"Mage Storms 01 - Storm Warning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

The Wolf Crown lay atop the robes, preventing them from slipping off
the bench altogether. Let mere kings flaunt their golden crowns; the
Emperor boasted a circlet of elect rum inset with thirteen yellow
diamonds. Only when one drew near enough to the Emperor to see his
eyes clearly did one see that the circlet was not as it seemed, that
what had passed at a distance for an abstract design or a floral
pattern was, in fact, a design of twelve wolves, and that the winking
yellow diamonds were their eyes. Eleven of those wolves were in
profile to the watcher, five facing left, six facing right;

the twelfth, obviously the pack leader, gazed directly down onto
whosoever the Emperor faced, those un winking yellow eyes staring at
the petitioner even as the Emperor's own eyes did.

Let lesser beings assume thrones of gold or marble; the Emperor held
court from his Iron Throne, made from the personal weapons of all those
monarchs the Emperors of the past had conquered and deposed, each
glazed and guarded against lust. The throne itself was over six feet
tall and four feet in Width; a monolithic piece of furniture, it was so
heavy that it had not been moved so much as a finger-length in
centuries.

Anyone looking at it could only be struck by its sheer mass-and must
begin calculating just how many sword blades, axes, and lance points
must have gone into the making of it.... None of this was by chance, of
course. Everything about the Emperor's regalia, his throne, his
Audience Chamber, and Crag Castle itself was carefully calculated to
reduce a visitor to the proper level of fearful respect, impress upon
him the sheer power held in the hands of this ruler, and the utter
impossibility of aspiring to such power. The Emperors were not
interested in inducing a groveling fear, nor did they intend to excite
ambition. The former was a dangerous state; people made too fearful
would plot ways to remove the cause of that fear. And ambition was a
useful tool in an underling beneath one's direct supervision, but risky
in one who might, on occasion, slip his leash.

There was very little in the Emperor's life that was not the result of
long thought and careful calculation. He had not become the successor
to Emperor Lioth at the age of thirty without learning the value of
both abilities-and he had not spent the intervening century-and-a-half
in letting either ability lapse.

Charliss was the nineteenth Emperor to sit the Iron Throne; none of his
predecessors had been less than brilliant, and none had reigned for
less than half a century. None had been eliminated by assassins, and
only one had been unable to choose his own successor.

Some called Charliss "the Immortal"; that was a fallacy, since he was
well aware how few years he had left to him. Although he was a
powerful mage, there were limits to the amount of time magic could