"Maggie Furey - Shadowleague 1 - The Heart of Myrial" - читать интересную книгу автора (Furey Maggie)

and people alike.
In Tiarond, food and fabrics were rotting; houses were coated inside and out
with fungus and foul mold. Crops had remained unplanted and unharvested
in the morass that had once been fair and fertile townlands in the valley.
Farm beasts and their young were drowning where they fell or dying of
starvation or diseaseтАФas were an increasing number of the townsfolk.
Sickness was spreading like wildfire. Violence and terror stalked the streets,
while grief and hardship overhung the city in a pall as dark as the lowering
clouds. All over the city of Tiarond, all over the realm of Callisiora, the
suffering people looked to Zavahl for help. It was up to him to intercede
with the GodтАФbut he could not, and his subjects had begun to suspect as
much. The Hierarch had informants among the healers and scribes who
worked among the lowly folk. They brought back word of the many
complaints overheard in the streets, the taverns, and the marketplaces.
Clearly, the Tiarondians had decided, Myrial was displeased with his
servant. And the worst of it is, Zavahl thought bleakly, is that I agree with
them. This calamity is my fault. Somehow, I have failed.
Would he fail again today? That remained to be seen. The Hierarch stooped
to take off his shoes and removed from his brow the slender diadem with its
single crimson stone that denoted his rank. Barefoot and bareheaded, he took
a deep breath, slid the silver filigree panel aside, and stepped through the
dark, forbidding portal.
Even after thirty years, the immense black vault, larger than the temple
itself, still came as a surprise. The first time Zavahl had been forced to
venture beyond the doorway, he had been a little boy of five scant years. He
remembered how terrified he had been, knowing he must go alone into that
dreadful, mysterious place, forbidden to all save himself, to confront his
God face-to-face. Even at that age, heтАЩd been too proud to cry, but he
remembered shaking so hard that he could barely stand. The Priests, some
hard-faced and harsh, like old Malacht who had the rearing of him, others
sympathetic but firm, had opened the silver panels and pushed him through.
Awed as always by the vast, echoing grandeur of the Temple, he had
somehow expected the Holy of Holies, hidden behind its delicate silver
screens, to be a small and secret place. The initial shock and reverence he
had felt when he first stepped into MyrialтАЩs dark core had remained with him

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THE HEART OF MYRIAL - SHADOWLEAGUE 1 - MAGGIE FUREY

throughout his life.
His feet now sure from so many years of walking this path, Zavahl stepped
out into the dark emptiness beyond the portal. The silence was so profound
that it roared in his ears. Even the soft whispering shuffle of his footsteps
was lost; swallowed up in the immensity of the void. Putting one foot before
the other with profound concentration, the Hierarch walked carefully
forward. Darkness or no, he knew he was crossing a bridge, a slender
shallow arch without curbstone or rail, that sprang out over nothingnessтАФan
abyss whose depths went far beyond all human knowledge.
Zavahl crept forward, cowed and insignificant as that child of so many years
ago. In this infinite darkness, all the power and panolpy of a Priest-King