"Holly Lisle - Secret Texts 3 - Courage Of Falcons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

"The Sabirs and then the Dragons . . . got information out of the survivors," Ian said quietly.
He'd worded that carefullyтАФhe hadn't said torture. But Kait had heard the word torture in the tone of his voice, and she saw it in the way he looked away from her. She stiffened and felt her blood chill; the pictures her mind threw at her made her want to scream. She kept her voice steady and said, "We won't know what they found until we check."
She led them downward via one of the multitude of servants' stairs. She had seen no sign of blood or bone, no smallest trace of the
horrors that the House had witnessed, but she braced herself. She feared coming across skeletons that wore familiar clothing; she dreaded encountering the bones that had borne the people she loved.
Memories of better times assailed her. Grimly, she walked faster. Behind her, she heard Ulwe suddenly whisper, "Ry, I can't walk that fast."
She dug her nails into the palms of her hands and forced herself to slow down. They reached the first subfloor, which held the main kitchens and most of the common stores. Kait turned into a dark corridor, then looked over her shoulder at Ian. "Did you come this way?"
"I didn't personally, but someone else might have."
She looked at the floor. There was no dust on it. She frowned, realizing then that she had seen no dust anywhere in the House, though it had been shut up since the Dragons abandoned it for their Citadel of the Gods. She considered that odd fact and couldn't decide on its import. "Stay close to me, then," she said. "This becomes tricky. People have gotten lost in these sublevels and never been found again."
She walked into a passageway, turned left at the first intersection, right at the second, then right again into what looked like a little cul-de-sac with a semicircular stone bench in it. The lanterns weren't lit, but Kait lit them, and the dancing shadows showed familiar sights. The air smelled stale, but here the House still felt civilized. Comprehensible. As though it were merely a building. Deeper within the subterranean labyrinth, beyond the reach of the sun and air, scents rolled past the nose that hinted of terror, and sounds skittered and scritched and chittered just at the edge of hearing, and the darkness held within it the feel of eyes that watched, of claws that waited. Galweigh House's surface friendliness covered a core of patient, watchful mystery. Through those deeper, darker places, not even Kait had chosen to wander alone.
She knelt, reached under the bench, and slipped her finger against the back of the bench's trestle leg. She found the pressure point hidden there and pushed. The mechanism silently moved away
from her finger, and with the faintest of whispers, the bench and the wall behind it moved backward.
"This is a fairly obvious one," Kait said. "If it's empty, there are others that are better hidden. We'll check them next."
She stepped into the gap that had opened in the wall to her left. The shelves were bare.
She stepped back out, shrugging, knelt again, and pressed the mechanism that closed the hidden passageway. She didn't feel much disappointment. "Downward, then. Deeper in the House, the stores are better hidden."
The Sabirs or the Dragons or both had found most of what the Galweighs had put by, though. After half the day and six more hidden rooms stripped to the walls, she finally led them to a storeroom that had not been touched. It lay well away from the main areas, in a corridor so utterly lightless that the lanterns seemed only to move the darkness around, not dissipate it. The hidden mechanism used two pressure points and a rhythmic patternтАФKait had to try five times before the door would finally open for her. But when it did, she was rewarded by the dark forms of lidded jars and wax-sealed amphorae, huge barrels and smaller casks, crates and bags and boxes and trunks. The air was thick with the scents of pepper and sage and cinnamon and a dozen other spices. Hooks hung empty from the ceiling, and a rack to the right held nothing but shelves of crumpled cloth, but even without whatever was missing, that one storeroom would feed the four of them for a year if necessary.
"I'd begun to fear you were wrong," Ry said. He moved up behind
and slid his arm around her waist.
"So had I. I never thought anyone could have uncovered the room just before this one."
"The Dragons created these places."
"I thought of that. But I also thought that only the Dragon who
created the place would have been able to find them allтАФand if
that Dragon had come back, surely he would have reclaimed his house and stayed."
"It looks as if you were right."
