"Mark S. Geston - TheSiegeOfWonder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Geston Mark S)

The man was young and thought: they have named this war too grandly, as
they have named this place, the Holy City. He reconsidered: but it should at
least be denominated as "holy" with a small h, for it is choked with tombs and
cathedrals, mosques, shrines, places of adoration and prayer, sacred groves,
enchanted grottoes and temples of nameless ritual. Priests were as common here
as he remembered soldiers and technicians to have been in his own home cities
before he left. Their silken and sackcloth robes bracketed the dull tans and
greens of the common folk. Some were indistinguishable from princes in the
richness of their garments; pearls and diamonds were sewn in swirling patterns
to the hems of their cloaks, their saddles inlaid with mother-of-pearl and
silver, and their escorts often rode gryphons or lithe peg-. asuses, as suited
the varied tones and nuances they wished to lend to their powers.
The Holy City had named it the Wizards' War, as if it had already been
won and enshrined in its history. It had been going on for almost seven
hundred years when Aden left his home, and was known there only as "the war,"
as were all the wars of his people's history during their prosecution.
He stepped from the road and balanced on the edge of a marble fountain
while some exalted personage thundered by with his retainers; they were all
dead men, which showed their leader to be powerful indeed. Flashes of ivoried
bone glinted through seams in their golden armor. The dust their horses kicked
up became gold too.
Aden held himself against the fountain's rim and easily hid his disgust
with the funereal cavalry; he had seen much worse. Outwardly, he mirrored the
awe and reverence of the other people on the narrow street. Certain mages, it
was widely known, often allowed the dust of their passage to remain gold and
diamond chips, instead of transmuting back into dirt, as a reward to the
people for their acclaim. Many were that extravagant. Of course, there were
others who loathed such obsequiousness, so one had to be careful not to
overplay the role.
Aden watched the party with his left eye. An adept mage could have
detected millimetric variations between the pupil dilation of that eye and his
other, just as he could have discovered the coldness and conductivity that
underlay the left side of his skull. But in three years, Aden had been careful
never to give such persons any reason to look.
The crowd solidified behind the party. Trading and haggling resumed. The
noise, if anything, was worse than it had been before, as each person sought
to compliment the magnificence of the magician's dress and his house's livery
to his neighbor. The men of power in that part of the world often kept spies
in their pay, some human and some otherwise, and there remained the hope of
washing one's clothes that evening and finding the gold still gold at the
bottom of the tub. At worst, it assured one that the magician's disfavor would
not be incurred.
Aden brushed some of the dulling gold dust from his coarse tunic and, as
if pondering the magician's greatness, put his smudged left index finger up
alongside his nose. His eye watched the dust in the act of its transmutation,
sucked dry its spectrums, counted and weighed the opaque interchanges of
electrons and subatomic particles, and caught traces of the fading resonances
that tied it to the wizard's mind.