"Barbara Hambly - James Asher 1 - Those Who Hunt The Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

THOSE WHO HUNT THE NIGHT

Barbara Hambly



[18 Jun 2001 тАУ scanned for #bookz, proofread and released тАУ v1]




тАв One

"Lydia?"

But even before the shadows of the stairwell swallowed the last echoes of his wife's name, James Asher
knew something was des-perately wrong.

The house was silent, but it was not empty.

He stopped dead in the darkened front hall, listening. No sound came down the shadowy curve of the
stairs from above. No plump Ellen hurried through the baize-covered door at the back of the hall to take
her master's Oxford uniform of dark academic robe and mortarboard, and, by the seeping chill of the
autumn night that permeated the place, he could tell that no fires burned anywhere. He was usually not
con-scious of the muted clatter of Mrs. Grimes in the kitchen, but its ab-sence was as loud to his ears as
the clanging of a bell.

Six years ago, Asher's response would have been absolutely unhesi-tatingтАФtwo steps back and out the
door, with a silent, deadly readiness that few of the other dons at New College would have associated
with their unassuming colleague. But Asher had for years been a secret player in what was
euphemistically termed the Great Game, innocu-ously collecting philological notes in British-occupied
Pretoria or among the Boers on the veldt, in the Kaiser's court in Berlin or the snowbound streets of St.
Petersburg. And though he'd turned his back on that Game, he knew from experience that it would never
completely turn its back on him.

Still, for a moment, he hesitated. For beyond a doubt, Lydia was somewhere in that house.

Then with barely a whisper of his billowing robe, Asher glided back over the threshold and into the raw
fog that shrouded even the front step. There was danger in the house, though he did not consciously feel
fearтАФonly an ice-burn of anger that, whatever was going on, Lydia and the servants had been dragged
into it.If they've hurt her . . .

He didn't even know whothey were, but a seventeen-year term of secret servitude to QueenтАФnow
KingтАФand Country had left him with an appalling plethora of possibilities.

Noiseless as the Isis mists that cloaked the town, he faded back across the cobbles of Holywell Street
to the shadowy brown bulk of the College wall and waited, listening. TheyтАФwhoever "they" were in the
houseтАФwould have heard him. They would be waiting, too,
 Lydia had once asked himтАФfor she'd guessed, back in the days when she'd been a sixteen-year-old
schoolgirl playing croquet with her uncle's junior scholastic colleague on her father's vast lawnsтАФhow he