"L. Warren Douglas - The Veil of Years 3 - Isle Beyond Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglas L Warren)

lampтАФa wick of twisted lint in a shallow bowl of oilтАФwith a flick of her fingers. Her firelighting spell was
the first she had ever learned, and she didn't even have to murmur the proper incantation for it to work.
But magic, even small magic, was unreliable. The thrust of her studies with Anselm had been to codify the
complex rules that underlay its unpredictability. What she now knew was that a spell written in one era, in
one language, might have different results in other times and tongues. She had learned that ranges of high
hills, rivers, and even great stone roads separate the realms of different magics. No spells worked at all in
the highest places, or afloatтАФexcept on the open seaтАФor on a Roman road. But in the Camargue, the
delta of River Rhodanus, a magical place where dry land graded imperceptibly into a sea of reeds and
then open water, where the water was neither entirely fresh nor salt, and ocean creatures rubbed
shoulders with upland fish from the streams, her small firemaking spell had once started a conflagration.

Spells, like geometric theorems, owed their utility to the validity of their axiomsтАФthose unprovable,
irreducible assumptions that underlay them. When people's beliefs changed, so did those assumptions,
and so did spells' results. Pierrette no longer uttered such dangerous words casually. She took the time
instead to allow her eyes to adjust to the gloom. . . .
***

When she stepped from the house, it was as a shabby boy with dirty bare toes, wornbracae тАФshort
trousersтАФand tunic, and a conical leather hat. The hat concealed long, black hair bound in a tight bun.
Townsfolk who passed glanced at Piers with only ordinary interest.
At the tavern, that changed. Lovi was seated with the three older men, a disparate grouping. His eyes
bored into her. He was, thought Piers, quite attractive. Perhaps her opinion showed, for his scowl
deepened.

Muhammad abd' Ullah ibn Saul was tall, and as skinny as a post. Gold threads gleamed at the hem and
sleeves of his tunic, watery silk lined his dark travelling cloak, and his hair was concealed within a tightly
wound cloth fixed with an emerald-encrusted fibula. His beard was curled and oiled.

Gilles, Pierrette's father, back from a morning at sea, wore only a ragged kilt, and reeked of fish, salt,
and seaweed. His few teeth were yellowed or brown.

Anselm's white hair and bushy beard, threaded with black, were only slightly darker than his robe, a
shapeless drape worn in the Roman style long out of fashion.

Gilles addressed his child appropriately: "I was looking for you, Piers. You weren't in the olive grove."

"I was out walking," she replied noncommittally. It would not do for ibn Saul to hear of the sacred pool:
he would want to see it, and then perhaps to write of what he sawтАФwhat he did not see. He would not
write of the goddess, or of visions in the water, but only of moss, trees, and cool air, and if he wrote it,
there would be no more goddess, and no more visions, for the written words of a disbeliever were a spell
of their own, that destroyed magic before the ink dried on the page.

"I'm glad you're here, boy," said Anselm, seamlessly continuing Gilles's deception. "My friend
Muhammad has a proposition that might interest you." His voice was easy, but Pierrette read tension in
the lines around his eyes.

"I am planning an expedition in search of a land unvisited for centuries," the scholar said. "Anselm claims
you have read every history written, and might know where I should begin. The place consists of islands,
and your father assures me that you're handy aboard a boat. Will you accompany me?" As always, ibn
Saul treated her as a colleague, an equal, and not an unbearded boyтАФmuch to Lovi's discontent.