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

railless stone bridges that cut the black expanses of floor.
At the Aisle's far end, pale daylight leaked through the Doors, the single entrance to the whole of the
Keep's great inner dark: two pairs of massive metal portals separated by the twenty- or thirty-foot
thickness of the outer wall itself.
Dare's Keep. The final stronghold. Unbreachable by the Dark that had shattered the world.
"Both she and that uncle of hers have been eating pretty good," said Gil, and twisted a tendril of her dark
hair around one of the sharpened sticks that held it out of the way.
"And there's a limit to what you can pack on a donkey. But mostly what tips me off is that she thinks-or
she says this Oale Niu bird says-that the Keep is powered by machinery. She thinks that the heart of the
Keep is a machine. And that would be true for Keeps like Prandhays and the Black Rock Keep in
Gettlesand. Keeps where a wizard, a mage, didn't sacrifice himself or herself to enter into the heart of the
Keep as a source of magic to keep it going. If Oale Niu really were a mage from the Times Before, she'd
know about that. She'd know about Brycothis."
She spoke softly the name of the wizard who had sacrificed herself: Ancestor in a way, the Icefalcon
thought, of all those who lived here. When first he had been told the secret of the Keep, known only to a
handful, he wondered why he had not guessed it already.
There was life here in the lamp-sprinkled midnight among the catwalks overhead, life in the flow of the
moonless water along the streams of the floor, life in the breathing of the air. The life of the Keep, like the
spirits that dwelled in rocks and trees, in the ocean and in each of the thousand thousand stars. It was the
only time he had heard of a human being transforming herself into a spirit, the ki of a place, but it did not
surprise him.
The spirit was the mage Brycothis, who had abandoned her body and been absorbed into the magic
walls to draw power from the earth and channel it to the uses of her people within those walls forever.
Sometimes he wondered that everyone in the Keep did not guess. At other times, after he had been
dealing with these civilized people for a while-mud-diggers, the Talking Stars People called them, these
people who had lived so long so fat and easily, with their wheat fields and their furniture and their clothing
that tied up one's sword-hand-it did not surprise him at all. Civilized people would have trouble guessing
what was amiss should a uintatherium take up residence in their parlors.
"But why here?" he asked. "Why make up such a tale?"
"Because we've got food here." Gil shrugged. "And we've got the only setup that guarantees production
of food. Since those bandits took over Prandhays Keep last summer, we're just about the last stronghold
for the length of the Great Brown River, from Penambra to the Ice in the North, and the most productive.
You know how many bandits these days are from the Alketch, soldiers displaced by fighting there since
the old Emperor's daughter gathered troops and threw out the general who thought marrying her against
her will would be a good way to become Emperor himself, the more fool he."
"They are fools," said the Icefalcon dismissively, "the Alketch." The original owner of the finger bones he
wore in his braids had been a prince of the Alketch.
A door in the Aisle's south wall, and a dark vestibule, led them into the watchroom of the Guards. The
triple-sized cell was bright with glowstones-ancient crystal polyhedrons that shed a kind of stored
magelight-and redolent of the warm reek of potatoes, venison stew, and sweaty wool. Sergeant Seya
was playing pitnak with one of the rookies-Gil glanced at the sergeant's tiles and shook her head.
"If our girl Hethya was passing herself off as some kind of ancient wizard to gain status wherever she
lived," she continued, turning back to the Icefalcon, "Alketch bandits' religious scruples might not have
stretched to keeping her around, especially once they found out she couldn't come across with anything
useful. You know what the Church in the South does to wizards. My bet is she and Uncle Linok had to
get out of there fast."
"So they stole a donkey," said the Icefalcon, "and came here ... For what purpose? To hoax us?"
"At a guess. To buy status. Maybe they thought we wouldn't let them in. Everyone loves a good story."
"Civilized people do," retorted the Icefalcon, who wasn't about to admit to a weakness of that kind.
"They could make a good living," he added thoughtfully, "just selling the donkey."