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

Kingdoms on the borders of the desert, even the few hardy herds of
cattle grazing the patches of scrub that passed for oases were chivvied
in to closer pastures near the foothill towns, and the silver miners strung
lines of rope from their dwellings to the pitheads, lest the burning
sand-winds rise while they were between one point and another, and
the darkness come on so swiftly that they would be lost.
Deceptively idle-seeming, Starhawk scanned the room.
Like half the buildings in Pardle Sho, the Longhorn was adobe
brick and about fifty years old. Its low roof, thirty-five feet long and
less than ten from side to side, was supported by rafters of stripped
scrub pine whose shortness gave every adobe building in the town the
appearance of a hallway. The older buildings of the town, erected of
stone when Pardle Sho was the administrative center through which the
Lords of Dalwirin ruled the Desert Lords of the wastelands beyond,
were spacious and airy. According to Sun Wolf, who knew things like
that, the smallest of those stone houses fetched seven times the price of
any adobe dwelling in the town. Looking up at the blackened lattices of
rafter and shadow over her head, Starhawk had to concede that the
buyers had a point. Adobe was cheap and fast. The men and women
who'd come over the mountains, first as slaves, then as free
prospectors, to work the silver mines and eventually to wrest them and
the land of Wenshar from those who had held them before, often could
afford no better.
One of the first wars Starhawk had fought in, she recalled, had
been some border squabble between Dalwirin, closest of the Middle
Kingdoms north of the mountains, and Wenshar. She remembered
being a little surprised that, approached by both sides, Sun Wolf had
chosen to take Wenshar's money. She'd been twenty-one then, a silent
girl only a year out of the convent which she'd abandoned to follow the
big mercenary captain to war; a few weeks of defending the black
granite passes of the Dragon's Backbone had shown her the wisdom of
taking defense rather than attack on such terrain.
Sipping her beer, she remembered she hadn't had the slightest idea
what to do with the prize money after the campaign. Sun Wolf, if she
recalled correctly, had used his to buy a silver-eyed black girl named
Shadowrose who could beat any warrior in the troop at backgammon.
She glanced across at the man beside her, his gold-furred
forearms stretched before him on the table, picturing him then. Even
back then, he'd been the best and certainly the richest mercenary in the
length and breadth of the old boundaries of the fallen Empire of
Gwenth. He'd had both his eyes then and a voice like a landslide in a
gravel pit; the thin spot in his tawny hair had been small enough that he
could deny its existence. His face had been a little less craggy, the
points of bone on the corners of his bearlike shoulders a little less
knobby. The deep silences within his soul had been hidden under the
bluster of crude sex and physical challenge, which some men used to
conceal their vulnerabilities from other men.
He sat now with his back to the corner of the room, as usual, his
blind left eye toward her. She was the only person he allowed to sit on
that side. Though she saw no more of his face than the broken-nosed