"Hambly,.Barbara.-.Darwath.5.-.Icefalcons.Quest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

The Icefalcon shook his head. "Whatever else may be said of this Vair na-Chandros," he murmured, "he is not mad."
The boy Tir was escorted from among the wagons. "It is well the woman is there to look after him," said Loses His Way. "She is good, that one."
"She is the one who deceived him into leaving the protection of the Keep," retorted the Icefalcon, with whom the subject of Hethya still rankled.
Loses His Way shook his head. "I have watched her now many weeks," he said. "People can be pressed into any hunting, good or ill, o my enemy. She cares for the child, and cares more for him each day. She has the way of one who has had a child herself. Has the boy been here, then?" For Tir made signs, pointing along the right side of the talus.
The Icefalcon hesitated, not sure what to say. "It is a knowledge in his family."
"But how can he know what does not exist?" How indeed?
He himself had gone to scout another way up the glacier, on the far side of Daylily Hill, a deep crevice and chimney that could be scaled with the help of axes. The road led to the North, but the end of the road was now covered in the trackless ice. Vair asked another question, and Tir assented, seeming very small and helpless among the men.
If you strike him again, thought the Icefalcon, though he is no kin of mine and has no claim on me, still I will have an accounting from you.
But Vair did not strike the child. Instead he gestured to Hethya, who even at this distance the Icefalcon could tell was possessed by the spirit-or imitating the mannerisms-of Oale Niu.
"What new hunt is this?" murmured Loses His Way.
Cold Death came over to them, having finished filling Ingold in on everything that had so far passed that day. The old man had finally reached Renweth Vale, she had informed them yesterday, having come down from the north over the St. Prathhes' Glacier, a nearly impassable trek; he had been most interested in Vair's journey.
"Did you see this when you shadow-walked into the camp?" she breathed, and the Icefalcon shook his head.
"It was packed in its boxes in a wagon." His voice was the murmur of ice winds through the naked roots of fallen trees. "I thought the boxes had about them an evil light, like the thing in the tent. Do you know what it is?"
She shook her head.
Under Hethya's instructions, the crates were opened, the pieces lifted out and put together by Bektis and the Truth-Finder, helped by the scout the Icefalcon called Crested Egret, a clever young man who managed to stay at Vair's side without ever incurring his wrath. Tubes of gold of varying thicknesses looped over balls of glass, crystal rods bound in iron and covered over with brittle-looking encrustations of salt.
"Is she indeed possessed of the spirit of an Ancestor of the shamans?" asked Loses His Way, as Hethya moved forward to help connect the many components into one single, sleekly lumpy finger, glittering like an extension of the ice wall itself.
"Either that or some instruction survived, writ on paper or embedded in the heart of a Wise One's crystal, that she studied to lend credence to her lies." The Icefalcon, crouching beside him, rested his crossed hands on his drawn-up knees. "Anyone can make up stories, it is an art among the mud-diggers, and many are adept at it."
"Pah," said Loses His Way. "She has not the look of a woman who tells lies."
Oh, hasn't she? he thought. But he only said, "it has something of the look of the things we found in the Keep many years ago. Rudy and Ingold made of them weapons that spat fire at the bidding of the Wise Ones, but they did not work overwell. They needed no Ancestor of shamans to show them how such things were made."
Slowly, with dignity, Hethya walked around the apparatus, touching the tubes and the rods, the balls that fit sometimes into the rods and sometimes into one another.
Bektis nodded wisely at her side. Gil, thought the Icefalcon, would be open-mouthed with awe, but to him it was merely what it was, glass and iron, gold and salt, elements of the earth that had existed in their current form only somewhat longer than other formations of the same substances.
Hethya emphasized a point with a sweeping gesture that would have shamed a marketplace preacher in the days before the coming of the Dark, and her voice carried dimly across space to the three watchers-possibly to other watchers as well.
Still, it was a wonder when it was finished. It lay glistening in a cradle of geared wheels such as Ingold tinkered with in the crypts of the Keep, haloed, it seemed, by some curious condensation of the thin wicked afternoon light.
Tir hung back, as if he would conceal himself between the wagons-he came forward when Vair beckoned, but unwillingly and, when asked a question, would only shake his head.
Hethya and Bektis stood beside the new apparatus. It was Hethya who worked its ivory levers, making the whole of it swing about suddenly, like a live thing, articulate, quivering, balanced to a hair. Bobs and wires whipped like the antennae of an insect, and lights sang from the jewels that hung on their tips.
