"Hawke, Simon - Athas 3 - Broken Blade e-txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

Though he was male, Sorak was accepted by the high mistress of the convent, both out of her reverence for the pyreen and because she had detected his inborn psionic powers. He was not only an elfling, born of a forbidden union between halfling and elf, he was also a tribe of one, a condition so rare that it was known only among villichi. He was an outcast, as were most villichi, and if he was not villichi himself, then he was as close to being one as any male had ever been. The high mistress took him in and named him Sorak, an elvish word for a nomad who travels alone.
Sorak grew up among the villichi sisterhood. One of them, Ryana, a villichi girl his own age, became his closest friend. They grew up together, played together, trained together in the exotic warrior arts of the villichi, and studied the Way of the Druid. But as they grew older, youthful friendship and affection gave way to love and sexual attraction. And Sorak found himself tormented, torn between his own desires and those of his other personalities.
The female personalities residing in him could accept Ryana as sister or friend, but not as lover, so Sorak left the convent to seek out his destiny and discover the truth of his origins. But Ryana would not be parted from him. When she found out that he had left, she broke her villichi vows, fled the convent in the middle of the night, and followed him out into the desert.
Together, they sought the Sage, the reclusive and mysterious preserver wizard who had embarked upon the long and arduous course of metamorphosis into an avangion, the only creature capable of standing against the power of the dragon kings. Only the magic of the Sage was great enough to help Sorak discover his past, and only preserver magic, which did not destroy the dwindling natural resources of Athas, could cure him of his rare condition. To accept the help of a defiler would have violated everything he had been raised to believe, and would have doomed him to forsake forever the Path of the Preserver. However, in searching for the Sage, Sorak had attracted the attention of the dragon kings and their defiler minions, who regarded the preserver wizard as the sole threat to their power.
In Bodach, Sorak and Ryana faced not only an army of undead, but the murderous champion of the Shadow King, a ruthless killer named Valsavis. They prevailed, but only at great cost. Guided by Kara, a pyreen known as the Silent One, they had found the gateway into Sanctuary in Bodach. It was a magical doorway into another time and place, in an age when Athas was still green. That was the secret of the Sage, and it was why none of the dragon kings had ever been able to find him. They sought him in the present, but he had used his magic to find a refuge in the distant past.
In Sanctuary, Sorak found the answers he had so long sought. He had already deduced that the Sage was the same person once known as the Wanderer, who had chronicled his peregrinations across Athas in a book known as The Wanderer's Journal. What he had not known was that the preserver wizard was his grandfather.
The Sage cast a spell on Sorak, which enabled him to see into his past. He discovered who his parents were, and what his truename was, and what had become of his people. Through the magic of the Sage, Sorak saw how the Moon Runner tribe of elves had been destroyed by a necromancer called the Faceless One, a defiler wizard hired by Sorak's halfling grandfather.
However, finding out those answers both set Sorak free and severed him from the only security he had ever really known. The voices of his multiple personas would never speak to him again. The wise, maternal Guardian; the stoic Ranger; the calculating Eyron; the brash and irrepressible Kivara; the beastlike Screech; the gentle, childlike Lyric; and the others... all were gone now. They had joined with the Sage, living on inside him as he entered the next stage of his transformation. The act that empowered the Sage's evolution also healed Sorak's fragmented personality, and now Sorak was left feeling more alone than he had ever felt before.
"All living creatures are alone, Sorak," Ryana told him afterward in an attempt to ease his pain. "That is why they mate and bond in friendship."
"Yes, I know," he replied. "But it is one thing to know it, and still another to experience truly being alone for the first time. I have never known the feeling. For as long as I can remember, I have had the others with me. Now, I feel their absence, the emptiness in my soul. It feels as if a part of me is missing."
Nor was his multiplicity the only thing he lost.
When he had left the convent, High Mistress Varanna had given him a gift, a wondrous sword named Galdra-the enchanted blade of elven kings. It had been entrusted to her safekeeping by a pyreen elder, who had received it from the hand of Akron himself, last of the ancient line of elven kings. Sorak had not known the nature of the blade's enchantment when he had received it, but he learned that it would cut through anything, and that other blades would shatter upon contact with its elven steel. He knew, too, that if Galdra fell into the hands of a defiler, its magic blade would shatter-and that was precisely what happened when he fought Valsavis, champion of the Shadow King. When Valsavis seized the sword, a blinding explosion of white light shattered the enchanted blade. Now, all that remained was the hilt and about a foot of broken blade. Of the legend once engraved on it in ancient runes-"Strong in spirit, true in temper, forged in faith"-only the elvish symbols for "Strong in spirit" now remained. A defiler's hand had touched it, and the enchantment was broken.

