"Elizabeth Haydon - Rhapsody 5 - Elegy for a Lost Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haydon Elizabeth)

When he had discovered the plans for the Lightcatcher buried deep in
the vault of the kingdom he now ruled, once a great civilization fallen into
ruin by its own folly, he had broken into a gray sweat. He could not read
the writing on the ancient parchment; it was drafted in a tongue that had
been old when his long-dead homeland was still young. As a result, he
could not be certain of the specifications of the drawings, of the
directions to build the instrumentality, and, more important, of what its
powers were. He only knew he recognized in the detailed renderings
something he had known in the old world as an apparatus of unsurpassed
power, a device that had held an entire mountain range invulnerable from
the same evanescent demons that were now seeking the Earthchild he
guarded.
That device had apparently been duplicated here long ago.
From that moment on it had become a challenge to rebuild it. For the
first time in his life he'd had to rely on outside help, on expertise other
than his own, to fashion something that was part weapon, part scrying
device, part healing instrumentality. And it was being done in secret, in the
hope that he was not being betrayed or misled. Achmed did not really
believe in hope, and therefore had suffered mightily, plagued with doubt
and worry mixed with the burning belief that this apparatus, and this
apparatus alone, would be able both to make his kingdom invulnerable to
the invaders he knew would someday come, bent on its destruction, and,
far more important, to help him protect the Sleeping Child from those
invisible monsters that endlessly sought to find her.
One of his two friends in the world was a Lirin Namer, schooled in the
music of words, ancient lore, and the dead language of the drawings. She
had been disquieted by the depth of the magic she saw in the renderings,
had implored him not to meddle in matters he didn't fully understand, but
in the end her loyalty to and love for him had won out over her
reservations, and she had given him a brief translation of one of the
documents, at his insistence. It had contained a poem, a riddle really, and
the schematic of the color spectrum, along with the power each color
held.
He chanted them to himself now as he rode, trying to commit them
more naturally to his memory, and finding that the words refused to
remain there. He had never been able to recall the words in the ancient
tongue; he could retain only the color translations, only for a short while,
and only by concentrating resolutely. Even then, he was still uncertain of
them, as if some innate magic within them was refusing him right of entry.
Red-Blood Saver, Blood Letter, he thought, trying to employ the
techniques of visualizing the words that Rhapsody, the Namer, had taught
him. That one, at least, was easy for him to recall. Orange-Fire Starter,
Fire Quencher. He was fairly certain of that one as well. Yellow-Light
Bringer, Light. .. Queller? His mind faltered. Damnation. I can't
remember.
But soon it would not matter. He had finally found a glass artisan in the
neighboring kingdom of Sorbold, a Panjeri master from a tribe known the
world over for their expertise in molding the sand of the desert and the
ashes of wood into the most exquisite of glass, capturing rainbows in a
solid yet translucent form to adorn the windows of temples and of crypts.