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

"And that," he said, "is where I need your help." She only looked at him, uncomprehending. "You understand," Ingold went on in that same quiet tone, "that by leaving it that late, I shall be cutting my escape very fine. In the last extremity, my only course will be to flee across the Void into some other worldЧthis world. I can cross back and forth at will with relative impunity. Normally such a crossing is a shocking enough physical trauma for an adult. For an infant of six months, even under my protection, it can be injurious, and two such crossings in a short span of time could do the child real harm. I will therefore have to remain a day in this world, with the child, before I can return to some safer spot in my own."
The light dawned. Gil smiled. "You need a place to hole up."
"As you say. I need an isolated spot and a few creature comfortsЧa place to pass that time in obscurity. Do you know of such a place?"
"You could come here," Gil offered.
Ingold shook his head. "No," he said decidedly.
"Why not?"
The wizard hesitated before answering. "It's too dangerous," he said at last. He rose from his chair, moved restlessly to the flat rectangle of the window, and pushed the curtain aside, looking out, down into the apartment courtyard below. The greenish reflections of the courtyard lights in the waters of the swimming pool rippled over the old marks of alien battles on his face. "Too many things could happen. I have a great mistrust of fate, Gil. My powers are severely limited in your world. If something were to go wrong, I have no desire to try to explain my presence or that of the child to the local authorities."
Gil had a brief, disturbing picture of Ingold, like some bearded refugee from the Society for the Preservation of Dungeons and Dragons in his shabby robes and killing sword, having a close encounter with the local police or the Highway Patrol. Despite her impression that the Highway Patrol would come off second best, she realized such a confrontation could not be risked. Not with so much at stake.
"There's a place we used to go past on trail rides," she said, after a moment's thought.
"Yes?" He turned back from the window, letting the curtain swish shut.
"A girl I used to go to school with lives out near BarstowЧit's in the desert, way the hell east of here. I spent a couple weeks out there two summers ago. She had horses, and we used to ride all over the back-hills country. I remember there was a cabin, kind of a little house, out in the middle of some abandoned orange groves in the hills. We holed up there one afternoon during a thunderstorm. It isn't much, but there's running water and a kerosene stove, and it's as isolated as you could want."
Ingold nodded. "Yes," he murmured, half to himself. "Yes, it should do."
"I can bring you food and blankets," she went on. "Just tell me when you'll be there."
"I don't know that yet," the wizard said quietly. "But you'll know, at the time."
"All right." Though Gil was normally a suspicious person, it never occurred to her to question him, and this did not even surprise her about herself. She trusted him, she found, as if she had known him for years.
Ingold reached across the table and took her hand.
"Thank you," he said. "You are a stranger to our world and you owe us nothingЧit is good of you to help."
"Hey," Gil protested softly. "I'm not a stranger. I've been in your world, and I've seen the Dark. I just about met King Eldor, as a matter of fact." Then she paused, confused at her blunder, for she remembered that the King and the wizard were friends, and that Eldor was almost certainly going to die before the week was out.
But Ingold passed over her error like the gentleman he was. "I know Eldor would have been pleased to make your acquaintance," he said. "And you shall always have his gratitude, and mine, for ... "
Some sound in the night made him suddenly alert, and he broke off, raising his head to listen.
"What is it?" Gil whispered.
Ingold turned back to her. "I'm afraid I must go," he said politely. His voice seldom betrayed worry or fearЧhe might have been making his excuses because of a prior engagement for tea with the Queen of Numenor. But Gil knew that something was happening, across the Void, in the embattled Palace at Gae.
He rose to go, the straight dark line of his mantle breaking over the sword at his hip. Gil thought of the danger and of the Dark waiting on the other side of the Void. She caught at his sleeve. In a voice smaller than she meant, she said, "Hey, take care."
His smile was like the coming of the sun. "Thank you, my dear. I always do." Then he walked a few paces to the center of the kitchen and put out his hand to push the fabric of the universe aside like a curtain. As he did so, he drew his sword, and Gil could see the cold light that burned up off the blade as he stepped into the mist and fire beyond.

