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

"I need to know," he said, speaking to her now not as his sister but as a shaman. "We all need to know.
And I could not protect you while you slept."
"Even so," she said, and sighed, knowing he spoke truth. "But if it is a demon in the camp that they have
summoned..."
"Whatever is there, it is no demon." He gestured to the amulets, like unholy fruit glittering in the new light.
"And if there are wardspells in the camp, or some other form of spirit power that will tell them of my
presence, the best time for me to enter is while they are breaking camp."
She spread her hands palm out in surrender. "So be it, then," she said. "Come."

"You go quick, now." Hethya unknotted the rope that pinched agonizingly around Tir's wrists. "He's
looking into that crystal of his, so he'll be busy awhile. Don't go far."
"I won't." Tir was sufficiently grateful that this woman let him go into the woods alone to relieve himself,
instead of taking him on a rope as Bektis did, that he wouldn't have gotten her into trouble by running
away. Besides, he knew perfectly well there was nowhere to go. He might only be seven years old, but
he knew he could not survive alone in the badlands. Whatever was happening, he was safer with
Bektis-which, as Rudy would say, was a pretty scary mess to be in.
He could not rid his mind of the image of Rudy being struck by Bektis' lightning, buckling slowly forward
over the cliff, falling into whirling darkness. Beside Hethya's soft-breathing warmth at night he saw it over
and over again, as if it were caught like the images in Gil's record crystals, repeating itself exactly the way
it had happened for all eternity. He wanted Rudy and he wanted his mother and he wanted his friends
and his home, and he knew that he might never, ever see any of them again.
He knew not to go far into the woods. Hethya was watching him-turning around he could see her broad
face, her rough rusty curls and the topaz-and-snuff patterns of her quilted jacket-but he knew, too, that if
any trouble arose, like the White Raiders who'd attacked them the day before yesterday, that she was
too far off to help.
From Tir's earliest memories there had been bandits, dire wolves, saber-teeth, and sometimes even
White Raiders in the Vale of Renweth, in spite of all the patrols by Janus and the Guards. He had a
healthy respect for the green-on-green isolation among the cottonwoods, boulders, and fern.
He was coming back toward camp when he found one of the Akulae dead.
The man lay on his side at the bottom of a little slope, in a nest of fern and wild grape. Tir could see no
blood. It wasn't the man who'd been wounded in the fight, but Tir didn't know which of the other two it
was.
His white-stubbled face, half turned up toward the dapple shade of elms and cottonwoods, was calm,
stoic, and a little stupid, as it had been in life.
Tir looked around quickly. There was no danger in sight. ("It isn't the saber-tooth you see that kills you,"
the Icefalcon would have pointed out.) Taking a deep breath, the boy scrambled down the clayey slope.
Closer to, the body smelled of death, but not of blood. It smelled of something else, too, an ugly decay
Tir couldn't recognize or define.
What if the Akula had died of the plague? Gil and Rudy and Ingold all said plague got spread by bugs
too tiny to see. What if they were all over this body just waiting to jump off like fleas and onto him?
But at the same time he thought this, he was looking around, pulling a handful of big leaves off the
wild-grape vine-from underneath where it wouldn't show-to shield his hands. He unbuckled the dead
man's belt and pulled his dagger free, sheath and all. The leaves were awkward, and he threw them
away-if he dropped dead of the plague, he thought, it couldn't be any worse than what might happen to
him if he didn't have a weapon in an emergency.
He buckled the belt on the dead man again, and with some difficulty worked the dagger down into his
own boot, on the inside of his leg, and pulled his trouser over to cover the hilt. There wasn't time for
more. Hethya would be watching for him the moment his head disappeared from the bushes. He
scrambled fast up the bank again, calling out, "Hethya! Hethya!"
He remembered to sound scared, so they wouldn't think he'd gone down to the body.