"Hambly,.Barbara.-.Darwath.3.-.Armies.Of.Daylight.e-txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

The night was still. The wind that had beaten with such violence down the
ice-locked mountains to the north had fallen at about sunset to an uneasy
murmuring in the dark pines that filled the twisting Vale of Renweth. By
midnight, even that had ceased. The black branches hung motionless from one end
of the Vale to the other, slowly furring with frost in the deepening cold. A
man's breath, barely visible in the soulless glimmer of the few remote and
haughty stars, would hang like a diamond cloud about his face or freeze in white
hoarfrost to his lips. In that piercing cold, not even the wolves were abroad;
the silence ran from cliff to lightless cliff, an almost tangible property in
that frozen and desolate world.
Yet beneath the dark trees, something had stirred.
Rudy Solis was sure of it. He glanced behind him for the fourth time in as many
minutes, fear creeping along his spine and prickling at the nape of his neck
like tiny teeth. Yet he saw nothing there, only the thin sheen of starlight
frosting the unmarked snow.
He looked back to the darkness of the trees. He stood some fifty feet from the
forest's edge, his shadow a misty blur on the old broken snow around his feet,
his breath a tiny smear of steam against the darkness. Even wrapped in the
thickness of his buffalohide coat, he shivered, though not entirely with cold.
He knew that it would be warmer in the protection of the forest and, look as he
would, he could sense no movement there. It was undoubtedly perfectly safe, and
sheltering there would be a damnsight more intelligent than standing in the open
listening to the ice crystallize in his lungs.
But neither hope of Heaven nor fear of Hell would have induced him to seek the
shelter of those shadowed woods.
A wind touched his face like a clammy, seeking hand. It took all his strength
not to whirl, to face the unseen foe. But he had been told not to run. In the
open ground of a still mountain night, flight would mean instant death. The
cloaking-spell that covered him, like all cloaking-spells, depended upon
diverted attention; the wizard who used one must do nothing to call attention to
himself, lest the illusion fail. And in any case, Rudy knew that no human being
could ever hope to outrun the Dark.
This is stupid, he told himself desperately. What if Lohiro was wrong? Or worse,
what if he was lying? The Dark possessed his mind for weeks. How the hell do we
know he was telling the truth when he said they'd let him go? This spell of
Ingold's is to cloak against a collective, rather than an individual,
intelligenceЧbut how do we know that will overcome the reason human magic never
worked against the Dark Ones? What if it was all a trap?
The unbearable terror returned again, as if some vast, dark bulk were creeping
slowly toward his back. But he could see nothing there, no movement in the stark
white emptiness of the snow-covered meadow, and could hear no sounds but the
hiss of his own breath in his lungs and the hot, too-swift pounding of his
heart. The years he'd spent on the fringes of the motorcycle gangs, among the
tough guys and would-be tough guys of smog-bound Southern California, had given
him a kind of bar-fight courage sufficient for his survival. But the waiting in
terror for an unknown danger was different. His every perception, sharpened by
wizardry to detect what others found invisible, was keyed to a fever pitch for
the warning of danger. And in his heart, he was sure that no warning would save
him.
Cold, directionless winds breathed upon him, like the draught from a primordial