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

red-gold brow, flicked suspiciously up at her as she stepped casually
over the back of the chair next to his and settled into it. The leather
patch that covered the empty socket of his other eye was already
scuffed and weathered to the same shade as his sun-gilded skin, but the
telltale groove of years had not yet been worn across his forehead by
its buckskin thong.
Starhawk's face, as usual, was inscrutable as she handed him his
beer; features that would have been delicate, had not her original
uncomeliness of a long jaw and a square chin been added to, in the
course of nine years as a mercenary soldier, by a broken nose and
three inches of whitening scar that decorated one high, fragile
cheekbone. For the rest, she was a tall, rangy cheetah of a woman,
dressed in a man's leather breeches, embroidered shirt, and sheepskin
doublet. Her baby-fine blond hair was cropped short and, like Sun
Wolf's thinning red-gold mane and faded mustache, bleached out by
the sun of the K'Chin Desert, along whose northern edge they had been
traveling for four days.
Sun Wolf grumbled, correctly suspecting that what lay behind
those water-gray eyes was a deep and private amusement. "The
woman is a fool." His voice was like the wheezy creak of an unoiled
hinge, as if his vocal chords had all the flesh stripped from them, leaving
nothing but bare wire.
Starhawk took a sip of her beer. It was bitter, like all the beer in
the Middle Kingdoms, the color of mahogany, and very strong. "She's
also the only thing we've seen that remotely resembles a wizard since
we left Mandrigyn," she reminded him after a moment. "And since we
can't go back to Mandrigyn ... "
Sun Wolf brushed aside the reminder of his banishment from the
city that was known as the Jewel of the Megantic Sea. "The Wizard
King Altiokis lived and ruled for a hundred and fifty years," he growled.
"He destroyed any wizard with even a guess of the power that might
have challenged him. If this Kaletha woman has the powers she claims,
he'd have destroyed her, too."
Starhawk shrugged. "She could have kept them hidden until his
death. That was only nine months ago. Altiokis got much of his silver
from the mines of Wenshar-it's a sure bet Pardle Sho and every little
mining town along the cordillera was riddled with his spies. She has to
have remained silent, like Yirth of Mandrigyn did, in self-defense."
Sun Wolf wiped the beer foam from his thick, raggedy mustache
and said nothing.
Though the air in the common room was hot, still, and strangely
dense-feeling, not one of the half-dozen or so miners and drifters there
made a move to leave its indigo shadows for the striped
black-and-primrose shade of the awning of peeled cottonwood poles
outside. It was the season of sandstorms, as autumn drew on toward
winter. In the north, sailors would be making fast their vessels till spring
opened the sea roads again, and farmers re-chinking the thatch of their
roofs. Throughout the north and west and on to the cold steppes of the
east, all life came to a standstill for four months under the flail of those
bitter storms. Here in Wenshar, the southernmost of the Middle