"David Drake - Lord of the Isles 05 - Goddess of the Ice Realm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

of the high domed ceiling, along the struts and down the heart of the thick crystalline pillars on which it
rested. The creak and groan of the vast structure filled the half-dark like the sound of moonlit surf. The
ice was alive, but it was coldly hostile to all other living things.

In the hall below were things that looked like men but were not, and things that could never have
existed save here or in nightmare. Lower still, beneath the transparent ice of the floor, monstrous
shadows glided through the phosphorescent water.

She sat on a throne of ice in the center of the hall, white and corpulent. In the air before Her,
wizardlight twisted and coiled; and as it moved, the whole cosmos began to shift.
The ice groaned....



CHAPTER 1

"I think the rain's going to hold off after all," said Garric, eyeing the sky to seaward where clouds
had been lowering all day as the royal fleet made its way up the western coast of Haft.

If it didn't, well, he wouldn't shrink. For most of his nineteen years he'd been a peasant who
herded sheep and worked in the yard of his father's inn, often enough in the rain. But now he was Prince
Garric of Haft, making a Royal Progress from Tisamur, through Cordin, and to Carcosa on Haft. He was
here to convince the folk living in the West that there was a real Kingdom of the Isles again and that they
were part of it. It's hard to impress people in a downpour; all they really care about is getting under cover
as soon as the foreign fools let them.

"Ah, you can believe that if you wish, your highness," said Lobon, the sailing master of the
Shepherd of the Isles. His voice mushed through a mouthful of maca root which oarsmen claimed gave
them strength and deadened the pain of their muscles. "What I say is that we'll have a squall before we've
settled half so many ships into their berths."
He nodded glumly toward the harbor mouth ahead. "That's if Carcosa even has berths for a
hundred warships. We're at the back of beyond!"
"Carcosa can berth a hundred warships," Garric said, a trifle more sharply than the sailing
master's comment deserved. "A thousand years ago when Carus was King of the Isles and Carcosa was
his capital, the harbor held as many as five hundred."

Lobon was a skillful judge of winds, currents, and the way to get the best out of even a clumsy
quinquereme like the Shepherd, but he'd been born on the island of Ornifal. He was just as much of an
Ornifal chauvinist as a landowning noble like Lord Waldron, commander of the royal army.

Garric came from Barca's Hamlet on the east side of Haft. All the time he'd been growing up,
Carcosa was the unimaginably great city that held all the wonder in the world. And besides Garric's own
background--

"Aye, lad," said the ghost of King Carus, alive and vibrant in Garric's mind. "Five hundred ships
in harbor--but only when I wasn't off on campaign with them, smashing one usurper or another.
And that was most times, till the Duke of Yole's wizard smashed me instead and the kingdom with
me. But you'll do better, because you know not to solve all your problems with a sword!"
Garric smiled at the image of his ancient ancestor. He and Carus could have passed for son and
father: tall and muscular with a dark complexion, brown hair, and a quick smile unless there was trouble