"Barbara Hambly - Windrose 1 - The Silent Tower" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

what-the whisper of the winds of eternity along his uncovered bones. He pressed his
face to the stone of the wall, squeezing his eyes shut, unable to breathe. He felt in
danger, but his training, like his magic, had deserted him; he wanted to run, but knew
not in which direction safety would lie. It was not death he feared-he did not know
what it was.
Then the feeling was gone. Like a man dreaming, who feels even in sleep the
refreshing storm break the lour of summer heat, he felt the hideous weight of
hopelessness lift from him. Still pressed to the chill stone of the wall, Caris felt as if
he had waked suddenly, his heart pounding and his breathing erratic, but his mind
clear. His magic-that trace of intense awareness that all his life had colored his
perceptions-had returned. With it came a moment's blinding fury at himself for being
so child-simple as to wander abroad unarmed and barefoot.
His knees felt weak at the thought of what he knew he must do. It took all his
will to force himself to move forward again, crouching below eye level though he
knew that the man with the pistols was gone. It was the Way of the Sasenna never to
take chances.
Cautiously, he peered around the corner into the alley.
Filtered moonlight showed him the moss-furred cobbles, the battered walls of
the houses, and the glitter of noisome gutter-water in the canyon of dark. There was a
puddle right across the mouth of the lane, too wide to jump, but there were no prints
on the other side.
Caris turned back to where Thirle lay like a beached and dying whale in the
silver wash of the faint starlight. Lights were going up in the houses around the Yard,
and voices and footsteps made a muffled clamor on the edges of the darkness. As he
reached Thirle's side, Caris saw the dark glitter that covered all the breast of his robe.
With a guttural gasp, the fat man's body twitched, lungs sucking air desperately. Caris
fell to his knees beside him, and for one moment the dark, frantic eyes met his.
Then Thirle whispered, "Antryg," and died.
 "The police must be fetched."
The Archmage Salteris Solaris, kneeling beside Thirle's body, made no reply to
the words of the skinny old swordmaster, who stood in the little cluster of men and
women, Old Believers and novices, all clutching bedclothes about them and looking
down at the body with the wild eyes of those startled by gunshots from sleep. Caris,
kneeling beside him, looked from the corpse's eyes, staring blindly now at the faint
pearliness of false dawn visible between the crowding black angles of the roofs, to the
thin, aquiline features of his grandfather. The old man's white brows were pinched
down over the bridge of his nose, and there was grief in his eyes for the loss of one he
had known for so many yearsтАФgrief and something else Caris could not understand.
The old man glanced up at the crowd behind them and said "Yes-perhaps."
The Lady Rosamund, standing fully dressed even to the hyacinth stole of a
Council member-a mark of rank that the Archmage seldom wore sneered. As the
scion of one of the noblest houses in the land, she had little use for such bourgeois
institutions as the Metropolitan Police. "The constables will find some reason to wait
until light to come."
Salteris' thin mouth twitched in a faint smile. "Very likely." He looked back
down at the plump heap of black robes. In the soft glow of bluish witchlight that
illuminated the scene, hanging like St. Elmo's fire above his high, balding forehead
and flowing white hair, the muscles of his lean jaw tightened.
Something twisted inside Caris, and he put out a hand to touch the old man's
square, slender shoulder in comfort, but he remembered that he was sasenna and