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

"You passed her test-when you healed me," Eduin gasped aloud, "and now I am here-to guide you-in your great work."
"I knew it!" Saravio crowed, releasing Eduin. "I knew she would not abandon her chosen one!"
Well, Eduin said to himself as he rubbed his neck, making sure no trace of the thought leaked past his barriers, Naotalba is as good a god as any, these days.
For so long, his only goal had been freedom from a quest that he could not possibly fulfill. As a penniless fugitive without any way of making a living, save with those skills that would betray him, he had no hope of putting an end to King Carolin. Now for the first time, he had both respite and hope-hope that with the help of this stranger, however odd he might be, Eduin might rid himself forever of his father's dying curse.
"I knew it-I knew it-" Saravio chanted, bouncing up and down on the rickety pallet like a small child. "I knew-ew-ew-ew it!"
Dark Avarra, the man is not odd, he's raving mad!
Eduin got to his feet, thinking it would be safer to retreat for a time. He had already seen enough of Saravio's shifting moods to suspect how uncertain, how dangerous his temper might be.
Before he could turn toward the door, however, Saravio's body went rigid. His eyes bulged, the whites stark against the dusky flush of his cheeks. He arched backward and fell upon the pallet with a loud thump. For a moment, he lay there, as still as a corpse.
The door lay only a step or two away. Eduin could be gone in a moment, out into the streets and their familiar anonymity. Every instinct shrilled at him to run, to hide. He might have a few hours or days before the compulsion returned. Yet, he hesitated.
Saravio's next breath came as a hoarse gasp. His spine bowed upward, so that he rested on the back of his skull and his hips.
Eduin had trained as a monitor at Arilinn, one of the oldest and most prestigious of all the Towers on Darkover. Although he had not done the delicate work of diagnosis and healing by laran in many years, he had not forgotten the techniques.
Do nothing to draw attention to yourself, urged his years of living as an outlaw. Hide who you are and what you can do.
Shudders ran the length of Saravio's frame, each wave peaking in a spasm. Eyeballs rolled up in their sockets, parted lids revealing crescents of white. Arms and legs flailed wildly, fell still for a moment, then began twitching again. Teeth snapped together. No breath came from between the lips pulled back in a rictus.
Even through his psychic barriers, Eduin sensed the wild chaos of the other man's nervous system, the agony of his straining muscles, the lungs screaming for air, the frenzied beating of his heart.
Eduin took a deep breath. This man had pulled him from certain death in the snow, had given him a gift beyond imagining. He could not walk away now.
He threw himself down beside the pallet and fumbled
at his belt for the starstone in its wrappings. The crystal warmed instantly upon contact with his bare hand.
The world shifted. He had been living without using his laran for so long, he had grown blind. Now every detail, every radiant nuance of color and texture, of sound and smell and inner sensing glowed incandescent across his conscious mind. He closed his eyes, ignoring the sting of renewed tears.
Without visual sight, using his starstone to amplify his laran senses, Eduin narrowed the focus of his concentration. Saravio's energy body burned like a flame. The channels and nodes that conducted psychic forces appeared as a spectrum of colors-reds and oranges, searing white and dull brown. The brilliance indicated the strength of the man's laran, which was considerable.
Rarely had Eduin seen such disorder, such a breakdown of the normal balances. Colors clashed, especially at the centers at the base of the brain. The node at the bottom of the skull pulsed wildly, throwing off sparks that bore a sickening resemblance to clingfire. Wherever they touched, they left gaping holes of darkness in Saravio's energy body.
Eduin searched his memory for a similar pattern. Once, in his first year as a fully qualified matrix technician, he had assisted in the treatment of a woman with falling-sickness. At unpredictable intervals, she would become unconscious and her body would jerk uncontrollably, leaving her battered and exhausted, but with no memory of what had happened to her. Otherwise, she appeared normal, except for the odd neural cross-circuits.
Eduin opened his eyes. Saravio's skin had turned blue around his mouth. He could not survive much longer without air, nor could his heart withstand the strain.
Spreading his fingers wide, Eduin reached out his free hand to scan the other man more deeply. Normally, he would avoid actual contact with the patient he was examining. It was too easy to be misled by direct physical touch.
Just then, Saravio's torso heaved upward, contorting so that his arms wrapped around Eduin's neck. Hands dug into the back of Eduin's shoulders with iron strength, pulling him down. Desperately, Eduin pushed away. It was no use. He was held fast. Panic seared him. He struggled for breath. The mingled rankness of sweat and terror filled his nostrils.
Somehow, Eduin managed to slide his free hand in front of his own shoulders. Gasping, he shoved as hard as he could. His hands slipped upward along the slope of Saravio's rib cage. Under his fingers, he felt the hard line of jawbone. He curled his fingers around Saravio's lower face. If only he could make contact with the brain centers that controlled the other man's muscles. Even a moment of relaxation would allow him to pull free-
He shaped his laran like a spear point to pierce the tumult.
