"Simon Hawke - Dark Sun- Tribe Of One 02 - The Seeker" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

The Seeker

Simon Hawke
TRIBE OF ONE TRILOGY, Book Two



Acknowledgments

FOR BRIAN THOMSEN

Special acknowledgments to Rob King, Troy Denning, Robert M. Powers, Sandra West, Jennifer Roberson, Deb
Lovell, Bruce and Peggy Wiley, Emily Tuzson, Adele Leone, the crew at Arizona Honda, and my students, who keep
me on my toes and teach me as much as I teach them.

Prologue

The twin moons of Athas flooded the desert with a ghostly light as the dark sun sank on the horizon. The temperature
dropped quickly while Ryana sat warming herself by the campfire, relieved at having left the city.
Tyr held nothing for her but bad memories. As a young girl growing up in a villichi convent, she had dreamt of visiting
the city at the foot of the Ringing Mountains. Tyr had seemed like an exotic and exciting place then, when she could
only imagine its teeming marketplaces and its tantalizing nightlife. She had heard stories of the city from the older
priestesses, those who had been on pilgrimages, and she had longed for the day when she could take her own
pil-grimage and leave the convent to see the outside world. Now she had seen it, and it was a far cry from the dreams
of her youth.
When in her girlish dreams she had imagined the crowded streets and glamorous marketplaces of Tyr, she had
pictured them without the pathetic, scrofu-lous beggars that crouched in the dust and whined plaintively for coppers,
holding out their filthy hands in supplication to every passerby. The colorful images of her imagination had not held
the stench of urine and manure from all the beasts penned up in the mar-ket square, or the human waste produced by
the city's residents, who simply threw their refuse out the win-dows into the streets and alleys. She had imagined a city
of grand, imposing buildings, as if all of Tyr were as impressive as the Golden Tower or Kalak's ziggu-rat. Instead she
found mostly aging, blocky, uniformly earth-toned structures of crudely mortared brick cov-ered with cracked and
flaking plaster, such as the ramshackle hovels in the warrens. There the poor people of Tyr lived in squalid and pitiful
conditions, crowded together like beasts crammed into stinking holding pens.
She had not imagined the vermin and the filth, or the flies and the miasma of decay as garbage rotted in the streets, or
the pickpockets and the cutthroats and the vulgar, painted prostitutes, or the rioting mobs of desperate people caught
up in the painful transition of a city laboring to shift from a sorcerer-king's tyranny to a more open and democratic form
of gov-ernment. She had not imagined that she would come to Tyr not as a priestess on a pilgrimage, but as a young
woman who had broken her sacred vows and fled the convent in the night, in pursuit of the only male she had ever
known and loved. Nor had she imagined that before she left the city, she would learn what it meant to kill.
She turned away from the shadowy city in the dis-tance, feeling no regret at leaving it, and gazed across the desert
spreading out below. She and Sorak had made camp on the crest of a ridge overlooking
the Tyr Valley, just east of the city. Beyond the city, to the west, the foothills rose to meet the Ringing Mountains. To
the east, they gradually fell away, almost completely encircling the valley, save for the pass directly to the south, along
which the trade route ran from Tyr out across the tablelands. The car-avans always took the pass, then headed
southeast to Altaruk, or else turned to the northeast toward Silver Spring, before heading north to Urik, or north-east
to Raam and Draj. To the east of the oasis known as Silver Spring, there was nothing but rocky, inhos-pitable desert, a
trackless waste known as the Stony Barrens that stretched out for miles before it ended at the Barrier Mountains,
beyond which lay the cities of Gulg and Nibenay.
The caravans all have their routes mapped out, Ryana thought, while ours has not yet been deter-mined. She sat alone,