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

There were petcocks and drains on the vat, and the straw underneath them, sodden and stinking, was
being cleared away. Sockets, too, made dark little mouths in the corners of the vat to accommodate
what looked like poles with ingeniously geared crank-wheels, but these had already been dismantled.
Where had they had gotten all of this? the Icefalcon wondered. And how had it survived the
centuries-decades of centuries, Gil said-since the Times Before?
Hidden away, as Gil and Maia had said?
It looked built to last, like all the possessions of the mud-diggers, who could not abide the thought of
anything they owned passing into dust.
In the lower part of the tent, on the straw and rough carpets of the floor, the Truth-Finder was packing
up a little box. Coming near, the Icefalcon saw that it contained needles made of crystal, dozens of them,
each with a bead on its head: amber, iron, crystal, black stone.
White Mustaches, whom Vair greeted as Nargois, came into the tent and asked a question in which the
Icefalcon recognized the words for corpses-only Vair used the word carcasses, the bodies of animals
and barbarians. Nargois assented, and Vair seemed pleased.
Nargois asked something about the Keep of Dare, and Vair shrugged as he replied. Though he knew of
it-how not?-the siege was clearly not a matter that deeply concerned him.
Eleven hundred men? Why not?
Blood-stench, magic, cold, and pain twisting at his mind, the Icefalcon left the tent. He saw no reason
why he could not go directly through the walls, and he was right: the scrape and itch of every layer of the
cheap black cloth and canvas, darkness, then the bright dry sunlight of the plains morning.
He investigated the other wagons as the men loaded them. Most contained food; one held weapons.
Two were packed with clothing, heavy furs and densely quilted jackets in addition to the loose,
bright-hued hand-me-down trousers and tunics worn by most of the men.
In another wagon he found crates of the type he had seen in the tent: heavy wood, draped with
demon-scares, and dimly glowing with the sickish pale light that played around the apparatus in the tent.
Some other apparatus, clearly.
May their Ancestors protect the folk of the Keep if it prove as evil.
But, of course, he thought, the Ancestors of the Keep folk could not protect them. The protection lay
only in Tir's memories-and it was the Icefalcon's failure that had separated Tir from them.
Outside, men were taking down the demon-scares from their poles, the last thing done before moving on.
One or two pocketed them if they thought they were unobserved. It was an easy matter for the Icefalcon
to leave the camp.
So Vair had machinery from the Times Before.
And a woman who claimed to be possessed of a spirit from those times, though Gil, who was wise in
many matters, considered her a fraud.
From a rise in the windswept lands, the Icefalcon watched the caravan draw away. The snapping of
whips, harness leather creaking, and the ceaseless bleat of sheep pierced him, musical as the light and the
smells and the terror of the demons who now, he saw, materialized from the air and drifted after the
wagons like thinly glowing sharks. The cold had grown on him, crippling and exhausting, drawing him
toward the unfulfilled promise of the sun's ascending disk.
Slowly he let himself drift upward, until he hung like his namesake hawk far above the smooth curves of
the land. His sight could follow the trace of the trail, a grass-filled groove paler than the surrounding hills,
all the way to the dark tuft of Bison Hill in the distance.
In the other direction that pale groove drove south, arrow-straight, the scuffed smudges like footprints
marking Vair's previous camps. Every draw and wash and coulee formed serpentine patterns of red and
sepia, silver agonizingly bright through the dust-green cottonwood and sedge.
He could see the rabbits in the brush, the fishlike glowing sinuosity of water elementals in the stream. He
was aware of the Empty Lakes People, riding in all directions still, scattered and broken after their defeat
and going back to their hunting trails, telling themselves they were fools who followed fools when
mammoth and uintatheria roved the draws.