"Terry Goodkind - Debt of Bones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goodkind Terry)

DEBTOFBONES
BY TERRY GOODKIND




'What do you got in the sack, dearie?'
Abby was watching a distant flock of whistling swans, graceful white
specks against the dark soaring walls of the Keep, as they made their
interminable journey past ramparts, bastions, towers and bridges lit by
the low sun. The sinister spectre of the Keep had seemed to be staring
back the whole of the day as Abby had waited. She turned to the hunched
old woman in front of her.
'I'm sorry, did you ask me something?'
'I asked what you got in your sack.' As the woman peered up, she
licked the tip of her tongue through the slot where a tooth was missing.
'Something precious?'
Abby clutched the burlap sack to herself as she shrank a little from the
grinning woman. 'Just some of my things, that's all.'
An officer, trailed by a troop of assistants, aides, and guards, marched
out from under the massive portcullis that loomed nearby. Abby and the
rest of the supplicants waiting at the head of the stone bridge moved
tighter to the side, even though the soldiers had ample room to pass. The
officer, his grim gaze unseeing as he swept by, didn't return the salute as
the bridge guards clapped fists to the armour over their hearts.
All day soldiers from different lands, as well as the Home Guard from
the vast city of Aydindril below, had been coming and going from the
Keep. Some had looked travel-sore. Some wore uniforms still filthy with
dirt, soot, and blood from recent battles. Abby had even seen two officers
from her homeland of Pendisan Reach. They had looked to her to be little
more than boys, but boys with the thin veneer of youth shedding too
soon, like a snake casting off its skin before its time, leaving the emerging
maturity scarred.
Abby had also seen such an array of important people as she could
scarcely believe: sorceresses, councillors, and even a Confessor come up
from the Confessor's Palace down in the city. On her way up to the Keep,
 'Yes, ' Abby said. 'A jug I made.'
there was rarely a turn in the winding road that hadn't offered Abby a view of
The woman smiled her scepticism and fingered a lick of short grey hair back
the sprawling splendour in white stone that was the Confessor's Palace. The
under her wool head-wrap. Her gnarled fingers closed around the smocking on
alliance of the Midlands, headed by the Mother Confessor herself, held
the forearm of Abby's crimson dress, pulling the arm up a bit to have a look.
council in the palace, and there, too, lived the Confessors.
'Maybe you could get the price of a proper bone for your bracelet.тАЩ
In her whole life, Abby had seen a Confessor only once before. The
Abby glanced down at the bracelet made of two wires twisted together in
woman had come to see Abby's mother and Abby, not ten years at the
interlocking circles. 'My mother gave me this. It has no value but to me.'
time, had been unable to keep from staring at the Confessor's long hair.