"Hambly,.Barbara.-.Darwath.1.-.Time.of.The.Dark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

There was only wind, and darkness. Gil stirred, her body one undifferentiated ache, frozen to the bone. The motion brought her stomach up into her throat. She felt as if she had swum a long way in rough cold water after a heavy meal, sickened and exhausted and weak. There seemed to be a weight of warm velvet clutched in her tired arms, a taste of earth and grass in her mouth, and the rankness of smoke in her jacket and hair.
All around her, there was no sound but the wind.
Painfully, she sat up. The child in her arms was silent. Under wispy starlight, she could make out bleak, rounded foothills stretching away in all directions around her, stony and forsaken, and combed incessantly by the ice-winds out of the north. Close beside her lay Ingold, face down, all but invisible in the darkness save for the faint edge of starlight on his drawn sword. A little farther away Rudy Was sitting, curled in a semifetal position with his head clasped between his hands.
She asked, "You okay?"
His voice was muffled. "Okay? I'm still trying to figure out if I'm alive." He raised his head, his dark, slanting eyebrows black in the starlight against the whiteness of his face. "Did youЧwere youЧ?"
She nodded.
He dropped his head back to his hands. "Christ, I was hoping it was all a hallucination. Are weЧwherever Ingold comes from?"
He still won't say it out loud, Gil thought. She looked around her at the ghostly pewter landscape, indistinct under the starlight, and said, "We're sure not in California."
Rudy got up, stumbling as he came over to collapse beside her. "The kid okay?"
"I don't know. I can't wake him. He's breathingЧ" She pressed her fingers to the child's waxy cheek, brought her lips close to the little rosebud mouth, and felt the thin trickle of breath. "Ingold said two crossings in twenty-four hours could do him a lot of harm."
"The way I feel now, I don't think I could survive another one no matter when I did it. Let's see." He took the child from her, joggled him gently, and felt how cold his face was. "We'd better wake Ingold. Does this place have a moon?"
"It should," Gil said. "Look, the constellations are the same. There's the Big Dipper. That's Orion there."
"Weird," Rudy said, and brushed the long hair back from his face. He turned to scan the barren landscape. Shoulder upon shoulder, the hills massed up to a low range of mountains in the north, a black wall of rock edged with a starlit knife blade of snow. Southward, the rolling land closed them in, except for a dark gap through which could be glimpsed the remote glimmer of a distant river. "Wherever the hell we are, we'd better get someplace fast. If any more of those things show up, we're in deep yoghurt. Hey!" he called to Ingold, who stirred and flung out one groping hand to catch the hilt of his sword. "Stay with us, man."
"I'll be all right," Ingold said quietly.
Lying, Gil thought. She touched his shoulder, found his mantle splotched all over with great patches of charred slime that brushed off in a kind of flaky, blackish dust. Her own right sleeve was covered with it, the back of her hand and wrist smarting and scorched. The Dark One, in dying, had come very close to taking them all.
Ingold half-rolled over, brought his hand up, and rubbed his eyes. "Is the Prince all right?"
"I don't know. He's out cold," Gil said worriedly.
The wizard sighed, dragged himself to a sitting position, and reached out to take the baby from Rudy's arms. He listened to Tir's breath and stroked the tiny face gently with one scarred hand. Then he closed his eyes; for a long time he seemed to be meditating. Only the thin moaning of the wind broke the silence, but all around them the night was alive with danger. Gil and Rudy were both aware of the depth of the darkness as they had never been, back in the world of Southern California, where there was always a glow in the sky from somewhere, competing with moon and star. Here the stars seemed huge, intent, staring down with great, watchful eyes from the void of night. Darkness covered the land, and their one brief contact with the Dark was all Rudy and Gil had needed to make them conscious of how unprotected they were, how uneasy with the ancient fear of being in open ground at night.
At length Tir gave a little sob and began to cry, the weak, persistent cry of an exhausted baby. Ingold rocked him against his chest and murmured unintelligible words to him until he grew silent again, then held him, looking for a moment into the dark distance, idly stroking the fuzzy black hair. For a moment Gil saw, not a wizard rescuing the Prince and heir of the Realm, but only an old man cradling the child of his dead friend.
Finally he looked up. "Come. We had best move on."
Rudy got stiffly to his feet and gave first Gil, then Ingold, a hand up. "Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that," he said as the wizard handed Gil the child and proceeded to wipe his sword blade on the corner of his mantle and sheathe it. "Just where can we go to, clear the hell out here?"
