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

"It fares well, she says." A little frown puckered between Cold Death's sparse brows. "She says the
southern warriors have not even essayed to break the Doors."
"Have they not?" The Icefalcon settled his back to one of the rocks among which they crouched, down in
the coulee where the night lingered blue, and folded his long arms about his drawn-up knees.
He felt no surprise.
The merchant came to mind, the brown-faced southerner who had claimed to be from Penambra, the
man who had told Ingold about the cache of books in the villa in Gae. He had spoken the name of
Harilomne the Heretic. And Ingold had gone.
It didn't take a Wise One or a scrying glass to deduce that the man had been dispatched by Vair.
Overhead, vultures made a slow silent pinwheel above the bodies of the slain.
The Icefalcon plucked a little dried venison from his bag and chewed it thoughtfully. "How fares Rudy
Solis?"
Cold Death relayed the query to Ilae. The Icefalcon imagined Ilae herself, sitting in all probability in the
long double cell the wizards used as a workroom, with its battered table of waxed oak and its great
cupboards filled with scrolls, tablets, books salvaged from every library and villa they could get to, from
the western ocean to the Felwoods.
Rank after polyhedronal rank of record crystals glittered frostily on shelves, the images of the Times
Before for all those who could read them. He wondered if Gil would be there, too, studying the crystals
by means of the black stone scrying table in the corner, seeing in it the faces of the mages who by their
spells and arcane machinery had raised the Keeps against the first incursion of the Dark.
Single-minded and essentially lazy-for it was reasonable to rest and conserve energy when not either in
an emergency or preparing for one-the Icefalcon regarded Gil's obsessive studies with some
bemusement.
She had for years now been piecing together histories, both of the three and a half millennia that had
transpired between the first arising of the Dark and the second, and of the Times Before, trying to learn
what she could of the world the Dark had long ago destroyed.
This she did, she told him, as he would have sought knowledge of a trail long cold, by scratches on rocks
or seeds in crumbling dung.
That she would or could do so while maintaining the brutal training required of the Guards and caring for
a son now able to toddle purposefully in the direction of anything that could conceivably be complicated
was, to the Icefalcon, merely an example of the alienness of her nature.
"She says he still lies unconscious." Cold Death's sweet murmur brought him from his thoughts. She held
out her hand and he passed her the leathern tube-Cold Death was much enamored of venison sweetened
with maple sugar. "The Lady Alde tends him, she says, and has not slept. She is much distressed."
"The child Tir is her son."
A shift in the voices of the men, the doleful complaint of mules, snagged his attention, and he swung up
the stones of the low cliff until he could just put his head over the grass on the rim.
But it was only breakfast ready, not breaking camp just yet. They were lazy as bears in summer, these
southerners. Some of the men gathered around the cook fires, holding out wooden plates and bowls
made of gourds. Their heads were bald as new-birthed babies, their feet not clad in boots but, like the
feet of Bektis' three clone warriors, wrapped in rawhide.
It was too far to distinguish clearly, but he thought they were all of the same height, the same build.
In the morning stillness the walls of the black tent hung straight, seeming to absorb the light of the pallid
sun. The demon-scares flashed on their poles like the corpses of crystal insects, sinister and bright.
He slipped down the rocks to Cold Death once again. "Can you speak with the Wise One Ingold
Inglorion?" he asked. "He was once called Olthas Inhathos, the Desert Walker, among the White Lakes
People."
"Ah," said Cold Death softly, and smiled. She licked the venison grease from her fingers and plucked
another grass blade, which she passed over the tiny pool in the rocks, no more than a cupped handful
and frozen with last night's cold, and considered it with brightblack prairie-dog eyes.