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

Eduin thought it likely that whatever caused the seizures had also damaged that part of Saravio's brain responsible for receptive telepathy. Saravio seemed to have no idea of his extraordinary projective empathy, his ability to temporarily override the compulsion spell.
We are two of a kind, Eduin thought with a touch of unfamiliar compassion, each crippled through no fault of our own. Perhaps together we can make one whole patched-up man and limp through the world. No, he realized, he would no longer have to settle for a half-existence in the shadows. Life held the promise of much more.
Emotion, hot and bright, came singing up behind Eduin's throat. For the first time in his years of hiding, he had a friend, an ally. He would know moments of freedom, and in them, a chance to think, to plan, to reach beyond the gutters. Perhaps, too, he could help Saravio find peace and a use for his unusual talent. It would be a fair trade.
4
The last of the snow clung to the alleys and back streets of Thendara long after it had melted everywhere else. Here in the poorest sections, shadows clung, chill and secretive, to the broken walls. Grime scummed pools of slushy water. Half-starved children picked through the piles of refuse for scraps of moldy bread.
Eduin, now close friends with Saravio, had moved to roomier quarters. Saravio sang to him whenever he could not bear the internal pressure of his father's dying curse, and he would know a few days of release before the cycle, remorseless and inexorable, began again. Saravio sometimes lapsed into seizures after an episode, although the fits were never as severe as the first. Eduin dared not leave him, for fear that Saravio might stop breathing again. This only increased Eduin's exposure to the euphoria of the song. His craving for drink abated, but at the same time he found himself longing for the moments of physical pleasure that accompanied Saravio's laran manipulations, finding ways to draw them out. The allure frightened him, for it was, both in its power and its purity, far more seductive than ale.
With the lifting of the numbing effects of drink, Eduin experienced a renewal of other emotions as well.
Whenever Saravio suffered his fits, Eduin felt a mixture of pity, disgust, and guilt. Guilt that he himself had brought this malady upon the friend who sought only to help him. He never inquired about Saravio's willingness to pay this price. Indeed, Saravio always responded cheerfully to his request and afterward, seemed unaware of what had happened. Then Eduin felt shame, as if he were taking advantage of the innocent trust of a child. He thrust the unpleasant feelings from his mind. What choice did he have? Silently, he promised himself that he would use the respite from the compulsion in a good cause. He swore he would find a way to do without the soporific effect. Usually he would feel better for a while, until he was forced to ask Saravio to sing again.
As one tenday blended into the next and the sun swung higher in the sky, heralding the end of winter, Eduin began to wonder if he had exchanged one form of imprisonment for another. As far as he could tell, Saravio's laran manipulation did not place his life and health at risk the way drink had, but he was no less chained to it. Sooner or later, the compulsion within his own mind returned, the scorpion roused to spread its poison in his mind and drove him to beg another song. Eduin grew to resent his dependence. Only his quick thinking in representing himself as Naotalba's messenger prevented him from deteriorating into Saravio's abject slave, willing to do anything for yet another ecstatic moment.
At least, there were times, however brief, when his thoughts were clear. There must be a way to free himself of both the enslavement of his father's command and the numbing addiction of either drink or Saravio's euphoric touch. He walked the outskirts of the city, to and from his days of casual labor, and considered his situation.
Gradually, Eduin's awareness shifted. He needed a permanent solution, not a temporary respite that exacted an even higher toll. Perhaps the answer was not to
dampen the compulsion but to fulfill it. For so long now, he had regarded it as an impossible task. How could he possibly attack Carolin Hastur while he was reduced to skulking in the shadows, hardly able to earn his bread for fear of revealing himself? He had never succeeded before, when he was the Prince's companion, and Zandru knew, he had had enough opportunities.
Carolin Hastur seemed to lead a charmed life. He had survived every attempt on his life, not only by Eduin and his brother, but by his own cousin, Rakhal, who had seized the throne and sent Carolin into exile. How had the man done it?
In a strange, transcendent clarity, Eduin understood. It was not his fault he had not been able to defeat Carolin Hastur so many years ago. Something had always gotten in the way.
Not something. Someone.
A voice whispered through the hollows of his mind, not the brutal command Eduin knew so well, but nonetheless familiar, subtle and cunning: Varzil Ridenow is the power behind the Hasturs. Without his counsel... Carolin will fall...
Eduin would not be a penniless outcast if it were not for Varzil Ridenow. He would be secure in his position as Keeper, hailed as the savior of the siege of Hestral, and Carolin would long since have been in his grave.
Varzil! At every turning in Eduin's life, Varzil Ridenow had managed to thwart him. It was Varzil who kept Carolin safe from Eduin's careful plans, Varzil who had tried to prevent Eduin's first romance with his younger sister, Dyannis, Varzil who foiled Gwynn's assassination attempt, Varzil who secretly aided Carolin during the Prince's long exile, Varzil who unmasked Eduin's role in the murder of Queen Taniquel's daughter, and betrayed Eduin during the battle to save Hestral Tower.
In order to fulfill his father's command, he must kill
Carolin Hastur, whom he once loved, but in order to do that, he must first eliminate Varzil Ridenow, whom he hated still.
As the thoughts roiled in Eduin's mind, the knot of ice in his belly loosened. Triumph shivered through him. For the first time, he need no longer fight the compulsion. Instead, he would use it to fire his own thirst for justice.
