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

Of his father, he had the memories of the House of Dare, memories of the line that stretched unbroken
back to the original Time of the Dark; memories uncertain, patchy, in no particular order, memories of
other people's mothers, other people's griefs.
Some members of his house had been spared these memories, the Icefalcon had been told. Others had
had them only in flashes, or sometimes in the form of hurtful, restless dreams. Minalde had them, too,
inherited from the House of Bes, a collateral of Dare's line. Sometimes Tir's eyes were three thousand
years old and more.
He'd be eight in high summer and looked it now, small face filled with wonder as he gazed up at this
newcomer from another world.
Hethya smiled looking down at him, and her expression softened. "I don't remember to her, me little
lord," she said. "I-I am her, in a way of speaking. Sometimes. She's like in a room in me head" she
tapped her temple-"and sometimes she only sits in that room talking to me, and sometimes she comes
out, and ... and then I have to sit in that room, and listen to the things she says, and watch the things she
does with me hands, and me feet, and me body."
Her brow creased again, and some remembered pain hardened a corner of her mouth. She looked aside
from Tir's too innocent eyes. After a moment she went on, "Sometimes she'll tell me things, or show me
things, things about the Times Before. It's hard to explain the way of it, between her and me."
"Rudy?" Minalde looked across to the young mage who was her lover, seated at a discreet distance with
his two colleagues in wizardry out of respect for the sensibilities-religious or political-of the Keep Lords
and the Bishop Maia. "Have you ever heard of such a thing?"
Rudy Solis shook his head. He, too, had changed, the Icefalcon thought, over the past seven years. Like
Gil-Shalos he was an outlander, son of an alien world.
When they had arrived in the train of Ingold the Wizard on the morning following the final destruction of
Gae, the Icefalcon had guessed immediately that Gil-Shalos, who now sat beside him in the loose black
clothing of the Guards, would survive. He had seen the warrior in her eyes.
Rudy he had not been so sure of. Even after the young man had found in himself the powers of the Wise
Ones-powers that evidently did not exist or were not accessible to humans in his own world-the
Icefalcon would not have bet the runt of a pot dog's litter on Rudy's survival.
He might do so today, he thought, but not much more. For all that Rudy had been through, under Ingold's
tutelage and on his own, like many civilized people he lacked the cutting blade of hardness in his soul.
"I've never heard of anything of the kind," he said. "Neither has Ingold, as far as I know. At least he's
never mentioned it to me."
He shook his long dark hair from his eyes, an unprepossessing figure in his laborer's clothes and his vest
of brightly painted bison-hide. "When we're done here, I'll contact him and ask."
"It is a most inopportune moment," put in the elderly Lord Ankres dryly, "for Lord Ingold to have
absented himself from the Keep." Gil-Shalos stiffened at this slight to the mage who was her lover, her
life, and the father of her young son, but as a member of the Guards it was not her place to speak out of
turn to one of the Keep Lords. Rudy answered, however.
"When you come to think of it, my Lord, there never is an opportune moment for Ingold to go
scavenging. I mean, hell, nothing ever happens in the winter because the bandits and the White Raiders
are as locked down by the weather as we are, but then Ingold can't get out, either. The only times he can
get to the ruins of the cities is in summer. Are you saying you'd rather he didn't find stuff like sulfur and
vitriol to kill the slunch in the fields? Or books?"
"He could leave the books for another time," responded the stout Lord Sketh. "There are things we need
more."
"Like a new brain for you, meathead?" muttered Gil under her breath.
"Be that as it may," Minalde intervened, with her usual artlessly exact timing, "the fact is that Lord Ingold
is at Gae just now and can be contacted easily by any of the mages here. Wend? Ilae? Have either of
you heard tell of such a thing, that one of the wizards of the Trnes Before should possess the mind and
soul of someone in our times?"