"Mithgar - Hel's Crucible - 02 - Into The Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKiernan Dennis L)

"Mounted, I think," replied Loric, easing his hora ahead.

Now Beau frowned in puzzlement. "The weeping, the laughing, is mounted?"

"No," whispered Tip. "It's we who will go mounted rather than on foot down to the river's edge."

"Oh," breathed Beau in understanding.

"Spread wide," said Phais, "a street or so. 'Twould no do for us all to ride into the same ambush."

Beau looked at Tip and silently mouthed [Ambush?]

Tip shrugged and chrked his pony rightward to stai away.

Taking a deep breath, Beau went leftward.

Widely spread, down through the snow- and ice-laden wrack they rode in a ragged line abreast, down toward thi frozen Ironwater, Bekki in the center, with Phais a cobblei street to the right and Loric a street to the left. Beyon Phais rode Tip, with Beau to Loric's left.

And now Tip could hear an intermittent hissing and babbling, spates of unrecognizable words interspersed by gig gling and weeping . . . and silence. Onward he rode, now able to see the frozen surface of the waterway ahead, bone white under the grey overcast above. At last he came to a

long stone wharf bordering the Ironwater River itself, with

a great number of boat slips and barge landings along its considerable length, all empty in the winter cold. His bow at the ready, Tip waited for the others to reach the long, long pier, and as he held position, again he heard distant hissed words, as if someone were revealing secrets to a confidant, though what was said Tip did not know, for it was in a tongue he spoke not.

To the left, bucco, and near. But wait for the others. Now Beau appeared on the stone pier a distance away, and in quick succession Bekki and Phais and Loric rode onto the windswept stone.

Phais turned rightward and held out a shushing hand to Tipperton. Quietly she dismounted.

Tip did likewise, carefully and silently swinging a leg over and down.

Moving toward the Dara, Tip listened and looked and tried to hear and see everything all at once. And as he passed a wide ramp pull-way leading up from the river to the pier and across to the collapsed ruins of a dockside warehouse, from within the wreckage a giggling babble and weep sissed forth.

Tip turned toward the warehouse ruin and signalled to Phais it was here. And he waited for her to arrive.

Together they crept in among the shatter and char, and found whence the hissings came: from 'neath an overturned barge. And as Bekki and Loric and Beau came in among the rubble, Phais and Tip knelt and peered under. And in the shadows they sawЧ "Lord Tain!" gasped Tipperton.

The white-haired man was holding the frozen corpse of a burnt woman and muttering into her ear.





As weeping and babbling and hissed secrets came sissing from under the barge, Bekki stood up and growled. "I say we kill him now."

"What?" blurted Tip.

"He fled from the field of battle and deserves nothing more than a coward's death."

Loric put a hand on Bekki's shoulder. "Aye, my friend, he did flee from the Rupt at Mineholt North, yet he was advisor to Prince Loden, hence justice is King Enrik's tc do and not ours."