"Terry Goodkind - Sword Of Truth 10 - Phantom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goodkind Terry)

features seemed frozen to stone. One hand was lifted out a ways. The fingers of her other hand, at
her side, were spread.
Her feet weren't level, as if standing, but dangled as if she were in mid-jump. Her fall of blond
hair was lifted out a little, as if in the midst of that jump up into the air her hair had risen away
from her head, just before she was about to come back down70; and at that precise instant she
had been turned to stone.
She didn't look alive.


CHAPTER 4
[19] [20] [21]

Richard stood transfixed, staring at Nicci poised in midair just above a heavy library table, a net
of glowing green geometric lines tangled all around her. Nothing on her moved. She didn't appear
to be breathing at all. Her blue eyes stared unblinking into the distance, as if gazing on a world
only she could see. Her familiar, exquisite features looked perfectly preserved in the greenish cast
given off by the glowing lines.
Richard thought that she looked more dead than alive, the way a corpse in a casket looked just
before being laid to rest.
It was an impossibly beautiful and at the same time profoundly alarming sight. She appeared to
be nothing so much as a lifeless statue made of flesh and light. Skeins of her blond hair in
twisting, gentle arcs and curves, even individual strands of hair, stood out unmoving in midair.
Richard kept expecting her to finally and suddenly finish her fall back to the table.
When he realized that he was holding his breath he at last let it out.
Seemingly in sympathy with the tempestuous intensity of the lightning out beyond the wall of
windows, the air in the room fairly crackled with the power that had been focused into what was
obviously, even to Richard's untrained eye, an extraordinary conjuring. It had been that rare
quality to the air that had first caught his attention back in the small reading room.
For the life of him, Richard could not imagine what was going on, what could be the purpose of
such a use of magic. He was at once fascinated by it and disconcerted that he knew so little about
such things. More than anything, though, he found the sight darkly frightening.
Having grown up in Westland, where there had been no magic, he sometimes wondered what he
had missed52;especially at times like this, when he fell hopelessly ignorant. But at other times,
like when Kahlan had been taken, he haled magic and wished never again to have anything to do
with it.
Those devoted to the teachings of the Imperial Order would find cynical satisfaction at such cold
thoughts about magic coming from the Lord Rahl.
Despite having grown up unaware of magic, Richard had since come to learn a few things about
it. For one, he knew that the Grace drawn under Nicci was a powerful device used by those with

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the gift. He also knew that drawing it in blood was something that was rarely done and even then
in only the gravest of circumstances.
As he glanced at the glistening lines of blood that made up the form of the Grace, Richard noticed
something that made the hair at the back of his neck stand on end. One of Nicci's feet was poised
over the center of the Grace52;the part representing the Creator's light, from where emanated not
only life but the rays that represented the gift that passed through life, the veil, and then on into