"Sara Douglass - The Axis Trilogy 1 - BattleAxe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglass Sara)

exhaustion almost obscuring her sight.
"StarDrifter?" she whispered, hope strengthening her heart and her voice.
Slowly, hesitatingly, she lifted a blackened hand towards the sky. "Is that you?"
 The Tower of the Seneschal
Twenty-nine years later. . .

The speckled blue eagle floated high in the sky above the hopes and works
of mankind. With a wingspan as wide as a mart was tall, it drifted lazily through
the air thermals rising off the vast inland plains of the kingdom of Achar. Almost
directly below lay the silverтАФblue expanse of Grail Lake, flowing into the great
River Nordra as it coiled through Achar towards the Sea of Tyrre. The lake was
enormous and rich in fish, and the eagle fed well there. But more than fish, the
eagle fed on the refuse of the lake-side city of Carlon. Pristine as the ancient city
might be with its pink and cream stone walls and gold and silver plated roofs;
pretty as it might be with its tens of thousands of pennants and banners and
flags fluttering in the wind, the Carlonites ate and shat like every other creature
in creation, and the piles of refuse outside the city walls supported enough mice
and rats to feed a thousand eagles and hawks.
The eagle had already feasted earlier that morning and was not interested in
gorging again so soon. It let itself drift further east across Grail Lake until the
white-walled seven-sided Tower of the Seneschal rose one hundred paces into
the air to greet the sun. There the eagle tipped its wing and its balance, veering
slowly to the north, looking for a shady afternoon roost. It was an old and wise
eagle and knew that it would probably have to settle for the shady eaves of
some farmer's barn in this most treeless of lands.
As it flew it pondered the minds and ways of these men who feared trees so
much that they'd cut down most of the ancient forests once covering this land. It
was the way of the Axe and of the Plough.
Far below the eagle, Jayme, Brother-Leader of the Religious Brotherhood of
the Seneschal, most senior mediator between the one god Artor the Ploughman
and the hearts and souls of the Acharites, paced across his comfortable chamber
in the upper reaches of the Tower of the Seneschal.
"The news grows more disturbing," he muttered, his kindly face crinkling
into deep seams of worry. For years he'd refused to accept the office his fellow
brothers had pressed on him, and now, five years after he'd finally bowed to
their wishes and accepted that Artor himself must want him to hold supreme
office within the Seneschal, Jayme feared that it would be he who might well
have to see the Seneschal - nay, Achar itself -through its greatest crisis in a
thousand years.
He sighed and turned to stare out the window. Even though it was only early
DeadLeaf-month, the first week of the first month of autumn, the wind had
turned icy several days before, and the windows were tightly shut against the
cold. A fire blazed in the mottled green marble fireplace behind his desk, the
light of the flames picking out the inlaid gold tracery in the stone and the silver,
crystal and gold on the mantel.
The younger of his two assistants stepped forward. "Do you believe the
reports to be true, Brother-Leader?"
Jayme turned to reassure Gilbert, whom he thought might yet prove to have
a tendency towards alarm and panic. Who knew? Perhaps such tendencies would
serve him well over the coming months. "My son, it has been so many