"I think," the wizard said slowly, "that we had best make for Karst, the old summer capital of the Realm, some fifteen miles from here in the hills. Refugees from Gae have gone there; we can get shelter, and food, and news, if nothing else."
Rudy objected uneasily. "That's a helluva long way to go truckin' around in the middle of the night."
"Well, you may stay here, of course," the old man agreed magnanimously.
"Thanks a lot."
The rising moon edged the hills in a thin flame of silver as they moved off, the shadows of the rolling land profound and terrible in the icy night. Ingold's dark mantle whispered like a ghost across the silver grass.
"Uh, Ingold?" Rudy said hesitantly as they started down the long slope of the land. "I'm sorry I said you were a nut."
Ingold glanced back at him, a glint of the old mischief in his eyes. Gravely, he said, "Apology accepted, Rudy. I'm only pleased we were able to convince youЧ"
"HeyЧ" Rudy bristled, and the wizard laughed softly.
"I admit it was not a very likely story. Another time I shall do better."
Rudy picked his way down the stony trail after him, dusting black crud off the gaudy sleeves of his patched jacket. "I hope you don't plan to do much of this," he said. "It's too damn hard on your friends."
They were on the move until just before dawn. Though the night was profoundly silent and cold, nothing worse was seen or heard. If the Dark Ones hunted, they did not hunt these hills.
After several miles Ingold left the wind-combed silver slopes of the foothills, and they began working their way up a steep wooded valley that seemed to lead straight back into the heart of the mountains, with the scent of the crackling mat of autumn leaves under their feet and from somewhere the far-off trickling sounds of water. Only once in the woods did Ingold break the silence, to say, "I'm avoiding the main road up from the plains and leading you into Karst by the back way. The road would make walking easier, but it will be crowded with refugees and consequently in greater danger from the Dark Ones. I personally have no desire for further swordplay tonight."
Gil, weary already from stumbling over broken ground with fifteen pounds of sleeping infant in her arms, wondered how Ingold had managed this far, after the original battle at the Palace of Gae, no sleep, and the fight with the Dark in the isolated shack in the orange groves. Did all wizards have that kind of reserve strength to draw on, she wondered, or was Ingold simply incredibly tough and enduring? In the shadows of his hood, his face was white and tired, his eyes circled by dark smudges of weariness. Red welts marked where the thing's whiplike tail had cut his face, and the shoulders of his mantle were scattered with spark-holes; dappled with the wan starlight, he moved through the darkness of the woods as straight and serene as some old gentleman out for an afternoon promenade in the park.
They stepped from the dark beneath the trees into the clearer area of second growth along the stream, and the music of the water grew suddenly louder to their ears. After the darkness of the woods, even the shifting moonlight seemed bright. It illuminated a ghostly dreamscape of black and pewter, of deep patches of river sand and water-smoothed rocks. Before them, up the stream bed, loomed the black wall of the mountain's flank, featureless against the muted glow of the sky, save for one spot of orange, a distant glimmer of fire in the night.
"There," Ingold said, pointing. "That will be Karst. There we should find what is left of the government of the Realm of Darwath."
Karst, when they reached the town, reminded Gil of every wealthy mountain resort town she had ever seen, beautiful with a self-consciously rustic elegance of roomy, splendid houses mingled with ancient trees. As they passed the dark mansions, locked up tight in leafy shadows, she could make out variations of the architecture which she had never before seen, but which were eerily familiar to herЧthe clusters of smooth, narrow pilasters, the twining plant motifs of the capitals, and, here and there, pierced stone molding in an elaborate geometrical design. As they came toward the center of town she saw sheep and cows tethered or in folds close around some of the buildings, their staring eyes gleaming in fright in the darkness. As they passed out of the woods, the path they walked turned to cobblestones, the mossy pavement down the center of the lane sporting a thin, silver trickle of water. For a moment, walls enclosed them in sinister shadow; then they emerged into firelight as brilliant as day.
The town square was deserted. Huge bonfires had been kindled there, the flames reaching fifteen feet toward the cool, watching stars, the light gleaming redly on the black waters of the great town fountain with its wide lichen-rimmed bowl and dark, obscure statuary. In the flickering shadows surrounding the square, Gil could distinguish the walls and turrets of several opulent villas, the fortress-like towers of what she guessed was a church, and the massive foursquare bulk of what was undoubtedly the Grand Market and Town Hall, three and a half storeys of gemlike half-timbering, like black and white lace in the dark. It was for this edifice that Ingold made.
The double doors of the hall were ten feet high and wide enough to admit a cart and team, with a little man-size postern door cut in one corner. Ingold tested it; it was bolted from within. Since his body interposed between them and the door, Gil didn't see what he did, but a moment later he pushed it open and slipped through into the light and the clamoring noise beyond.
