"C. S. Friedman - Coldfire 3 - Crown of Shadows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friedman C. S)

A faint smile tightened the corners of Tarrant's lips; the pale eyes sparkled. "No dreams of the Patriarch,"
he agreed. "Not of my devising, anyway."

"Yeah." He turned away, refusing to look at Tarrant. Or at the letter. "I can manage those nightmares on
my own, can't I?"
Faraday: jewel of the east, heart of all commerce, haven par excellence for all the merchant ships that
plied the eastern waters. Unlike the other great ports of Erna this city had not relied upon Nature for its
security, but had crafted its own safety with walls and locks and measures and men, creating a complex
alarm system which rendered the great harbor as safe as any coastal region could ever be.

Faraday: devastated.

They saw it from a distance at first, then assessed it in greater detail as they approached. The great sea
wall which towered thirty feet above the water's surface, protecting the harbor beyond, was now ragged
along its top. There were broken spars that jutted out from its surface, wooden shards driven deep
between the rocks as a memorial to whatever ship the sea had caught up and heaved against its
unyielding surface. Mast-bits floated in a muddy sea, rail-bits, scraps of sail. Something that might have
been a chunk of flesh was caught up in their wake, but the scavenger fish had so worried it that there was
too little left to identify.

At the top of the wall men scurried about, quickly making repairs. Damien saw them nervously looking
east as they worked, as if they could somehow measure the sea's temper. But smashers didn't always
give warning, and from the looks of the damage... Damien felt his stomach tighten as they came around
the end of the wall, past the first smasher lock. He hated the sea. He hated its power, and its
unpredictability. Most of all he hated the limits it had placed on man's progress, by forcing him to focus
on a land-based expansion.

Rozca's expression was dark as they came around the end of the wall, easing God's Glory and her
companion ship into the narrow harbor entrance. Damien followed his gaze out into the harbor itself,
where broken piers and battered hulls littered the tide. "Shouldn't have happened," Rozca muttered. "Not
here."

"You can't stop a smasher."

The Captain snorted and jerked his head toward Faraday. "They could. Maybe not stop it outright, but
keep it from killing. They've got alarms up on the cliff there-" he waved a hand toward the bluffs that
towered over the harbor, "-that sense a quake far away as Novatlantis, and enough good men praying
'em to work that they're damn near perfect. With the watchers up there and sirens all along the coast...
there's never been a smasher yet that they didn't know was coming. Get your ships out into deep water if
you can, tie up the rest to a special mooring that lets 'em go with the waves, set the locks so the harbor
can't be drained, and then get the vulk out of the way... maybe they can't stop 'em, but they can damned
well make ready for 'em. There hasn't been a ship lost in Faraday since the last lock was built, nearly a
hundred years ago." He gazed out in the harbor, eyes narrowed against the sunset's glare. Shadowed by
his thick brows, his expression seemed doubly dark.

"Not this time," he muttered. "Vulkin' Hell, look at the place!"

They had come past the lock and around the sea wall, so that now their view of the harbor was
unimpeded. Damien's hand tightened about the rail as he gazed upon what was once the proudest port of
the eastern coast, as he compared it to the harbor from which they had set sail nearly two years ago.