"Mercedes Lackey - Dragon Jousters 3 - Sanctuary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

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Lackey, Mercedes - Joust 03 - Sanctuary (v1.0) (html).html




Kaleth was accepted by the Veiled Ones, the Wanderers of the desert, the Blue
People, as a Seer, a Hand of the gods and a Mouth of the People as well. And if
Kiron only had an imperfect understanding of what that meant, well, he knew it
was a position of great respect, and that was enough for him.

As the city slumbered under the clear, predawn sky, Sanctuary hardly looked
like a city at all, more like a collection of squared-off mounds, very like wind-
sculpted, sand-polished mastabas, nearly the same color as the sand around
them. Hardly surprising no one had found it until Kaleth led the Veiled Ones to
it; even if it had not been buried beneath the dunes, when Kiron thought of a
city, he thoughtтАФwell, he thought of nothing at all like this. To his mind, the
word "city" called up the image of the tall, angular sandstone or granite edifices
of Mefis, the capital of Tia, carved and painted with images of the gods and
Great Kings, reaching five, six, ten times the height of a man. Or the "city" of his
slave days, the mud-brick, two-storied, mathematically-laid out buildings along
the narrow streets where ordinary folk dwelled. Or, possibly, the white-
columned, long, low buildings of Alta, reflected in the shining surfaces of her
seven ring-shaped canals. He did not think of buildings the color of sand, with
rounded corners and edges, walls as thick as a man's arm was long, and scarcely
an opening to be seen anywhere.

But that was because the buildings of Sanctuary were armored against the
blistering desert heat by the thickness of their stone walls, and against the
sandstorm by their curves. Not even the dragons, much as they reveled in heat,
spent more time in the sun than they could help, once the great disk had reached
past the point of midmorning. Some of the buildings, in fact, were mere
antechambers into a labyrinth of rooms carved out of the rock bed beneath the

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sand, a network of man-made caves which all connected eventually to that most
precious of desert treasures, the water source that lay at the heart of Sanctuary
itself

Water. Water was the reason for anything made by man in the desert. Men
sought for it, fought over it, bartered what was most precious to them for it,
killed and died for it and for lack of it. And yet here, through long years gone,
and until the gods permitted it to be found again, was a kingdom's ransom of the
precious stuff.

Beneath the sand, beneath the rock that lay beneath the sand, there flowed a river