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

which Noon would have passed on to me. She made Noon the weapon of her will, an old man in the last
summer of his strength. And he went to his death thinking me a coward and all his training of me gone to
nothing. For that I will not forgive her."
Slunch grew thick on the hills to their right, the rubbery blanket of it slopping down into a small stream.
From this a shambling band of bloated things toddled on swarms of wriggling legs.
The Icefalcon's horse-Scorpion Eater he was called-flung up its head and snorted, but Ashes, the mare
Cold Death had ridden these many years, only snuffled disapprovingly. Like one of the Talking Stars
People, she refused to be impressed by anything.
Or perhaps, thought the Icefalcon, in these days such sights were common enough in the Real World.
Rain swept over the country, a spring cloudburst common to those lands, though the Icefalcon had noted
already that they were fewer than they had been twelve years ago. Resting under a hazel brake at the
foot of a hill, the Icefalcon asked Cold Death to scry along his back trail, to Sarda Pass and the Keep,
though he was almost certain no one had followed him over the pass.
Clouds still sat on the mountain, livid below and blinding-white above, longer than the Icefalcon had ever
known a Wise One to tie weather-spells in place. Cold Death broke off a blade of needlegrass and
brushed it across the silver pool left in the old bison wallow and sat for a time with her brown legs drawn
up, gazing into the sandy shallow.
"The pass is thick with snow, o my brother." She glanced at him under long straight eyelashes, like a
thoughtful fox pup. "There are tracks of deer and rabbit in it, but the tracks of men always end in
avalanche spills-one, two, three of them. Nor does anyone come on the road from the place west."
"I thought Bektis seemed calm about it," remarked the Icefalcon. "There is a shaman in the Keep, an
outlander named Rudy Solis, the son of alien stars. Can you reach him? Speak to him?"
She repeated the name once or twice to herself as was the way of shamans, then brushed the water again
with the grass: the Wise Ones of the Real World did not use crystals as civilized mages did, but rather
things that came and went, like water and fire. Only among the Salt People did the shamans make
elaborate mirrors of blood and obsidian glass.
Water roared fresh in the stream they'd left, and wind still smelling of storm stirred the miscut crests and
locks of her inky hair. Her face was like a child's intent on a game. In time she shook her head. "He
doesn't reply."
"There is a woman named Ilae, then," the Icefalcon said. "She has red hair and plays a deer-bone flute;
she was born in Gettlesand in the Spring of Many Lemmings."
Cold Death went a third time to her gazing. The Icefalcon saw that she still bit her nails. His earliest
recollections were of her, a tiny plump girl whom no one ever saw during the time of the summer hunts,
such were the spells that she put on herself after their parents died.
Black-haired children were frequently shunned in the Real World, and sometimes abandoned to die
because they showed up against the dry prairie grass. Though Cold Death had cared for him diligently,
still Noon and his wife had taken him into their household under the impression that Cold Death had
disappeared, so unnoticeable had his older sister become.
"Are you Ilae?" said Cold Death suddenly, speaking to the pool. "Wonderful! I am Cold Death, sister to
the Icefalcon. Yes, he is here. He asks after the outlander Wise One Rudy Solis. She says he lives." The
last remark was addressed to the Icefalcon.
"I love your hair-you really ought to braid it with blue penstemon, in a crown on top," she added to Ilae in
the pool. "It would look gorgeous. She says he is unconscious still." She turned back to her brother.
"He has been so ever since the Guards carried him in. It is all she can do, she says, to hold him in life until
their eldest Wise One comes. He is on his way, she says, from the City of Walls."
"And does she have an explanation," asked the Icefalcon sarcastically, "for the fact that no one has
followed me over the pass to assist my rescue of Prince Tir? Should I perhaps give over the hunt and
return to the Keep again, if the matter is of so little concern?"
Cold Death conferred with her pool again. Ashes and the horse Scorpion Eater cropped the grasses
around the thicket, while the third mount, Afraid of Flowers, who had followed at Cold Death's bidding,