"Debra Doyle & James MacDonald - Mageworlds 06 - The Stars Asunder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doyle Debra)

clung to their bodies like wet leaves, and the glow from Yuvaen's lantern cast a swaying circle of yellow
light on the space within, where the sus-Demaizen kept their tablets of remembrance.
Plaques and memorials covered the walls-ancient slabs of grey slate scratched with names in a
language no longer spoken by anyone living, and newer tablets of painted wood and cast metal. On the
altars beneath them, long-guttered candles spilled out their wax across carven wood.
Garrod strode into the center of the room, where a small altar stood in front of a freestanding
memorial on tripod legs. The candle holders were empty-whoever had last tended the memorial had
scraped them clean when the rite was done-and a spray of white flowers, long since dried, lay on the
altar between them.
"This is an end and a breaking," Garrod said. With that he picked up the memorial and flung it out
through one of the high, west-looking windows in the center of the long wall. The window glass gave way
in a jagged, shivering peal, and the memorial went crashing down onto the gravel drive outside.
"Wait!" Yuvaen cried over the noise. "Hasn't there been enough broken already?"
Garrod put his hands against the wooden altar and shoved it toward the broken window. "No,"
he said. "Not enough by half. Before I am done, I will break our very universe."
The altar smashed against the low sill and tumbled over it to the ground below. Rain poured in
through the gap in the window, driven slantwise by the rising wind.
"Your ancestors will curse you," Yuvaen said.
"My ancestors mean nothing to me," Garrod said, "and I mean nothing to them." He pulled
another of the tablets from the wall, and the dried wood splintered in his hands. He threw the tablet out
onto the gravel with the other wreckage. "I am the last of my line, and what follows after will follow the
older days."
"I don't understand."
"The sundering of the galaxy is not just a parable, or an allegory suitable for children and
scholars," Garrod said. He was pulling tablet after tablet away from the plastered walls, working now
with a fierce, unstoppable intensity. "It is nothing less than the truth. And I intend to bring together that
which was split apart."
Yuvaen shook his head. "You're right not to fear your ancestors. It's the gods themselves that
you should fear."
Garrod fished in his pocket and pulled out an incendiary, of the kind used by workers in the
metal and construction trades. He pulled the igniter and tossed the incendiary down onto the tangle of
broken wood on the gravel drive. A brilliant white light blossomed up, mixed shortly after with red as the
wood caught fire. The western windows glowed with the color.
Garrod heaved another wooden tablet out of the broken window and into the flames. "I don't
have time to fear the gods, Yuva-you'll have to do it for me. Come, help me clean out this space, for here
will be our workroom."
"May the gods forgive me, then," Yuvaen said. "Because I'm with you."
The two men embraced, then fell to stripping the walls of their memorials, and clearing the floor
of its altars.

II : Year 1116 E. R.
Eraasi: Western Fishing Grounds syn-Grevi estate,
Northern Territories
Ildaon: Ildaon Starport

The deep-water fleets from Amisket, Demnag, and Ridkil Point had been having a bad summer.
Like most of the coastal settlements in the Veredden Archipelago, the three towns depended for a
livelihood on their commercial fisheries, and a poor haul meant a lean year to come. In autumn, the fish
migrated to spawning grounds near the equator-too great a distance for the Veredden ships to follow,
even if biological changes during the spawn didn't turn the fish sour and spongy-and winter in the northern