"Hambly, Barbara - Dragon's Bane UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

lingering birds of autumn, thrushes and blackbirds, should
have been waking in the twisted brown mats of ivy that
half-hid the old inn's wallsЧthey were silent. After a
moment, she caught the scent of horses, and the ranker,
dirtier stench of men.

One bandit would be in the stumpy ruin of the old tower
that commanded the south and eastward roads, part of
the defenses of the ruined town left from when the pros-
perity of the King's law had given it anything to defend.
They always hid there. A second, she guessed, was behind
the walls of the old inn. After a moment she sensed the
third, watching the crossroads from a yellow thicket of
seedy tamarack. Her magic brought the stink of their souls
to her, old greeds and the carrion-bone memories of some
cherished rape or murder that had given a momentary
glow of power to lives largely divided between the giving
and receiving of physical pain. Having lived all her life
in the Winteriands, she knew that these men could scarcely
help being what they were; she had to put aside both her

Dragonsbane 3

hatred of them, and her pity for them, before she could
braid the spells that she laid upon their minds.

Her concentration deepened further. She stirred judi-
ciously at that compost of memories, whispering to their
blunted minds of the bored sleepiness of men who have
watched too long. Unless every illusion and Limitation
was wrought correctly, they would see her when she
moved. Then she loosened her halberd in its holster upon
her saddle-tree, settled her sheepskin jacket a little more
closely about her shoulders and, with scarcely breath or
movement, urged Moon Horse forward toward the ruins.

The man in the tower she never saw at all, from first
to last. Through the browning red leaves of a screen of
hawthorn, she glimpsed two horses tethered behind a
ruined wall near the inn, their breath making plumes of
white in the dawn cold; a moment later she saw the bandit
crouching behind the crumbling wall, a husky man in greasy
old leathers. He had been watching the road, but started
suddenly and cursed; looking down, he began scratching
his crotch with vigor and annoyance but no particular
surprise. He did not see Jenny as she ghosted past. The
third bandit, sitting his rawboned black horse between a
broken comer of a wall and a spinney of raggedy birches,
simply stared out ahead of him, lost in the daydreams she
had sent.