Justice ... and the end of Varzil Ridenow. He would have to go carefully. He had no direct access to any Tower, let alone the most famous Keeper on Darkover. A Keeper of Varzil's ability could not be taken by surprise or killed by ordinary means. Varzil might have the resources of rank and Tower behind him, but even the most mighty tenerezu was mortal flesh and blood. Eduin needed a way to bring Varzil down from Neskaya, place him within reach ... distract him ...
And in this pursuit, Saravio would be his ally, his helper, his tool.
Traders arrived with the opening of the roads, and a party of rich Comyn lords walked the broad avenues in their fur-trimmed cloaks, their heads raised to the spring sunshine. The laughter of the women rose above the music. A bevy of jugglers and street minstrels accompanied them. Two young boys, twins by the look of them, shrieked in delight as they tossed a glittery ball. Their nurse, her ample skirts of fine-woven wool swirling around her, ran after them.
"Look at them," Eduin said to Saravio. They were standing at a corner beside the door of the inn where they'd earned a few coins chopping wood and washing dishes.
Along the street, a crowd in tattered rags, many with weeping sores on their exposed skin, pressed against the City Guards. Despite the clear skies, the air carried a faint prickle like the first intimation of lightning, perceptible only to trained laran yet hovering on the edge of the senses.
Saravio still went cloaked. With time and Eduin's coaching, he was rapidly losing the carriage of a Tower worker. No one would mistake him for a peasant, but he passed well among the underclass. He might have been a tradesman or a soldier, down on his luck and on the streets too long, surviving from day to day. Now, he had no difficulty finding work as a common laborer.
Saravio's lip curled in a sneer that Eduin felt rather than saw. "They play while our people suffer."
Our people. Eduin wondered if he could use Saravio's bitterness and the simmering resentments of the people to generate an attack against Varzil Ridenow. "The Comyn are nothing but parasites," he pointed out. "But it is the corrupt Towers that sustain their position. Without that power, they would be nothing."
Once Eduin had believed that the Towers ought not to take orders from kings, as if they were some breed of superior servant. Those who created laran weapons were the only ones with the right to decide how they were to be used. Such power ought to rule, not to serve. But the Keepers were too bound to law and tradition to see the truth, just as they had turned away Saravio's remarkable gift. Although their reasons differed, Eduin and Saravio found common cause in their hatred of the Towers.
"Stand back!" one of the Guards cried. He bad drawn a stout wooden staff instead of his sword, and he pressed it against the foremost ranks of the crowd.
"For pity!" one man cried. His shirt hung loose from shoulders that had once been broad and strong. Now the bones jutted from his body like the beams of a ruined house. "My children are starving!"
"Then you should have stayed where you belong, and not come to Thendara." One of the Comyn party, a young man barely twenty, took a step toward them.
He'd thrown back his cloak to reveal a tunic of elaborately patterned cut velvet, ornamented with a golden chain whose price would have fed an entire village for a year. The sun glinted on his pale hair, the color of straw with only a slight tinge of red. Eduin caught only the whiff of laran from the boy, not nearly strong enough to be worth training.
"My good fellow," the young lordling drawled, "did you think you'd find the streets lined with food stalls? We have nothing for you here. Go back home."
"Home?" The man spoke with a thick accent. Anguish ripped through his cry, echoed by nods and glances from the people around him. "To what home? To a pile of cinders, all that's left after the clingfire fell." With one hand he jerked his shirt open. Gasps surrounded him.
Eduin's stomach lurched at the sight of the man's chest, scarred over where it had been cut half away, leaving his arm a skeletal ruin. He'd seen what clingfire could do. Once ignited, it would burn anything combustible, even human flesh and bone, until there was nothing left. The only way to stop it was to physically dig out every single fragment. Someone had saved this man's life, but at the cost of his livelihood.
"What choice does he have?" Eduin muttered to Saravio. "He cannot farm with his arm like that. He came here for help, and this arrogant puppy tells him to go home!"
"I did not come for charity," the man went on, "but to find work."
"Work!" another man, equally ragged, shouted. "Work and justice!"
"I am very sorry for you all," the boy said, clearly shaken, "but it wasn't our fault-"
"Your kind sent the aircars that dropped it!" someone behind the crippled farmer cried.
"Aye, and the root blight what ruined two years' wheat crops till we had nothing left to plant!" came another voice. More joined him as they surged forward, shoving hard against the City Guards. The incipient electrical tension of the day fueled their anger.
The Comyn women and children hurried away, their faces white. The City Guards beat back anyone who tried to follow.
Eduin smiled grimly. The legacy of Carolin's predecessor, the brutal Rakhal Hastur, lay all about them: injustice, hunger, disease, the ravages of terrible laran-powered weapons.
The time of the Hundred Kingdoms was coming to an end, if not in this generation, then surely in the next. Even a fool could see that. These wars were the dying spasms of an age. Even now, a few powerful families extended their dominion over weaker client kingdoms.
King Carolin of Hastur had become foremost among them. He might have been a good man once, but the world, with all the allure of power, now had him in its
grip-Soon there would be no one to stop him.
His father's words echoed in his memory: Varzil Ridenow is the key. Without his counsel, Hastur will fall...
The crippled farmer stood, watching where the rich lords had passed. His chest heaved with emotion, his face flushed. Desperation radiated from his twisted body like heat from a furnace. Some of the crowd dispersed, but a number of them, particularly the men, remained. They seemed to be drawn to his intensity, as if he had been telling their stories as well as his own.