"Katherine Kerr - Deverry 04 - Dragonspell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kerr Katherine)

a quivering shrieking wreck, stick-thin and utterly mad from the tortures of those who followed the dark
dweomer.

And now, or so Blaen had been told, his beloved cousin was in the hands of those same evil men.
Although he generally could keep the thought at bay, at times, when he least expected it, when he was
talking with some vassal or merely walking down a corridor or looking idly from a window, the memory
would rise up like an assassin and stab him: Rhodry could be suffering like Camdel did. With the thought
came a breathless rage, a gasp for air that seared his chest and made him swear yet one more time a
vengeance vow: if these evil magicians had made his cousin suffer for so much as the length of a
cock-crow, then nothing on earth, not king nor dweomer, would stop him from raising an army and
sweeping down on Bardek like a flock of eagles, even if he had to bankrupt his rhan and call in every
honour-debt and alliance anyone had ever owed him. Since he made the vow to his gods as well as to
the honour of his clan, it was no idle boast.

He would have been surprised to know that the Dark Brotherhoods knew of his rage but pleased to
learn that they feared it.

The central plateau and especially the hill country of southern Surtinna, the biggest island of the
Bardekian archipelago, was at that time sparsely populated, a vast sweep of rolling downs descending
from the knife-edge of a young mountain range. Nominally the downs came under the jurisdiction of the
archons of Pastedion and Vardeth, who parcelled out land-grants to their supporters at whim, since the
hawks and field-mice who lived there never bothered to argue about it. The land-owners in turn rented
out parcels for farms or cattle ranches or even, in a few rare cases, for summer homes and country
retreats for the rich. Although the income from the grants was sparse, the prestige was enormous. As a
further benefit, the archons and the laws were far, far away, so that a grant holder could live as he
pleased, rather like a Deverry lord.

Up in the heart of the hill country, right under the looming, pine-black mountains, lay one particular
estate that had been bought and built some seventy years earlier by a retired civil servant named Tondalo.
Although it received rents from some free-born cattle ranchers, its own slaves raised enough food and
linen and so on for it to be fairly self-sufficient. Only rarely did any of its slaves turn up at the market
down in Ganjalo, the local town; even more rarely did visitors come to its gates. Since the few
neighbours were too busy working their own land to pry into its affairs, everyone assumed that the third
generation of TondaloтАЩs heirs were running the estate. They would have been shocked to learn that the
old man himself was still alive, though by no means in good health.

In truth, of course, Tondalo could have no heirs, because he was a eunuch, castrated as a boy to deny
him a family and thus limit his interests to VardethтАЩs civil service. Since he had a brilliant mind for detail,
heтАЩd risen high and taken an active hand in the politics of his town, becoming rich enough to buy first his
freedom, then an impressive house in the city, and finally this lonely estate. Now, at a hundred and
sixty-odd years old (he really couldnтАЩt remember just when heтАЩd been born) he lived in necessary
seclusion. Not only had he grown so grossly fat (a hated legacy of his castration rather than any natural
result of a love for pleasure and good eating) that travel was nearly impossible for him, but he needed
privacy for his work. He had immersed himself so long and so thoroughly in the craft of the dark
dweomer that he was as much of a leader as their chaos-sworn brotherhood could have. To his fellow
practitioners of the dark arts he no longer had any name at all. He was simply the Old One.

Of course, most times he had no need to travel. Scrying in a basin of black ink kept him in touch with
the other members of the Dark Council and also brought him direct visions of the doings of his various
allies and minions throughout Surtinna. Every now and then a messenger arrived, bearing books and the