"Barbara Hambly - Sun Wolf 2 - Witches of Wenshar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

THE WITCHES OF WENSHAR
Barbara Hambly

[19 sep 2002-scanned for #bookz]
[26 sep 2002-proofed for #bookz]

CHAPTER 1
"You may be a wizard, my lady," Sun Wolf said, tucking his big
hands behind the buckle of his battered sword belt, "but you're also the
biggest damn fool I've ever met in my life."
Every man has a gift, Starhawk sighed to herself. Why do I
choose to travel with a man whose gift is to be able to talk audibly
with his foot in his mouth up to the knee?
For one instant the sun-blasted garden with its small citrus trees
and hard, clayey red soil was utterly silent. Beneath the sharp black
lattice shadows of the bare arbor, the face of the Lady Kaletha, the
White Witch of Wenshar, went rigid with an indignation which was
three parts shock that anyone, let alone some roving barbarian in a
dusty sheepskin doublet and scarred boots, would dare speak so to
her. Her face paled against the dark red coils of her hair, and her
protuberant blue eyes blazed, but for the first moment she was literally
speechless. One of the little cluster of her ostentatiously black-clothed
disciples, misinterpreting, opened her mouth. Kaletha waved her silent.
"You barbarian pig." She had a voice like the clink of a dropped
gold coin upon stone. "Are you slandering me out of fear of what I
am-or jealousy of what I have?"
Behind her, her disciples murmured, nodding wisely to one
another. The gardens of Pardle Sho were public, occupying the
grounds of what had been the Governor's Palace back when the land
of Wenshar had been ruled by the Lords of the Middle Kingdoms;
across the vast open square of sand, two children chased each other
through the zebra shadows of the cloister, their voices shrill as birds in
the hot air.
After a moment Sun Wolf said, "I fear what you are, Lady."
 She drew breath to make some final point, but he cut in over her
words in a voice like the rasping of a rusted-out kettle. "What you are
is an armed idiot-if you're not simply a liar."
Turning, he walked away. The dark lace work of the vine
shadows rolled like the foam pattern on a wave along the lion-colored
leather of his doublet, and the Lady Kaletha was left with the
uncomfortable choice of giving him the last word or shouting her own
rebuttal in an undignified fashion after his retreating back.
Thumbs hooked in her sword belt, Starhawk followed him down
that hot, shaded colonnade and across the gardens to the street.

"You know, Chief," she remarked later, coming over with two tin
tankards of beer to the intense gloom of a corner of the Longhorn Inn's
common room, "sometimes your facility with words leaves me
breathless."
His single eye, amber as a tiger's under a long, curling tuft of fading