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

into the earth around him, like shining roots.
The sharp air from the cave's low opening filled the tiny space with fog, through which the wan blue
spirit-fires glowed like tiny suns on a day drowned in mist. Sleepiness closed over his mind.
"You'll want to stop and look at everything." Her fingertip was cold over his hands. "Don't. You're
vulnerable to everything-demons, elementals, rain, wind. The sight of the sun itself. If you get lost, you'll
never find your way back. Look for the ground first. Don't forget to watch your back trail."
Back trail, he thought dreamily. Like tracking in strange country. He tried to remember what that
long-ago scout had told him.
"No one is ever really prepared for what it's like." She stuck blades of grass and twigs of the elder
tree-whose ancestor was one of the Fifteen Dream Things-into the crossings of the lines. "Not the first
time, not the tenth time, not the twentieth. You will be terrified. You have to remember what your flesh
was like, every moment, and there will be many things to make you forget. You cannot become
unconscious, and you cannot sleep. Do you understand?"
He murmured, "I understand."
"Take three deep breaths, then," she said, sounding very far away. "And on the third your spirit will go
out of your body. Remember that I'm here waiting."
One. Two.
He was alone, hanging in the brilliant air. Sunlight pierced him like lances, needles of pain. He was colder
than he could ever remember being, empty, and terrified.
He couldn't breathe. (Of course, you fool, you have no lungs) But having no lungs did not mean that he
did not feel as if he were trapped underwater in that final second before the lungs give out and inhale
death. Only that second went on and on.
It was like being naked in bitter winter.
It was like the first moment after one has been thrust from the only home one has ever known, the curses
of those inside ended only by the silence of the closing door.
It was like falling, only he did not seem to be getting any closer to the ground.
Look for the ground first. But the first thing he saw was the sun. It stood just above the eastern horizon
still, but filled the dry air with powdered gold. He found he could look at it without injury to his eyes (You
have no eyes), and the novelty of that sensation kept him looking, drinking in its light, shaken to his heart
by the dense glory of its fire.
He watched it rise. Grandly, slowly, calmly ...
No wonder they didn't let young adolescents do this.
He was the Icefalcon, he thought. He was the Icefalcon. He had to rescue Tir.
He had to meet Blue Child in battle, when all was done. He had to return to his people.
Look for the ground.
He looked down and was swept by wonder and delight. The world was a jewel of topaz, sepia, and a
thousand breath-fine gradations of burning green. Threadlike silver lace marked the bottom of the little
water cut, the greater water into which it flowed a jumble of diamond-sewn brown silk down the coulee's
heart.
Every leaf and twig of the chokecherry bush over the cave-mouth blazed clear and individual, as if
incised, and the tiniest, most fragile wisps of the mists from the heat-spell were each an infinite
enchantment to be studied, reveled in, adored.
The grasslands were a wonderment beyond wonderment, shape and texture and scent that made him
want to rub his face against them as against velvet, the bison shaggy houses with frost in their curly fur.
Far off, minute and perfect, lay the exquisite ring of a prairie-dog town.
The twelve blue wagon-tops made a circle in the emerald grass, the horses, streaming out from the
opening, a school of brown and black and golden fish. Foreshortened warriors in bronze or sable leather
milled about the pale daytime cook fire.
The black tent was a square of horror against the wagon's square of midnight blue.
Ah.