"Gray, Julia - Guardian 01 - The Dark Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gray Julia)

Chapter Three

The tremor did not last long, but it was much stronger than usual. If it had not been for Terrel's premonition, the three friends might have fallen as the ground beneath them shook and growled. As it was, they were badly disorientated, and staggered drunkenly for a few moments. Tiles fell from the roof of the house, adding their brittle crashing to the hollow rumbling noise that seemed to come from deep within the earth itself. Finally, just as it seemed that the quake was ending, a stone balustrade on a second floor balcony crumbled and fell to the ground, close to the door that the trio had been heading for. Heavy pieces of masonry thudded onto the paving below and shattered, peppering the surrounding area with flying splinters of stone.
'Moons!' Elam gasped. 'That was close. We could've been under that lot.'
A brief silence enveloped them as the world became still once more, then the sound of agitated voices drifted from inside the building. The earthquake had been completely unexpected, and had taken everyone by surprise.
'The seers must be losing their touch,' Elam commented, regaining some self-confidence.
Everyone who lived on the Floating Islands was used to the regular, minor tremors that occurred with a frequency determined by the aspects of the four moons. The astrologers had calculated the lunar pattern for many years in advance and, forewarned, the populace generally took the earthquakes in their stride. But this one had not been foreseen by anyone - except Terrel.
'You saw it coming, didn't you,' Alyssa said.
'How did you do that?' Elam asked.
'I don't know,' Terrel replied. T just . . .' He shrugged, incapable of describing what he had felt. 'I don't know.'
'A sort of tugging?' Alyssa said. 'I suppose so.'
The two boys looked at her.
'No, I didn't. At least I don't think so,' she went on. 'But Terrel might have.'
'What?'
'I wasn't talking to you,' she told him calmly.
'It's one of her ghosts,' Elam said, rolling his eyes.
'What I don't understand is how you felt it,' Alyssa added, ignoring Elam's derision. Then, after a pause in which she appeared to be listening intently to the silence, she said, 'All right. Farewell, Sevin.'
'Not him again!' Elam exclaimed.
'What was all that about?' Terrel asked.
'Some of the ghosts felt the warning too.'
'But they're in a different world,' Terrel objected, repeating what she had often told him.
'I know,' she replied. 'I don't understand it, and neither do they.'
'You haven't become a ghost and not told us, have you?' Elam asked Terrel facetiously.
'What did Sevin say?'
'That it was like the moons, but different.'
'Sevin's obviously as mad now as when he was alive,' Elam commented. 'No wonder they locked him up here.'
Alyssa gave him a pitying look.
'Like you, you mean?' she asked innocently.
'We'd better get inside,' Terrel said hurriedly. He was aware that the sun had set during their conversation, and their need to obey the curfew would forestall any argument.
As they went in, glancing up to make sure no more masonry was going to fall on them, Terrel saw the semicircular shape of the Red Moon in the darkening sky. Nearer to the horizon the Amber Moon was a pale crescent rising in the east, and Terrel's final thought before he entered the shadowed world of the haven was to wonder what this night's dreams would bring.
Terrel was back in his cell well before he was locked in for the night, and no one made anything of the fact that he and his friends had broken the curfew. The turnkey made his rounds much later than usual that night, and Terrel assumed that the unexpected tremor had disrupted normal routines. To his annoyance, he found this unsettling.
The truth was that he found comfort in the regular patterns of his confinement. Because he was one of the inmates who had been classified as harmless, during the day he was free to wander within the boundaries of Havenmoon's self-contained world - unless he was being punished for something or was needed to work. Terrel knew that this privilege could easily be revoked, and because he did not want to end up like so many of the other inmates - who were permanently incarcerated in conditions that varied from the mind-numbingly boring to the downright horrific - he submitted to being locked up like a criminal each night without any thought of complaint. In one sense he had been alone all his life, and dealing with solitude came easily to him.
There had been times when he'd thought of trying to escape, but those times were long gone. In truth, Terrel was no longer sure that he would want to leave - even if he could do so as a free man. He had never known anything except the haven, never even seen beyond its high stone wall. His only knowledge of the outside world had come from books, and it seemed a strange and frightening place, full of inexplicable cruelties and daunting complexities. He was better off where he was.
He sometimes felt cowardly for thinking this way, but consoled himself with the fact that at least now he had the companionship of two people his own age - until he was ten his life had been almost entirely solitary - and that neither Elam nor Alyssa seemed to have any thoughts of escaping. The idea did not seem even to have occurred to Alyssa and, while Elam sometimes spoke of it, he - like Terrel - was aware that the chances of success were extremely remote. And failure would send him back to the dungeons, and to the tortures he had endured there.
