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

stopped himself with the gesture unmade. He was used to death, as the sasenna must
be. He had killed his first man at fifteen; the schools of the sasenna were given
prisoners condemned to die by the Emperor or the Church, for even in peacetime,
they said, the sword blade must learn the taste of flesh. As the sworn weapon of the
Council of Wizards, he would have cut Thirle's throat himself, had they ordered it.
But still, it had been many years since anyone he had known personally had died. A
little to his shame, he found that the training had not changed that shocked grief of
loss, and anger stirred in him that anyone would cause the Archmage pain.
Salteris stood up, his black robes falling straight and heavy around his thin
form. For all his snow-white hair, for all the worn fragility that had begun to come
over him in the last few years, he took no hand to help him. "We should get him
inside," he said softly. He looked over at the two sasenna who had been on patrol duty
that night. When they opened their mouths to protest that they had been in the alleys
on the far side of the Yard, he waved them quiet. "It was no one's fault," he said
gently. "I believe Thirle was killed only because he was in the man's way as he fled
-perhaps because Thirle saw him and would give the alarm."
"No," a cracked, thin old voice said from the darkness of Stinking Lane. "You
forgot about the Gate-the Gate into the Darkness-the Gate of the Void . . ."
Salteris' head turned sharply. Caris stepped forward in a half-second of reflex,
readying himself to defend his grandfather, then relaxed once more as he recognized
the voice. "Aunt Min?"
From the shadows of Stinking Lane, the bent form of the old lady who had once
been known throughout the Council as Minhyrdin the Fair hobbled determinedly, her
black robes coming untucked from her belt and dragging in the puddles, her
workbasket with its everlasting knitting dangling haphazardly at her side.
Half-exasperated, half-concerned for the old lady, Caris hurried forward to take her
fragile arm.
"You shouldn't be up and about, Aunt Min. Not tonight . . ."
She waved the remark fussily away and twisted her head on her bent spine to
look up at Salteris and Lady Rosamund, who had also come to her side. "There is evil
abroad," she piped. "Evil from other worlds than this. Only a curtain of gauze
separates us from them. The Dark Mage knew . . ."
Salteris held up his hand quickly against that name, his silky white brows
plunging together. Caris glanced quickly from him to Aunt Min, who had returned to
fussing with the trailing strands of her knitting, and then back. "Other worlds?" he
asked worriedly. His eyes went unwillingly to the dark maw of the alley, an uneven
agglomerate of dim stone angles, with the gutter picking up the quicksilver light of
the sky like a broken sword blade. "But-but this is the world. There is no other. The
Sun and Moon go around us . . ."
Salteris shook his head. "No, my son," he said. "They've known for years now
that it is we who go around the Sun, and not the Sun around us, though the Church
hasn't admitted it yet. But that is not what Aunt Min means." He frowned unseeing for
a moment into the distance. "Yes, the Dark Mage knew." His voice sank to a whisper.
"As do L" He put his arm around the old lady's stooped shoulders. "Come. Before all
else, we must get him inside."
They sent one of the night-watch sasenna-the only two sasenna to be
dressed-for a physician. Rather to Caris' surprise, it was less than a half-hour before
he arrived. In the low-roofed closeness of the Archmage's narrow study, Caris was
telling Salteris, Lady Rosamund, and old Aunt Min of what he had seen-the
pistol-shots, the chase, the terrible Gate of Darkness-when he heard the swift tap-tap