*****

As he stood alone upon the rocky ridge in the first orange-tinted light of dawn, Sorak drew the broken blade from his belt and held it up before him, staring at it as it gleamed with a faint blue eldritch light, the remaining trace energies of the enchantment. Why keep it? It was useless as a sword, and Sorak bore Valsavis's iron sword now, anyway. But Ryana had insisted that the legend of Galdra still stood for something and could be of use to them. Sorak grimaced wryly as he thought of it.
It was said in the songs of elven bards that whoever bore the sword Galdra was fated to become the Crown of Elves, the ruler who would once again unite the scattered tribes under one king. In his travels, Sorak had encountered elves who had believed that he would be that king, but he wanted no part of any elven crown.
Though his mother had named him Alaron after the long-dead elven king, Sorak felt the name did not belong to him. For as long as he could remember, he had been Sorak, the Nomad, and now that he had finally learned his truename, it did not seem to fit him. He was no elven king, no elven kingmaker.
So why keep the broken blade? Ryana thought it important, as did Kara. "Keep it as a symbol of what you have achieved, and what we struggle for," the pyreen told him before they parted.
But was it really a symbol of achievement, Sorak wondered, or a symbol of a life left behind? He was no longer a tribe of one, an elfling with a dozen different personalities. Now, he was merely Sorak the elfling, the Nomad, around whom unwanted legends had already sprung up. Such notoriety brought only trouble, and he had enough trouble as it was.
For the first time in his life, he felt alone and vulnerable. Yet, for all that he had lost, he had gained the one thing he had never thought that he could have. Ryana.
He turned his back upon the great salt plain and gazed down the slope into the small oasis where Ryana slept, curled up in her bedroll near the smoking embers of their campfire. He thought back to the day she had declared her love for him. It seemed almost a lifetime ago....

*****

As usual, after weapons training in the morning, the villichi students went down to the stream to bathe. In a desert world, a running stream was the rarest of luxuries, yet Sorak and his villichi companions took it for granted. The Ringing Mountains around them were covered with thick, old-growth forests, and he spent long days hiking through the lush woods, or running with Tigra by his side, a tigone that had been his constant companion since his childhood.
Instead of joining the others at the lagoon, Sorak and his best friend Ryana wandered off to a special spot a bit farther downstream. As they sat together on a large rock outcropping in the middle of the stream, feeling the coolness of the water rush over them, Ryana told him how she felt. "Sorak... there is something I have been meaning to ask you-"
"I know what you are going to ask. I have known for some time." He had seen it coming and had dreaded the moment when she would finally give voice to her feelings. She had known he was a tribe of one, but because his other personalities all spoke with his male voice, she had not suspected that some of them were female, and he had been afraid to tell her. When she learned the truth at last, it took her completely by surprise.
Shocked and dismayed by his disclosure, Ryana fled to the temple tower, where she began a period of solitary meditation.
That was when Sorak appeared before High Mistress Varanna and told her he was going to leave the convent. He felt his continued presence would only bring heartache to Ryana, whom he cared for very deeply, but could never have. The vows taken by villichi priestesses did not permit them to have mates, and even if they had, his female personas would never have allowed it.
Though he had lived with the villichi sisterhood, he was never one of them, and as an adult male living among them, he knew he would only be a source of discord. He thought that by leaving, he would free Ryana from the burden of loving him.
Instead, she forsook her vows and followed.

*****

Now, freed of his multiple personas, Sorak was able to accept her as a lover at long last, and that made all the difference. The harsh light of morning softened in his eyes as he looked down upon Ryana, sleeping below. In Sanctuary, they had made love for the first time, and they vowed that they would always be together, no matter what the future brought.
He pulled the broken blade from his belt. It might still have made a useful knife, even though the tip resisted all his efforts to sharpen it into a tapering point. Useless, though it yet sparked faintly with a crackling discharge of blue energy, like a guttering candle.
So much for the legend of the Crown of Elves, he thought. A broken blade, a broken people, scattered throughout Athas in small desert-dwelling tribes or living in the cities, where they performed the most menial of labor or eked out lives as gamers and merchants in the squalid, overcrowded elven quarters. A legend, perhaps, would give them some small hope for their future. Those who still believed in it, at any rate. But if they met with the reality, then they would see only a nomadic wanderer with a broken sword, not a fabled blade borne by an elven king. Why shatter their illusions, as the touch of a defiler had shattered the steel of the blade?
Why shatter more lives? Sorak's ancestors had done enough of that already....

*****

The Sage, his maternal grandfather, was the only family Sorak knew. He did not know if his paternal grandfather, the halfling chieftain Ragna, still lived, but hoped he was dead. If Ragna lived and Sorak found it out, the halfling would live no longer.
Sorak would never understand what sort of father could condemn his own son to death by fire for mating with a female of another race. Ragna had meant for him to die as well, and but for a chance casting of a spell, Sorak had survived.
Ragna's commission to the Faceless One was to cast a spell to slay every last elfin the Moon Runner tribe. Sorak had been spared only because he was not a full-blooded elf. He was a half-breed, born of two races that were natural enemies. The spell cast by the Faceless One had failed to strike him down, as it had struck down all the others, and though he was a sworn enemy of all defilers, Sorak despised the Faceless One above all others. He knew nothing of the wizard but his name, yet somehow, somewhere, he would find him. And then his father and his mother and her tribe would be avenged. Death to the sorcerer, and to the grandfather who commissioned him.
It was a cold and ruthless resolution. An unsettling thought.
And there were so many thoughts streaming through his head these days. He could not get used to the curious feeling of being all alone in there.
He was having trouble sleeping. When he was a tribe of one, Sorak could rest by letting one of his other personalities come to the fore and take over. He would fade back and "go under," as if sinking down into warm darkness, sometimes aware of what was happening outside and sometimes not, while his body remained awake and in the control of one of his other personalities.
Now that he was just alone, he had to learn to fall asleep the way that everyone else did. Sooner or later, he grew tired, and then sleep would come. However, being part elf and part halfling meant his body possessed immense physical reserves. Since leaving Sanctuary, he had found he could go for days without sleep. He would lie down to rest, as he had done the previous night, but while Ryana quickly fell asleep, he remained awake, his mind relentlessly active as if it sought to fill the void left by his other personalities.
It was a new life, a new way of being, and he was not yet accustomed to it.