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

What warrior, after traveling nearly eight hundred miles from the Alketch, would still not know how to
harness mules?
Another man came up carrying bowls-the same man. Not just a pale man of the White Coasts, but
identical in face, in body, in the way he walked. A black sergeant in red-laced boots had to tell him
where to stow his burden. The Icefalcon looked around. There could not be so many pairs of twins in a
single company of warriors. Not just twins: sets of three and four, as alike as millet seeds.
Clones, Gil had said.
The Icefalcon looked again. Never more than four to a set, and only one of any set wore boots. The
other three had rawhide rags wrapped around their feet, as had the clone warriors he'd followed from the
mountains.
The rawhide strips were all new.
The men with full heads of hair, and boots, tried not to look at those without them. Sometimes they'd
mutter but most often only turned aside.
Vair na-Chandros passed him, close enough to touch, the reek of blood and attar of roses mingling in his
clothes. He was making for the black tent, the Truth-Finder walking quietly at his side. The Icefalcon
would sooner have picked up a live coal, but he followed them as they lifted the black curtains and
passed within.
Masses of lamps hung from the roof, like hornet's nests in a building deserted for three generations, but
fewer than half still burned. Most of the candles ranged on planks along the walls, or, standing clumped
on iron holders, were guttered to yellow phantasms of twisted wax, and the smell of spent oil, smoke,
and tallow mingled with the stench of rotted blood. You could have cut the block of air contained within
the tent with a wire, like cheese.
As the Icefalcon had already guessed, the blue cloth of the wagoncover had been tied back so that the
wagon itself made a raised annex onto the square chamber of the tent.
There were demon-scares everywhere, depending from every lamp-cluster and pole-end. Being in the
tent was like being devoured by ants. A couple of the clone warriors were taking down lampstands and
packing up candles. They'd be breaking the tent soon.
The tent contained what was almost certainly apparatus that dated from the Times Before.
Gil will be pleased, thought the Icefalcon.
It resembled in workmanship the little that the Icefalcon had seen at the Keep, the pieces from which
Rudy had constructed flamethrowers to fight the Dark Ones, and some of what had turned out to be
lamps in the crypts where the hydroponics tanks were.
A deep vat, or sarcophagus, occupied most of the wagon-bed. Wooden stairs went up to it, the straw on
them, and on the floor of the tent itself, so soaked in blood that it squished under the feet of the men.
The vat's curved sides were wrought of what looked like the same black stone as the outer walls of the
Keep, but within-the Icefalcon climbed cautiously to the wagon-bed to see-it was lined with silvery glass,
and like fragments of twig and leaf caught in ice, there seemed to be transparent crystals, shards of iron,
and tiny spheres of amber and obsidian embedded in the darkly shimmering inner layer.
A canopy of three linked half arches surmounted it, intertwined metal and glass-two men were taking
them down now. They wore boots and moved with more intelligence and purpose than did the clones,
and packed the apparatus carefully into great wooden crates, stuffing in wadding of dry grass, wool,
crumpled parchments, and rags of linen and rawhide.
At their apex the arches had been joined by a many-sided obsidian polyhedron and linked down their
sides with dangling nets of what appeared to be meshed gold wire, worn thin and tattered, and woven
with more spheres of glass and amber.
Two more polyhedrons, glass or crystal, tentacled in gold tubes and set on wooden plinths-the plinths
were raw-new-stood at the opposite end of the tub. One of the booted warriors boxed them up as the
Icefalcon watched.
To the Icefalcon's spirit sight, the whole of the apparatus shimmered with magic, and he understood why
Cold Death spoke of it with uneasiness and fear.