Almost without effort, Eduin swept through the other man's chaotic barriers. Images flooded him, stark and vivid. He caught a flash of a Tower illuminated by lightning against a night sky, then a blizzard of swirling gray and white, a river in full flood, a figure in a long dark cloak. The eddies died, leaving only the figure turning slowly toward him.
Hands pale as snow drew back the hood and he saw it was a woman. She lifted her face. Framed by hair the color of jet that dipped in a peak between her flawless brows, her skin glimmered like pearl. The faintest tracery of rose on her cheeks and lips was the only color. Gray eyes searched his, yet he knew she could not see him.
Hers was a beauty to break men's hearts, and yet as Eduin looked upon her in that moment, he felt only pity. Pity that such a human woman walked the earth no more, but must descend into the Seven Frozen Hells.
She shaped a word, perhaps Adelandeyo, "walk with the gods," a formal phrase of parting among the Comyn.
Walk with the gods, she must.
Naotalba.
Eduin repeated her name to himself. He thought that if she answered him, if she called his own name, then his heart would shatter.
A gust sprang up at that moment. It whipped Naotalba's gray cloak, churning the snow at her feet into glittering billows. First her body disappeared, then the pale oval of her face. The dark outline of her cloak flared outward, growing in size like a giant maw, opening to engulf the whole world. Around it, the wind raged, streams of sleet and darkness, far worse than any Hellers blizzard. He looked upon a tempest against which no man could stand, a maelstrom straight from Zandru's coldest hell. And it was coming for him ...
NAOTALBA! NAOTALBA!
Claws like frozen darkness pierced him. In a spasm of terror, he hurled himself backward. The psychic substance of his body stretched and tore. A brassy din reverberated through him.
Eduin found himself back in his physical body, sprawled on the wooden floor. His outstretched legs convulsed for an instant. Then he scrambled to his feet. He ran trembling fingers over his face, feeling the skin damp and hot, as if with fever. He snatched up the filthy scrap of silk and tucked his starstone away. Chest heaving, he looked down upon the man on the pallet.
Saravio lay back on the bed, his breath deep and even. The blue tinge had faded from his lips and as Eduin watched, the iron tension seeped from his muscles. His face relaxed, giving him the aspect of a sleeping child.
Eduin's heart pounded in his ears and sweat ran freely down the sides of his neck and across his chest and back. Gradually, his terror gave way to pity. He knew very well the taste and weight of obsession, the bitterness of enslavement. What must it be like to live, day by day, with such visions, cast out by the very Tower that was his best hope of healing?
If Eduin were to have any chance at ending his father's curse, he must find some way to help this poor, crazed man. Murmuring a prayer he thought long forgotten, Eduin slipped out the door.
Eduin returned to Saravio's quarters late in the day, as the early dusk engulfed the canyons of the city. The place was very much as he had left it, with Saravio lying on his side, knees bent toward his chest, head resting on his outstretched arm, breathing deep and regular. Eduin sensed rather than saw all this. The battered lantern that he had purchased with part of his day's earnings cast an uncertain light across the room. In his other hand, he clutched a packet of nutbread, the cheapest he could find, and a skin of water. It had taken all of his ragged determination not to fill it with ale instead.
Sighing with weariness, he set the lantern on the crude table and lowered himself to the pallet. He placed one hand on Saravio's shoulder. The physical contact flooded him with laran sensations. As Saravio slept, his brain had continued its recovery. Waves of energy rippled through the overlapping systems of nervous tissue and energon channels, slow but steady.
Eduin sent out a mental probe, a simple telepathic thought. It ought to have been as clear as spoken word to the man's awakening mind, but there was no response, not even a flicker of awareness. He had not expected one.
He shook the shoulder gently. Saravio's eyes opened.
"It's you. I dreamed ... Naotalba ..."
"Yes, you're all right now. Here, you must eat something." Gently, Eduin helped the other man to sit up.
Like an obedient child, Saravio accepted morsels of bread and sips of water. He took the first few bites tentatively, as if he had forgotten how to chew and swallow. When Eduin sent a gentle telepathic message, Saravio gave no sign, overt or mental, that he'd sensed anything.
The little experiment confirmed Eduin's suspicions.
All through the day, as he had labored at mucking out stalls at the livery stables at the city's edge, he had mulled over the morning's events.
Whatever Saravio's talents while he was still at Cedestri Tower, before Naotalba had "visited" him, he was now as head-blind to telepathic contact as any commoner. Coupled with his delusions and unpredictable temper, that would certainly render him unfit for work in a matrix circle.