"Bradley,.Marion.Zimmer.-.Darkover.-.Clingfire.3.-.2004.-.A.Flame.In.Hali" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradley Marion Zimmer)

Eduin had never drunk to escape the aftermath of drinking. This was what he had sought, this blessed stillness. Was it some property of this room, although it seemed ordinary and shabby? He saw no trace of a telepathic damper. From experience, he knew how useless a damper was against his inner tormentor. Properly attuned, it would keep psychic energy from entering or emanating from the room. It could not protect him from what already lay within his own mind. He had used one when he lived in a Tower, first at Arilinn, where he was trained, and later at Hali for a brief time, and then Hestral until its destruction.
Hali. Only a short half-day's ride from Thendara, it might have been on another world. At the far end of the city, at the foot of the mysterious cloud-filled lake, a Tower lifted toward the heavens, a finger of graceful alabaster. In it, as in every other Tower, psychically-Gifted men and women joined their minds to work unimaginable feats, everything from the creation of weapons to the healing of hurts. Relays sent messages across the reaches of plain and mountain; laran-charged batteries powered aircars, lighted palaces, and guarded the secrets of kings.
Hali. She had once been there. Might still be, for all he knew.
Pain washed through him, but not from any physical cause.
Eduin sank down on the pallet and buried his face in his hands. His breath came ragged as he struggled for the control he had learned in his years as a laranzu, a
master of the psychic force called laran. Images flashed behind his closed eyes, bits of memory he had washed away with the bottle. The pale translucent stone walls that created the sense of light and endless space ... the ever-restless mists of Lake Hali... Dyannis warm and supple in his arms.
Sweet and bitter, feelings he had thought long dead stirred in him-longing and loss and things he could not put a name to. He lay back upon the pallet. Soundless weeping racked him. Some long time later, it seemed that someone held him, rocked him, stroked his matted hair.
For this pain, too, there will be a healing.
Again, he slept.
He wandered through a dreamy landscape of gently rolling hills and a knoll overlooking a river. Although he could not remember ever having been here before, something about the place tugged at his heart. The air was almost luminous, the warmth hypnotic. Time itself seemed to be holding its breath. Tree branches stirred and dappled brilliance danced across his face. Around him drifted transparent shapes, like figures of the Overworld. They drifted in and out of his sight. He felt no sense of threat.
He thought he heard singing in sweet bell-like tones, so faint it might have been only the breeze through the leaves. Shapes took on substance. Out of the corners of his eyes, he glimpsed slender bodies and cascades of silvery hair. Eyes and skin glowed with colorless radiance, as if sculpted from moonlight.
No humans moved with such grace, for these people were chieri, of the race that was already ancient in the times lost to memory, when humans first came to Darkover. It was said that in the madness of the Ghost Wind, they left their forests to take human women as lovers, appearing as fair, proud elfin lords, and from that time,
the blood of the chieri-and their laran-flowed through Comyn veins.
Their voices came clearer now as they sang through the slow, stately movements of their dance. Four moons swung through the pellucid sky, drenching it in multi-hued pastel light.
Part lament, part joy, the words resonated through Eduin. His body felt strangely light, as if the chieri's song transmuted his mortal flesh into glass. He found himself moving among them, these people whom no man had seen for hundreds of years, known only by legend. Their blood flowed in his veins, sang in his laran, his very soul. They turned to him with those knowing, luminous eyes, and held out their hands in welcome.
The Yellow Forest and the White, the slow, slow turning of the stars ... the pain of exile, the seasons in their cycle like the beating of an immense living heart....
And most of all, the endless dance of sky and tree, of hands and voices intertwined, so calm and sad and joyous as to break his heart, fading now....
Fading....
Eduin's next waking came more quickly. His senses had grown even sharper, as had his hunger. He had slept deeply, wandering in dreams that slipped away with each passing heartbeat. A rank smell arose from his body, a miasma of stale sweat, gutter filth, and the sodden reek of ale. His gorge rose at it.
There was no food, only the full pitcher. With an effort, he gulped down the water, which he now recognized as a dilute tincture of kirian, a psychoactive distillate used in the Towers for treating threshold sickness and other psychic maladies.
Eduin frowned as he finished the last of it. Only someone with training would know how to make the stuff, let alone administer it properly. It was clearly beneficial in his case. He could not have fallen into the hands of anyone with Tower training. If he had, he would not be in such a hovel, nor would he still be at liberty.
No, that transgression would not be soon forgotten.
His unknown benefactor had done more than refill the pitcher. Charcoal glowed in the little brazier, giving off a comforting warmth. The pile at the end of the table turned out to be clothing, a heavy tunic and drawstring trousers, worn and crudely patched, but clean.