CHAPTER TWO
It was the goddam motherless fuel pump!
Rudy Solis identified immediately the gasp and drag of the old Chevy's engine, automatically checked his rear-vision mirror, and scanned the dark, straight, two-lane highway ahead, though he knew there was nothing resembling a light in fifty miles. With all of Southern California to choose from, naturally the thing would decide to give up the ghost in the dead, endless stretch of desert and hill country that lay between Barstow and San Bernardino, miles from anywhere in the middle of Sunday night.
Rudy wondered if he could make it back to the party.
Be a lot of sorrow and tears if I can't, he thought to himself, glancing over his shoulder at the ten cases of beer stacked amid the shredded foam, old newspapers, and greasy articles of unidentifiable clothing heaped in the sagging back seat. The engine faltered, coughed apologetically, and chugged on. Rudy cursed the owner of the car, the seventh-magnitude rock-and-roll star at whose party he'd been drinking and sunburning himself into a stupor all weekend, and the buddies who'd volunteered him to make the beer run, thirty miles down the hills to Barstow; cursed them impersonally, and threw in a few curses at himself as well for being euchred into going.
Well, serves 'em right. Next time they want somebody to buy their beer for 'em, they can damn well lend me a decent car.
But the fact was that most people had arrived at Tarot's party on motorcycles, as Rudy himself had. And TarotЧwho had started out life as James Carrow and was still known as Jim when not wearing his flameout stage makeupЧwasn't about to lend his custom Eldorado to anybody, no matter how few cases of beer were left.
Well, what the hell. Rudy shook back the long hair from his eyes and risked another glance at the unrelieved blackness of empty desert reflected in his rear-view mirror. Everybody up at that hundred-thousand-dollar hideaway in the canyons was so drunk by this tune that it was impossible to see what difference ten more cases of beer could make. If worst came to worstЧwhich it looked like it was going to, from the sound of that engineЧhe could always find someplace in the hills to hole up in until morning and try to hitch a ride to the nearest phone then. There was a service road about ten miles farther on that he knew of, which would take him to a dilapidated shack in what remained of an old orange grove. Half-plastered as he was, he didn't relish the idea of trying to do anything about the engine tonight, nor was the thought of sleeping by the road real appealing. Rudy took a drink from the half-empty bottle of wine propped on the seat beside him and drove on.
Rudy had been driving and dealing with cars and motorcycles half his lifeЧnot always with legal sanctionsЧbut it took all his expertise to nurse the failing Chevy the mile or two from the last lighted billboard to the rutted track of the service road. The lag and jerk of the big V-8 engine as he maneuvered through potholes, gravel slides, and the ruinous washes of old stream beds made him wonder if the problem wasn't simply a blocked line. He itched to climb out, raise the hood, and checkЧexcept that he had nothing resembling a light with him, and the odds were that, once stopped, nothing short of total rebuilding would get the stupid car started again. The feeble glare of the headlights picked out landmarks he knew from his motorcycle trips back this way: an oak tree twisted into the shape of a disapproving monk, gloomily damning the couples who came out here to park; a rock like a sleeping buffalo, silhouetted against the star-luminous sky. Rudy's hobby of hunting with bow and arrow had given him a familiarity with half the wild country left in Southern California, a knowledge of these silent desert hills as casual as his knowledge of the inner workings of a V-8 engine or of the floor plan of his own sparsely furnished apartment. He was as much at home here as he was anywhere else.
Sometimes more so. Maybe the hunting was the reason, or maybe only the excuse. There were times when he simply took pleasure in being alone, a different pleasure from what was to be had from partying and raising hell, from horsing around with the guys at the body shop, from ratpack weekends in the desert. Never self-analytical, Rudy only understood that he needed the solitude, needed the touch of the empty land and the demand for slow skill and perfect accuracy. Perhaps it was this that had kept him on the edge of the biker crowd; he'd become acquainted with them at the body shop but never of them. Or perhaps it was simple cowardice.
