"Mercedes Lackey - Mage Storms 1 - Storm Warning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

Storm Warning
Mercedes Lackey
Mage Storms 01



Emperor Charliss sat upon the Iron Throne, bowed down neither by the visible
weight of his years nor the invisible weight of his power. He bore neither the heavy
Wolf Crown on his head, nor the equally burdensome robes of state across his
shoulders, though both lay nearby, on an ornately trimmed marble bench beside the
Iron Throne. The thick silk-velvet robes flowed down the bench and coiled on the
floor beside it, a lush weight of pure crimson so heavy it took two strapping young
men to lift them into place on the EmperorтАЩs shoulders. 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 electrum, 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 unwinking yellow eyes staring at the petitioner even as the EmperorтАЩs 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
rust. 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 EmperorтАЩs 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 oneтАЩs direct supervision, but risky in one who might, on
occasion, slip his leash.
There was very little in the EmperorтАЩs 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 тАЬthe ImmortalтАЭ; 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