"Elizabeth Haydon - Symphony of Ages - Threshold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haydon Elizabeth)

had stopped coming to Serendair. The young king, Gwylliam, newly crowned and the architect of the
evacuation that had saved most of his subjects from death in the cataclysm that was still to come, had
sailed on the last ship of the last Fleet, and so believed that every Seren citizen who wanted to leave had
done so.

He had forgotten completely about the Gated City.

It was really not surprising that the City had been missed in the inventory of GwylliamтАЩs conscious
thought. Though it occupied geographical space in his realm, it was a world unto itself, a former penal
colony of petty thieves and cutpurses that had evolved into its own entity, a dark and colorful society with
layers of governance and threat that were incomprehensible to any but those who lived within its locked
gates.

Despite the appearance of being contained, the Gated City clearly had as many tunnels out into the world
beyond its fortifications as a beaver dam or a nest of rats. Even in the days prior to the Seren War that
had ended two hundred years before, the City had been divided into the Outer Ring and the Inner Ring.
The Outer Ring contained a flourishing market of exotic goods and eccentric services that citizens of the
outside world could visit as long as they were checked through the gates.
They entered on the middle day of the week, known as Market Day, at the sound of the great brass bell,
to shop in the bazaar, clutching the token that would allow them passage back out of the City again when
the bell sounded at closing time, buying perfumes that could transport the mind to places beyond the
horizons of reality, linens and silks of indescribable colors, jewels and potions and soothing balms and
myriad other wares from the far corners of the earth. The mere existence of these exotic goods was a
broad hint at how porous the thick walls of the Gated City really were.

The Inner Ring was even more mysterious, a dark place to which none but the permanent residents of the
City had access. Within its windowless buildings, in its shadowy alleys, another sort of business was
conducted that those who lived outside the Gated City could only imagine in the course of their
nightmares.

When Hector and his companions first realized that the Gated City had been overlooked, they had
sought to offer its residents refuge on the first of the ships that had come in the wake of the exodus. He
had gone to the City himselfтАФits massive gates no longer were guarded from the outside. He had sprung
the lock and thrown the gates open wide, issuing an invitation to the startled population he found on the
other side to flee, to save themselves from the destruction that was surely to come when the Sleeping
Child awakened and rose, taking the Island of Serendair back beneath the waves of the sea with it, as
the king had prophesied it soon would.

The Gated City was teeming with people then. They stared at him as if he were mad, then turned away,
averting their eyes, and went about their business as if he were not there.

The next day, when he returned to entreat them once again to reconsider, to explain once more the
cataclysm that was coming, he found the gates closed again. A polite note was pinned to the outside,
declining his offer with thanks and wishing him well.

The thought of the thousands of souls on the other side of those gates had haunted Hector for weeks
afterward, as he and the others carefully packed the remaining stragglers that came from the lands east of
the Great River, or had somehow missed the exodus, onto the last of the rescue ships. Ofttimes he found
himself walking outside the CityтАЩs walls, wishing he had a way to make whatever governing force was
within them change its mind and spare its people.