Whatever his reasons, he was accepted for what he was; and though not part of any motorcycle gang, as an airbrush painter and pinstriper at Wild David's body shop in Fontana, he was part of that world. Hence, he understood his inclusion in Tarot's partyЧnot that anybody in Southern California was excluded from Tarot's party. Tarot's local reputation included an apocryphal story about being a former member of the Hell's Angels. But, thinking the matter over as he guided the thrombotic car deeper and deeper into the blackness of the hills, Rudy couldn't imagine any gang admitting a member as essentially chickenhearted as Jim Carrow.
The car's front wheels dropped suddenly into a twelve-inch water-cut in the road with a heart-rending scrape of oil pan against rock. Rudy tried the engine twice and got only a tired whirring in response. He opened the door and climbed cautiously out, boots slipping on the round stones of the dry stream bed. Two days of continuous partying didn't help his footing much. He ascertained at once that pushing wouldn't help matters, for the car was nose-down with its front bumper inches from the far bank of the gully. It might, he decided, kneeling in the soft sand, be possible to back out if the engine could be started, but it wasn't something he'd want to try at one-thirty in the morning.
Disgusted, he straightened up.
Starlight showed him the shape and roll of the hills, the shallow valley opening out to his right, with a dark clustering of dry, black-leaved citrus trees. The shackЧa cabin,
reallyЧwould be over there in the dense shadow of the hill, a hundred yards farther on.
Made it, he thought. Thank God for small favors.
It was surprising how silent the night was. There was little silence in the world; even away from people, there was usually street noise, airplanes, air conditioning. The cooling metal of the car's engine ticked softly in the darkness; now and then, dried grass sighed at the memory of wind. Rudy's eyes, adjusting to the wan glow of the Milky Way, slowly made out the edges of the cabin's roof line, the shapes of long grass and twisted trees. His footfalls seemed very loud in that world of darkness.
Walking carefully, if not precisely staggering, he collected two six-packs of beer from the back seat and the remainder of his bottle of muscatel from the front. His head was beginning to ache. Just what I need. A busted fuel pump and a hangover to fix it with. They'll probably figure I took the beer money and headed for Mexico.
He made his way up to the shack.
It stood solitary against the dark of the hills, the long grass around its peeling walls concealing the fossilized remains of dead farm equipment and broken bottles, the shabby asphalt tile of the roof sagging under the weight of accumulated leaves. He mounted the crazy front steps and set down his burdens on the narrow front porch, the mild chill of the sweet-scented night making him shiver as he stripped off his greasy denim jacket, wrapped it around his hand, and punched out a pane of the window beside the door to let himself in.
The lights worked, surprisingly. Hookup to the power tines in the grove, he decided, taking a quick look around the dingy kitchen. So did the sink, giving cold water but not hot. Well, you can't have everything. In the cupboard under the sink he found three cans of pork and beans with prices stamped on them that were at least four years old, and a kerosene stove with half a can of kerosene.
Not bad, he reflected, if I had anything to cook. Further exploration revealed a minuscule bathroom and a cell-like bedroom at the end of a narrow hall, with a sagging cot whose threadbare mattress would have been thrown out of any jail in the state as cruel and unusual.
Nothing to write home about, he thought, returning to the kitchen and thence to the star-limned silence of the front porch. He donned his jacket, on which the faded blue denim was rather gaudily illuminated with a flaming skull with roses in its eyes, and settled back against the doorjamb to polish off the muscatel and watch the night in peace. As the dark quiet of the hills soaked into his soul, he decided that there was, after all, something to be said for the place, a perfection of solitude in many ways superior to all the beer busts thrown by all the rock stars of California.
After a long time of silence he returned inside to sleep.
He woke up wondering what he'd done to annoy the little man with the sledgehammer who lived inside his head. He rolled over, to his instant regret, and wondered if he was going to die.