A strange shiver passed through the Icefalcon, the uneasy sense that Gil-Shalos was right. This was more than elements combined. There was a silence like the silence before an ice storm, a hushed waiting fear of the unimaginable.
Bektis laid his hands where Hethya showed him-tiny figures, gray and gold, white and red against the flinty gray rocks, the rinsed out aqua ice.
Then a flash, less like lightning than as if a star had spoken a curse of power, a curse that extended like a tickling feather a delicate, whickering, colorless whisper of unseen flame.
The sound that cracked across the valley was, the Icefalcon was sure, only the sound of the rock splintering where the shimmer touched it.
A great chunk separated from the wall of the promontory before them, pitching down the scree. Then like the sea-yammer came the wild whinnying of the mules and horses and all the men crying out.
Even old Nargois, whom the Icefalcon had observed to be a man of calm courage, fell back, hands fluttering in the signs against demons. Only Vair remained where he was, observing with interest as Hethya moved the levers again.
Bektis, who had flinched, stepped forward to lay his hands upon the apparatus again. Another shimmer, as if the air between the crystal horns of the machine and the raw rock wall had flawed, like the break in a pane of glass. The Icefalcon saw a slab of rock jerk outward, break, and tumble free down the slope before he heard the sound of it, a deep, booming crack and the hiss of heat.
"This is bad hunting," whispered Loses His Way, when any of them could speak again.
Bad hunting indeed, thought the Icefalcon. Three weeks' journey away that they were, he could not but feel that things would be worse still for the folk of the embattled Keep.

"What did she say?" Gil and Minalde both got to their feet as Ilae emerged from the hidden chamber in the crypt. The young mage stood in the doorway for a moment, a tall gawky girl, and gestured with one long-fingered hand that she was all right.
Encountering Brycothis, the mage spirit who dwelled in the heart of the Keep, was, Rudy had told Gil, frequently a disorienting experience.
Both Rudy and Ingold had tried to describe what it was like; Gil had the impression it was something only fully understood by another mage.
Brycothis herself-Gil had seen her image in half a dozen of the ancient record crystals, a rangy woman with smiling eyes and the tattooed scalp of a wizard of those days-had long ago transmuted into something far other than human, a pattern of memories and power whose center lay in the heart of the crypts. Those who entered that center, whose minds touched hers, experienced different things at different times.
"Did she speak to you?" Not that Brycothis actually spoke. Minalde led the girl to the bottom step of the hidden stairway, where she and Gil had waited, and made her sit down.
"Oh, yes." Ilae nodded hesitantly. "I mean, I saw things. She was there." She nodded quick thanks as Gil handed her the flask of tisane-now lukewarm-she and Alde had been sharing. "But I didn't understand what I saw."
Gil and Alde were silent. Shy and slow-spoken at the best of times, Ilae thought for a while, then said, "I asked her, Was there another way into the Keep. And I saw..." She spread out her hands helplessly. "I saw the laundry room up on the third level, back behind the sanctuary of the Church."
"The laundry room?" Gil almost laughed.
Minalde asked worriedly, "Are you sure?" Not because she thought Ilae would have been mistaken about anything she saw, wizards as a rule didn't make that kind of error-but simply because it made no sense.
"Sure as I'm sitting, m'Lady."
"But it's in the middle of the Keep," said Alde, baffled. "You couldn't have a secret passage going into it without it passing through my bedroom, or the sanctuary, or Lord Ankres' storerooms..."
"Christ, are we going to have to take measurements?" Gil asked, appalled. "That whole area behind the Aisle has been so changed and remodeled, with walls and cells partitioned and knocked together and new corridors put through, we'll never get an accurate reading. There's a dozen secret passages there already, going from one set of rooms to another. I don't even want to think about it."
"And in any case the entry has to be at or near ground level," Minalde protested. "Which means a stairway-maybe in the outer wall? At least we know it's in the rear quarter of the Keep."
"But who would have known of it?" Ilae asked. "And who'd Vair get to turn traitor? And how? It ain't like there's a stranger come, or anybody gone recently."
"If it exists at all," said Gil softly. "I'll tell Janus and we can make a search, and it better be a damn quiet one because the fewer people who know about this one the better. But if there's another doorway, I'm betting it's one only a wizard can see. That means you, Ilae, and Wend outside. You up for it?"