"Julia Gray - Guardian 3 - The Crystal Desert" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gray Julia)

Prologue
Mlicki was the only one who still believed they would hear the music of life
again. Every morning, when he woke, he would lie under his chilouk and listen.
The darkness brought many sounds to him - the rustle of wind-blown sand, the
scratching of insects, Erardi's rasping snores - but never the music.
Each morning was the same. After a while, he would be able to stand it no
longer. Even though the day had not yet begun, he would get up and quietly
leave the house, then make his way down to the river bank. And each morning he
would be greeted by a moonlit scene that came from a nightmare from which
there was no escape. It was unnatural - wrong - and all the more so because
Mlicki knew what it ought to look like. Alone among the inhabitants of
Bahriya, he had seen beyond the wind to a time when the music of life would
ring out again. It had been as real to him as the outer world, but his visions
had brought him trouble in the past, and so he had told no one of what he had
seen.
The river will come back, he told himself stubbornly, as he did each morning.
It will!
Mlicki was the only one who still believed, though even he felt his faith
beginning to dry up now, just as the mud of the river bed was drying -
becoming a cracked pavement of desiccated clay, like a million shards of
crude, broken pottery. The water would return, but he had no way of knowing
when this would happen. Or whether by then it would be too late.
The ominous silence crowded in upon him, and he looked up, sensing the weight
of the moons upon his thoughts. The White Moon was full, riding majestically
across the star-sprinkled plain, but there was something else that was
influencing his mood this morning. Neither the Amber nor the Red Moon was in
sight above the horizon, and although they were both waxing and close to full,
Mlicki wasn't able to identify their power. Which meant that what he was
feeling must come from the Invisible. The unseen moon had changed its pattern
recently, so that no one was really sure when or where it would appear within
the dome - and this had had an unsettling effect on the people of Misrah. It
seemed as though there was nothing left for them to rely upon. Such a change
was supposed to be impossible - though Mlicki didn't understand why this
should be so - and many people were saying that if there was chaos above, then
there would soon be chaos in the world of men. Mlicki couldn't follow that
logic either, but just at that moment he would have been willing to wager a
great deal that the Invisible was at its most potent. The idea made him feel
unaccountably nervous.
'Did you do this?' he asked aloud, searching the sky for the tell-tale
emptiness that marked the passage of the Invisible. The moon presented exactly
the same aspect whether it was 'full' or 'new', and the only way to 'see' it
was when it blotted out the stars beyond, or occasionally eclipsed the other
moons or the sun itself.
The dome brought Mlicki no answer, and when he looked down again, the eastern
sky behind him was illuminated by streaks of pink and pale gold. The pre-dawn
light was enough to confirm that his earlier impressions had not been
mistaken.
There had been droughts before - when the river had shrunk to a muddy trickle,
the fertile plains that lined its banks had begun to shrivel up, and even the
wells had become unreliable - but there had never been anything as bad as