Kait studied the stores. "We have enough of what we need to survive on. Still, I'd like to check on the other rooms I know of. It may be that we four will not be the only ones who have to live off the stores. We can eat first, and then you can carry up stores while I go through the rest of the House on my own. Or we can put off the rest of the inventory until tomorrow."
Ian had been looking through the contents of the room. "We'd best keep looking," he said. "This storeroom has no meat in itтАФI'm sure you'll want to find some before we quit for the day."
Kait was startled. She sniffed the airтАФshe could catch the scents of smoked pig and jerked venison and beef and dried python. But she certainly didn't see any wrapped hams hanging from hooks, and the jerky bags on the shelves looked awfully flat.
"We made sure every storeroom had everything needed for survival. There's even a fresh water source in the back of the room, and plumbing, and a way to lock the door from the inside, in case survivors needed to hide for a while. Some of those smaller trunks will even have gold in them." She started checking the shelves. But Ian was right. Nothing else had been touched, but every single piece of meat was gone.
"There will be salted fish in some of those barrels," she said. "Ry and I will be able to eat that."
Ry was frowning. He pointed to the empty hooks, and then to waxed cloth and binding twine that lay in crumpled piles on the floor beneath them. "Why would anyone unwrap all the meat before taking it?" he asked. "It wouldn't store well without the wrappings, and no one could eat so much at once."
Kait didn't know the answer to that. "Perhaps I ought to check on the fish," she said.
She pried the lid off of one fish barrel and looked in. Fish should have been packed clear to the surface of the brine, but the barrel was
empty down to the last third. And that thirdтАФdark brineтАФheld no sign that it had ever held fish. She couldn't find a single scale in the water or the tiniest piece of fin stuck on the side. She took one of the gaffing rods from the wall and stabbed it into the liquid. "Nothing," she said. "Not a single fish. If I didn't know better, I'd say that there had never been fish in here."
"Maybe someone intended to fill it later," Ry said.
Kait gave him a long look.
He shrugged. "I suppose not. We wouldn't have put anything into our storage rooms that wasn't ready to use, either. I can't imagine what happened."
"Neither can I. But you and I are going to have to have meat. These other two will do fine without it if they mustтАФ"
"I don't eat meat," Ulwe interrupted.
Kait nodded, but continued, "тАФbut if you and I don't have meat to fuel us during and just after Shifts, we won't last long."
"To the next storage room, then," Ian said.
The next hidden room had been cleaned out. The one following it had supplies intact. Except, again, for the meat. Once again, all the herb-stuffed waxed wrappings were crumpled into piles, and the barrels were sealed. Kait lifted one of the empty wrappings and realized that it was still intact. The wax seal was untouched, the wax-dipped cloth uncut. No one could have removed the meat without cutting the cloth or breaking the seal. Nevertheless, impossible though it seemed, the meat was gone.
"It isn't even as if the hams turned to dust," Kait said, frustrated. "If the meat had spoiled and rotted away, we'd at least have bones in these wrappings. But there's nothing."
Ry dug through the stores, clearly mystified. "What happened to everything?"
"It doesn't make sense." Kait dropped wearily onto a trunk that still contained gold and silver in a wide variety of denominations and mintings. "Who would take only the meat, leaving wines and herbs and spices and fruits and vegetables? For that matter, who would take
dried meat and leave the gold that could buy fresh meat a thousand times over?"
"And how in the hells did they take it?" Ian grumbled.
Ulwe crouched in the center of the room, her eyes squeezed tightly closed, her fingertips splayed to the floor. Kait became aware of the child's odd posture and the air of tense concentration that surrounded her.
Ry and Ian noticed Kait's stillness and followed her gaze. Both of them fell silent, too. The three of them watched the child, curious.
Ulwe began to speak, her eyes still tightly closed and her body rigid. "You're the first people in this room since before the ... the evil day. The day of bad magics and bad deaths," she said softly. "Nothing alive . . . has moved across this floor since that day. No . . . human . . . has taken anything from this room."
Kait leaned forward, elbows on knees. "Then what did?"
"The dead fed here. The dead were given flesh. ..." A shudder ran through Ulwe's body, and she squeezed her eyes closed tighter. "They were given dead flesh as an offering."