"Dave Duncan - Shadow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Dave)

A
matching line of ladies emerged to join the men, and together they paraded
down
a center aisle toward the distant and empty thrones.
All around the high walls, on tiered balconies, the lesser nobility and
some
of the commonality stood in silence to study their betters. Even men with
less
than two quarterings, perhaps.
There were more men than women in the procession, so only the men near
the
front had partners. At the end of the line came Ensign Harl: youngest,
shortest,
loneliest.
When the fat duke reached the open space before the thrones, he stopped.
The
next man moved to his right, and the next to his. When Sald arrived, he
paraded
along the whole line of highborn hindquarters and found barely space to
squeeze
between the last man and the wall, turning to face the dais and the thrones.
The
fabrics whispered again as the audience sat down.
The thrones faced the assembly and also faced sunward. High above, on top
of
the wall, a fixed mirror jutted out at an angle so that the rays of the
unchanging sun were reflected downward and the thrones glowed, brilliant in
the
shady courtyard.
There were a few minutes of expectant silence.
Unnoted in his edge position, Sald gaped around like the hick country boy
he
was. The Great Courtyard was the largest enclosed space he had ever seen.
High
above, slowly circling in the azure sky, were four--no, six--guards. What
happened, he wondered, to a trooper whose bird crapped on the court? A
posting
to the hot pole to make ice cream, perhaps?
Far beyond the courtyard wall he could see the distant craggy top of Ramo
Peak, but it could not compare with the view he had had from the desert, a
view
few men had ever seen: the Range in all its splendor. Even his home peak of
Rakarr he had never seen so well, set off by the hazy backdrop of the Rand
itself, a crumbled rampart rising miles above the plain, glowing bright
against
the midnight blue of the sky over Darkside, itself glittering with the
distant
reflection of ice. But Rakarr was a tiny peak, barely high enough to catch
rain,
and hence poor for cultivation. Ramo Peak, as he had seen it from the desert,