in. They'll strip the Vale of game, very
soon I should think, and what then? Wait until winter? Until they get tired? Until Ingold arrives?"
Gil folded her arms, looking around her at the heaps of fodder and provisions, twice head high and still
dwarfed by the Aisle's vastness. ("Provisions would be brought in from the surrounding country side...")
Men and women were settling down around the little piles of glowstones, with bales and bundles of sticks
and feathers and flint, to listen to storytellers while they made arrows, a wintertime occupation when there
was no game or when a storm kept them in.
At the Doors Ilae stood in a halo of witchlight, checking communication through her ruby with Brother
Wend, outside with Lank Yar's guerrillas. Janus and Lord Ankres went to her, asking about the black
river of men, of soldiers and slaves, of siege engines and provision wagons pooling before the Doors.
The only way in or out.
Impervious from the founding of the Keep.
Gil wondered if she should keep silent. But she knew she had to say what she thought. It might just be
true.
"The problem is, Alde," said Gil, "the warriors of the Alketch have to know that all they can do is sit
outside till winter comes and they get buried in snow. They have to know that we have wizards here and
would be able to see them coming, and get ourselves stocked up and locked down. So my questions is:
Why doesn't this bother them?"
Alde sighed, her shoulders slumping a little, and her face was again the face of a young girl. "I wish you
hadn't asked that," she said.
? Chapter 7

"I expected to be killed, you see, o my sister," said the Icefalcon, his voice no louder than the stirring of
wind in the grass that curtained the rims of the maze of coulees through which they rode.
"At the Moot, after Noon had gone up to the Haunted Mountain, I overheard Blue Child tell one of her
friends, 'I will see that you get Little Dancer and Sand Cat.' I forget what favor he promised her in return.
But I knew that she meant to kill me. Thus when Noon came down from the mountain and kissed me
with the kiss of death, I was ... suspicious. It felt, you understand, rather too pat."
It was good to ride again. Cold Death had three horses with her, of the short-coupled gray line of
Evening Star Horse, bred by Frogs Singing and his family in the Pretty Water Country; they traveled
sure-footedly and in silence through the red clay hills, the grasses of the bottomlands shoulder-high and
prodigal with wildflowers. Loses His Way, though in the Icefalcon's opinion not notably quick on the
uptake, would at least be a more than competent guard for Tir.
The Icefalcon's mind turned uneasily from what he knew of Vair na-Chandros and the potential evils of
Southron magic to what else might be waiting for him-for them all-here in the Real World.
Cold Death listened without comment to the Icefalcon's account of his life east of the mountains both
before and after the coming of the Dark: of his meeting with Eldor, of Ingold, of the Guards, and the
Keep, and Tir. She listened, too, without comment as he revealed what Loses His Way had told him