"Robert Jordan - Conan The Unconquered" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jordan Robert)

Conan The Unconquered
By Robert Jordan
Copyright 1983 Robert Jordan



Prologue


Storm winds howling off the midnight-shrouded Vilayet Sea clawed at the
granite-walled compound of the Cult of Doom. The compound gave the appearance
of a small city, though there were no people on its streets at that hour. More
than the storm and the lateness kept them fast in their beds, praying for
sleep, though but a bare handful of them could have put a finger to the real
reason, and those that could did not allow themselves to think on it. The gods
uplift, and the gods destroy. But no one ever believes the gods will touch
them.
The man who was now called Jhandar did not know if gods involved
themselves in the affairs of mortals, or indeed if gods existed, but he did
know there were Powers beneath the sky. There were indeed Powers, and one of
those he had learned to use, even to control after a fashion. Gods he would
leave to those asleep in the compound, those who called him their Great Lord.
Now he sat cross-legged in saffron robes before such a Power. The
chamber was plain, its pearly marble walls smooth, its two arched entrances
unadorned. Simple round columns held the dome that rose above the shallow
pool, but ten paces across, that was the room's central feature. There was no
ornamentation, for friezes or sculptures or ornate working of stone could not
compete with that pool, and the Power within.
Water, it might seem at first glance, but it was not. It was sharply
azure and flecked with argent phosphorescence. Jhandar meditated, basking in
the radiance of Power, and the pool glowed silver-blue, brighter and brighter
until the chamber seemed lit with a thousand lamps. The surface of the pool
bubbled and roiled, and mists rose, solidifying. But only so far. The mists
formed a dome, as if a mirror image of the pool below, delineating the limits
that contained the Power, both above and below. Within ultimate disorder was
bound, Chaos itself confined. Once Jhandar had seen such a pool loosed from
its bonds, and fervently did he wish never to see such again. But that would
not happen here. Not now. Not ever.
Now he could feel the Power seeping into his very bones. It was time.
Smoothly he rose and made his way through one of the archways, down a narrow
passage lit by bronze lamps, bare feet padding on cool marble. He prided
himself on his lack of ostentation, even to so small a thing as not wearing
sandals. He, like the pool, needed no adornment.
The passage let into a circular sanctorum, its albescent walls worked in
intricate arabesques, its high vaulted ceiling held aloft by fluted alabaster
columns. Light came from golden cressets suspended aloft on silver chains.
Massive bronze doors barred the chamber's main entrance, their surfaces within
and without worked in a pattern of Chaos itself, by an artist under the
influence of the Power, before madness and death had taken him. The Power was
not for all.