Set on top was a disk of fired clay, a token to one of the local bathhouses. Gathering up the clean clothes and token, Eduin pulled on his jacket and slipped into the street. He recognized the establishment by the stylized rabbit-horn on its sign, twin to the one stamped on the reverse of the token.
The woman who guarded the door inspected the token. "This one includes soap, towels, and shave. Haircut's extra." She squinted at him.
He thought of telling her he hadn't stolen the token, as she so clearly suspected. He had spent too much of his life creating trouble where there was none. The last thing he wanted was to be hauled before the cortes for trying to steal a bath. "That will be fine," he said meekly.
The tub was barely an arm's length across. Its wooden walls had gone velvety with age and stank of sulfur, but he didn't care. The water was deep enough to cover his shoulders. Looking down, he scarcely recognized the body as his own. When had he become so wasted, his skin so sickly pale and pocked with the small red bites of body lice? Where had the scars over his ribs come from-some altercation with a man who had even less reason to live than he had?
Sighing, he rested his head against the rim of the tub as the heat sank deep into his muscles. His hair trailed into the water.
How long he lay there, drifting in and out of consciousness, he could not tell. The water grew cool. He roused himself, noticing the puckered skin on his hands, and reached for the soap. By the time he had lathered
his body twice and his hair three times, the water was scummy with grime. A bucket of rinse water stood in the corner. He hauled himself out and doused himself, though it left him shivering. He dried himself on the coarse towels left for his use and wadded his old clothes into a bundle. Filthy as they were, they might be worth a reis or two for rags.
Dressed now in the clean clothes, he folded a small bundle into the waist of his pants. His fingers lingered upon it for a moment. Within its wrapping of grime-stiffened silk lay the one possession he could never sell, no matter how desperate. Although its discovery would surely betray him as an outlaw laranzu, he dared not let it leave his person. The pale blue star-stone had been given to him upon his arrival at Arilinn Tower. Throughout his training, he had used it to concentrate and amplify his laran, so that it had become a crystalline extension of his own mind. Were it to be lost or stolen, or fall into the hands of anyone but a Keeper, the shock might well stop his heart.
Eduin couldn't remember the last time he had been shaved by someone else. The barber, a wiry old man with more hairs jutting from the warts on his chin than from his head, hummed as he worked. When he reached for Eduin's still-damp hair, Eduin protested that he had not paid for a haircut.
"Ah, but it would be a crime to let you go, so clean and fine, with locks like these. You couldn't pick out those tangles, not even with a horse comb. Besides, a man likes to take pride in his work."
Eduin mumbled his gratitude, for it was not merely the haircut that deserved thanks, but the man's kindness. It had been a long time since his life had included such luxuries.
He spent the next few hours wandering the streets. The neighborhood was familiar, yet it seemed he had never seen anything above the gutters. When he returned to the room, he found the door ajar.
A man, tall and thin, looked up from where he was bending over the table. He wore a short cloak with a hood pulled snugly about his face. Eduin had no doubt this was his mysterious rescuer.
"I am glad you came back," he said, "so that I might thank you for all you have done for me."
"No thanks are necessary," came the reply. The voice sounded familiar, as if he had heard it in his sodden dreams. "For like has called to like, and mind answered mind."
"I-I don't know what you're talking about," Eduin stammered, suddenly alarmed.
"But you do. For who else but a fellow laranzu would recognize what you truly are?"
The man reached up and pulled back his hood, revealing an angular, weathered face and a head of the bright red hair of the psychically Gifted Comyn.
2
Adrenaline shot along Eduin's nerves, terror born of years of hiding. Only a member of the Comyn, Darkover's telepathic caste, would have such flaming red hair or be able to pick up Eduin's own laran. Eduin could hardly remember half the things he'd done during the past year, yet he would have staked his life-for what little that was worth-that his psychic shields had not slipped. They were as much a part of him as his own breath or the sound of his heart in the stillness before the dawn. From the earliest stirrings of his powers, he had been drilled in keeping his innermost secrets. And so he had, even from his own Keepers at Arilinn and Hali. If those men, the most powerful and highly trained telepaths on Darkover, had not been able to penetrate his barriers, then surely this bedraggled stranger could not, regardless of his bold words or the color of his hair.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Eduin repeated.
"Let us not descend to petty games," the stranger said. "We hold t"ach other's fate in our hands. I am called Saravio."
Eduin's glance flickered once more to the man's
flame-colored hair and to the hood now lying about his shoulders. I am called, he'd said. Not, I am or My name is. What was he hiding? Could he also be a renegade from a Tower with a price on his head? Did he guess that Eduin was in a similar position?
"You can call me Eduin," he said, keeping his voice mild.
Saravio had not offered his family name, which need not have any devious intent. Many illegitimate offspring of great Comyn lords found a home in the laran circles. There, at least, a man's ability counted more than his titles.
After a pause, Eduin asked, "By the way, which Tower did you train at?"