"Esther M. Friesner - Hallowmass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friesner Esther M)

Highborn men were there, and ladies so white they looked like milk poured into
samite skins. Faces like painted eggs nodded beneath headdresses of terrifying
weight and unpredictable balance. Gusts of musk and spiced orange puffed from
tight-laced bosoms, little cloth-caged breasts seeming hard as cobblestones.

There was to be a procession, it was said. Sweet-voiced children garbed in white
would march with pure beeswax tapers in their chubby pink hands, singing hymns
and anthems. The bishop would come gowned in music, every glint of his jeweled
robes tossing a garland of notes against the sky. Or so the whispers ran.

There were many whispers, many murmurings. The crowd bumped and jostled all
along the route the bishop and his suite were supposed to follow. The nobles and
the peasantry alike would not be still for fear that they might miss the chance
to pass along the all-important cry of "There they are!"

As it happened, they need never have worried.

Where did it come from, that uncanny hush that fell so suddenly over all the
town, like the stillness before a thunderstorm? The ripe, red-gold sunlight of
October drained to gray. Men looked up and could not tell the stone bastions of
the cathedral from the sky that stood behind. Even the rooks who had haunted the
cathedral since its inception were quiet. A lady dropped her rosary. Pearls
clattered over the stones like the bones of martyrs tossed out of their tombs.

And then, a lone, sharp cry to shatter the stillness: "There they are!"

There were horses. There were never supposed to be horses. The bishop's
procession was supposed to be afoot, a show of humility for the people to
remember. Yet here were horses! Indeed, for an instant those who saw the tall,
proud mounts doubted their eyes, for the beasts made no sound at all as their
silver-shod hooves passed over the pavement. The open space before the cathedral
filled with them -- black and smoke and roan -- and the richness of their
trappings would have left the bishop's robes looking like a beggar's rags had my
lord bishop been anywhere in sight.

Where was he? No one thought to ask; no one cared to answer. The eyes of all
present were devoured by the sight before them, for if the mounts of that eerie
parade were worth noting, the riders were impossible to ignore.

High and haughty the lords of elven sat their gemmed and lacquered saddles. Hair
like hoarfrost streamed down in gossamer fails that overlay their horses'
trappings with a mantle more glorious than any weaving from a mortal loom. Lords
and ladies of the Fey came riding, tiny winged dragons perched on their slim
wrists as ordinary men might sport a favorite falcon. They rode up to the very
steps of the cathedral and there they stopped and stayed.

"What blasphemy is this?" boomed the bishop. He seemed to have come out of
nowhere, all his splendor made invisible by the awe which the Fey had conjured
so casually from the people. He was not a man who relished being overlooked. He
stood between the elven host and the bulky fortress of his faith, gilded crozier