The Windsingers Series: The Complete 4-Book Collection. Megan Lindholm

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СКАЧАТЬ out of them. Ki folded her mouth tight and went on stoically. Her hands were cold, colder than her body that pressed and scraped across hard rock and snow. Her fingers were numb, and the black was becoming so solid that she had to batter her hand against it before it would sink in at all. The trailing hand had to be jerked free with a snapping movement. Ki felt tiny rippings in her shoulders, in the muscles of elbows and wrists, tiny snappings and poppings. Puppet strings breaking.

      She jerked a hand free, reached, slammed it against the solid wall. She drew it back farther, smashed her fist against it. It would not give. She dangled by one hand, and the hand was beginning to send her sharp messages of pain as the black crushed it. Ki squeezed her eyes shut, made a final driving blow against the wall.

      ‘It doesn’t work with rock.’ Vandien seized her knotted fist, heaved at it. She heard his body scrape and slide over snow. She could hear suddenly, she could breathe, and when she opened her eyes and looked, she saw that she had reached the end of the black wall and had, indeed, been trying to force her fist into solid rock. She jerked her screaming hand free of the black wall, entrusting her weight unthinkingly to Vandien’s grip on her wrist and forearm. He grunted as he took her weight, then, with a heave, she found the edge of the world was under her armpits. She scrambled frantically, her boots treading air, and with another heave she was up. Panic sent her body scooting further along the flat trail top. She didn’t even try to rise but slithered along. Vandien didn’t mock her. He was too busy copying her.

      They stopped to lie close together in the snow, bodies touching at shoulders and hips, heads cushioned on their arms. Ki listened to Vandien pant. Or was it her own hoarse breathing? The air came easily, the snow was cold to rest in; she was tired, and she did not wish to lift her head, but she knew she could if she tried. She was alive. She raised her head enough to gulp in a mouthful of snow. Her teeth hurt as it melted in her mouth, but she took another. She rolled her head over to one side to look into Vandien’s face.

      She studied the face so close to her own. He watched her from under half-closed lashes. What she could see of his face was drained of blood and lined with weariness. A large part of his bandage was red and wet. The snow closest to his face was melting with the red.

      ‘You look like an actor painted for a play,’ she panted. ‘White face, black beard, green and red bandage. You could be the corpse in the scene.’

      ‘Not this scene,’ Vandien grunted. They turned together to look at the solid black wall that reared up from the trail only a few steps away. Ki felt a pressure against her leg. She jerked away from it, and Sigmund, offended, snorted. Behind him, Sigurd was leisurely scratching the side of his nose against his black foreleg. They seemed mildly curious about Ki and Vandien in the snow, but not greatly interested.

      ‘My loyal beasts!’ Ki scoffed.

      ‘Smarter than you were,’ Vandien rejoined.

      They remained prostrate in the snow, breathing and resting. Ki’s body ached all over, her head throbbed, and she felt marvelous. The cool of the snow began to make itself noticed. Her hands were bare of protection, her gloves lost in that blackness. The cold pushed at her through her rent cloak. She smiled weakly at the thought of it. The Harpy of the morning seemed a lifetime away now, and of small import. She reached up wearily to pull her hood up over her head. She would have to get up soon and do something. She lay still, wondering what something she would do.

      ‘Ki!’

      She opened her eyes grudgingly. She wondered when she had closed them. The sun was far down the sky. One side of her body was cold. She pulled the covers over her more tightly and her eyes started to slide shut again. Then she realized that the covers were her own cloak and Vandien’s that he had spread to cover them both. The side of her body that shared his warmth was comfortable enough, but her feet were tingling. Time to move. She shifted.

      ‘Be still!’ Vandien hissed.

      Ki froze. His eye was dark and intent, staring from beneath his bandage that now showed a pale layer of frost over the red. His expression brooked no questions. She moved her eyes to see what he saw.

      The silver Sisters had gone gray. The black was rising, was writhing back up to them in whirling drifts and eddies, in every shade from palest gray to black. It flowed up like layers of silken webbing, veiling their beauty once more from lesser eyes. Ki took one final drink of their heartless majesty before the rising black made them again impassive stone.

      ‘They were guardians, once,’ Ki breathed.

      ‘Sssh!’ Vandien nodded slowly.

      ‘How could I fall asleep so close beside them?’

      The black on the Sisters grew darker every instant. On the trail where it had lain the wall of it was becoming lower, sinking as the black mist that formed it wafted back up to the Sisters.

      ‘We were out of their shadows,’ Vandien murmured, becoming bold enough to speak. ‘They are monstrously fair about it. Only in that one spot do they hold sway. That is why the trail, coming and going, avoids the look of their eyes, stays hidden for as long as it can. They are slow to react, I suppose. Perhaps they guarded against creatures more ponderous than we know, or perhaps they were instructed to barricade and block, not destroy. How can we know? Or maybe they did a thing that we can never comprehend at all, and the danger they present to travelers these days is coincidental. We are young on this old world, Ki.’

      ‘My wagon!’ Ki replied. She drew herself together, rose, leaving Vandien to scramble after her. The last drifts and snatches of mist were rising, flowing back into place. Ki walked unhesitating into the area they had just vacated. She had to step down off the layer of snow and ice where she and Vandien had napped to tread the bare rock of the trail, exposed flat and smooth where the black had been.

      Ki had once seen a Romni wagon that had slid and rolled off a mountain path made treacherous by spring runoff. She had marveled at the clean snapping of the heavy wood, great horses thrown about like puppies, at the litter of small debris strewn down the side of the cliff like bits of bright paper. But never had she seen wood crushed, the fibers compressed together so tightly that they crumbled away from one another afterwards. Her wagon had been crushed and smeared across the stone like a bright insect smashed on a window pane.

      Here and there her eyes picked out the details her mind did not want to know: the woeful head of a wooden horse, intact, but its body crumbled away; a rag of bright curtain; flat, crumpled copper that had been a kettle; straw crumbled to chaff; a single bright flower painted on a board that had survived.

      She did not scream; she did not speak. Vandien’s boots scuffed on the rock as he strode up to her. He took her upper arm to lead her away, but she shrugged him off. Only her eyes were alive as they flickered and danced over the wreckage. She began to tremble. It started as a shivering and increased in tempo until Vandien wondered if she would convulse in a fit. She prowled shaking among the wreckage of her life.

      Vandien observed her. She moved slowly, stooping to pick up a treasured fragment. She cradled it against her body for a few steps, then dropped it to pick up some other remnant. She seemed to choose them at random: a scrap of leather, the handle of a mug, a rag of bright fabric. She clutched and discarded each in turn. She moved aimlessly through the rubble, keeping nothing of what she gathered, impervious to the cold that made her hands white and red. Finally, she let a little fur boot tumble from her hand. She watched it fall. Her trembling passed.

      ‘It will be night soon. We have no more time to waste here.’ Her tone almost implied that Vandien had kept her standing about. With a purposeful stride, she crossed the rocky trail to climb up the packed snow and ice. ‘It will be dark soon,’ СКАЧАТЬ