Most inmates of the madhouse were either physically or mentally incapable of making an escape attempt, but anyone who tried faced almost insurmountable obstacles. Even if the wall and the moat which ran inside it were successfully negotiated without being seen by any of the guards, there was still the problem of having to trek across several miles of open moorland - which offered treacherous marshes and plentiful heather, but no food or shelter, and nowhere to hide. Anyone trying to use the only road, which ran south from the gate, would soon be recaptured, and taking any other route might mean days of fruitless toil. And even if all these hazards were overcome, each inmate had four concentric circles tattooed on the back of one of their hands - which marked them permanently as residents of the madhouse. Any stranger who arrived in one of the nearby villages and tried to hide his hands would be regarded with suspicion.
Terrel examined his own tattoo now. Someone had once told him that the circles represented the four moons, which seemed appropriate enough. Mental unbalance was not called 'lunacy' for nothing.
All around him, Havenmoon was strangely quiet. Even in the dead of night there were usually some sounds, especially when one or more of the moons was full, but the inmates were silent now, and even the old house itself was not producing its normal assortment of creaks and groans. It was as if the tremor had shaken everything into place and there was no need of more gradual adjustments.
And then, as if to challenge all Terrel's assumptions, Old Timi began to howl, giving voice to the wolf inside his feeble human frame. Although he sounded the same as always, the very fact that he was moved to howl at all was unnerving. Only half the Red Moon was visible that night; it would not be full for another eleven days.
It was just one more strange event, one more anomaly, in a day that had already seen too many for Terrel's liking.
Things are changing.
Terrel awoke with a start, unable to decide whether the words had been spoken aloud by himself or someone else, or whether they were just the tail end of a dream. Either way, the statement had a prophetic ring.
He was stiff and sore from the strenuous exercise of the previous day, but was relieved to find that any dreams that may have visited him in the night had left no mark on his memory. Sitting up, he saw from the sunlight in his cell's one high window that he had slept late for the second day in a row. Even so, he knew just from the feel of the room that the door was still locked. The turnkey was behind schedule again.
Terrel was feeling distinctly uneasy as he dressed, but then he remembered that the inspectors were arriving that day. Ziolka was probably keeping all his charges locked up while the official visit was in progress, to avoid any suggestion that his security was lax.
Once again the silence seemed deeper than usual, and as the morning drifted by Terrel could not help but recall his waking thought and Ingo's earlier words - There 'II be some changes around here - and wondered what those changes might be.
Eventually, just before noon, he heard the clatter of several horsemen riding south towards the gate and, shortly after that, his door was finally unlocked. The turnkey offered no explanation for the change to his routine, but he did advise Terrel to make himself scarce unless he wanted to be pressed into service in the kitchen. Ahmeza's resources had been stretched to the limit by the recent influx of visitors, and she was on the warpath now, looking for 'volunteers' to help her make up for lost time.
Terrel took the hint gratefully. After checking on Alyssa's and Elam's cells - there was no sign of either - he made his way up to the second floor via a rarely used spiral staircase, and then climbed a ladder into the loft space beneath the tiled roof. Havenmoon's attic consisted of a large number of interconnecting rooms, all crisscrossed by beams and joists in apparently random patterns beneath irregularly placed stone buttresses. It was possible - if you were small enough, didn't mind cobwebs and watched where you put your feet - to traverse the entire length of the building from south to north. Terrel did so now. When he finally arrived at the trap door he was looking for, he paused, listening for a while before opening it. He had never known anyone else to come to the hidden room, and regarded it as his private preserve, but he didn't want to take any unnecessary risks. When he was convinced that all was safe, he pulled the door up and felt for the ladder he had left positioned below. Clambering down into the darkness always gave him a thrill of discovery, remembered from the first time he had come there. At the bottom he found the flint-box, and lit a taper and then two candles. In the still, musty air the flames burnt evenly, casting a yellow glow over the rows and rows of books.
Terrel had discovered the library several years earlier, and had been captivated at once. According to Ziolka - who either did not guess or did not care that Terrel had actually found it - the library had once belonged to an inmate who had died many years ago, and had not been used since then. Quite what a madman would have wanted with so many books had never occurred to Terrel; he had just taken advantage of the mouldering legacy, escaping to the library whenever he could, and laboriously teaching himself to read. He had become reasonably proficient, although some of the more erudite tomes were still beyond his understanding. He had returned now for two specific reasons, both related to the events of the previous day. The first, which stemmed from his conversation with Alyssa about the Floating Islands, was so that he could once more study the book that contained maps showing the islands' movement in the Movaghassi Ocean. The second was to see whether he could find some clue as to why there had been an earthquake yesterday when the islands were not changing course - which was the normal cause of such tremors.
He found the relevant volume quickly enough and, after studying several of the now familiar charts once more, he turned to the accompanying text.
For centuries, as long as human records have been kept, these linked islands have been adrift together in the Movaghassi Ocean, the largest of Nydus's seas. The islands move in stately fashion, on an irregular but predictable course, always steering clear of the various fixed land masses.
Why would anyone record such details, much less go to the trouble of plotting the incredibly complex patterns on the maps, if it wasn't true? Terrel read on.