The entire lower floor of the building, one immense pillared market hall, was jammed to bursting with people. It was deafening with the unceasing chaos of voices, rank with grease and urine and unwashed bodies, smelly clothes and fried fish. A blue fog of wood-smoke hid the groined ceiling, stung the eyes, and limited visibility to a few yards in any direction. It must have been close to five in the morning, but people wandered around, talking, arguing, fetching water from a couple of half-empty butts over in one corner of the room. Children dashed aimlessly between the serried pillars and endless jumbled mounds of personal belongings; men stood in clusters, gesturing, cursing, sharpening swords. Mothers called to children; grandmothers and grandfathers huddled next to pitiful bundles of possessions, elbow to elbow with one another in hopeless confusion. Some people had brought crated ducks, chickens, and geese; the gabble of fowl and stink of guano mingled with the rest of the sensory onslaught. Gil glimpsed a girl of about ten in the homespun dress of a peasant, sitting on a pile of bedding, cradling a sleek brown cat in her arms; somewhere else, a woman in yellow satin, her elaborately coiffed hair falling in haglike disarray around her face, rocked back and forth on her heels next to a chicken crate and prayed at the top of her voice. The firelight threw a glaring orange cast over everything, turning the crowd and enclosure into a scene from the anteroom of Hell.
Smoke stung Gil's eyes and made them water as she picked her way in Ingold's wake through the close-packed ranks of people, sidestepping pots, pans, water buckets, bundles of clothes and bedding, small children and men's feet, heading toward the massive stairway that curved upward from the room's center to the floor above, and the table at the foot of those stairs.
Someone recognized Ingold and called out in surprise. His name was repeated, back and back, washing like ripples of meaningless sound to the far corners of that shadow-muffled room. And that sound was of awe and wonder and fear. People edged away from the wizard's feet to let him pass by. Someone snatched a sleeping child back; someone else raked a bundle of clothes and a money-bag out of his path. Magically, an aisle opened before him, an aisle lined with obscure forms and the glitter of watching eyes, a path to the table at the foot of the stairs and the small group of people assembled about it.
Except for the soft clucking of some chickens and one infant crying, the hall had fallen silent. Expectant eyes pinned them, the hooded form of the wizard in his singed brown robe, the man and woman, strangers in outlandish garb of scuffed blue denim, the bundle of dirty black blankets the woman carried in her arms. Gil had never felt so conspicuous in her life.
"Ingold!" A big man in the black uniform Gil recognized at once from her dreams came striding from the group to meet them, caught Ingold, and crushed him in a bear-hug that could easily have broken ribs. "We gave you up for dead, man!"
"Giving me up for dead is always unwise, Janus," Ingold replied a little breathlessly. "Especially when ... "
But the big man's eyes had already shifted past him, taking in Rudy, Gil, and the grimy bundle in Gil's arms, the grubby gold of the emblems embroidered there. His expression changed from delight and relief to a kind of awe-struck wonder, and he released the wizard numbly, as if he had half-forgotten him. "You saved him," he whispered. "You saved him after all."
Ingold nodded. Janus looked from the child back to the sturdy old man at his side, as if he expected Ingold to vanish or change shape before his eyes. The murmuring voices of the multitude swelled again, like the swell of the sea, and washed to the far corners of the crowded room. But around the table, there was still that island of silence.
Into that silence Ingold said, perfectly calmly, "This is Gil, and this is Rudy. They were kind enough to aid me in the Prince's rescue. They are strangers from another land and know nothing of the Realm or its customs, but they are both loyal and valiant."
Rudy ducked his head, embarrassed at the description. Gil, for her part, had subconsciously avoided thinking anything positive about herself for the last fifteen years and blushed hotly. Undisturbed, Ingold continued. "Gil, RudyЧJanus of Weg, Commander of the City Guards of Gae." His gesture included the two still seated at the table. "Bektis, Court Wizard of the House of Dare; Govannin Narmenlion, Bishop of Gae."
Startled that Ingold did not hold the title, Gil looked at Bektis, a self-consciously haughty man with the signs of the Zodiac worked into the borders of his gray velvet cloak. Because of the shaven head that gave the Bishop of Gae the look of some ancient Egyptian scribe, and because of the voluminous scarlet robes that hid the thin, straight body, it took Gil a moment to realize that this was a woman, but there was not a second of doubt that she was a Bishop. That harsh ascetic face would tolerate nothing less than spiritual command and would trust no one else to guard sufficiently the honor of her God.