"Ursula K. LeGuin - Earthsea 3 - The Farthest Shore" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

you. You'll go with me, to the... to the way."
Sparrowhawk stood, solid and pondering, in the middle of the dim room. "Maybe," he said at
last. "If we come, we'll be here by dark." Then he turned to Arren, who opened the door at once,
eager to be gone.
The dank, overshadowed street seemed bright as a garden after Hare's room. They struck out
for the upper city by the shortest way, a steep stairway of stone between ivy-grown house walls.
Arren breathed in and out like a sea lion- "Ugh!- Are you going back there?"
"Well, I will, if I can't get the same information from a less risky source. He's likely
to set an ambush for us."
"But aren't you defended against thieves and so on?"
"Defended?" said Sparrowhawk. "What do you mean? D'you think I go about wrapped up in
spells like an old woman afraid of the rheumatism? I haven't the time for it. I hide my face to
hide our quest; that's all. We can look out for each other. But the fact is we're not going to be
able to keep out of danger on this journey."
"Of course not," Arren said stiffly, angry, angered in his pride. "I did not seek to do
so."
"That's just as well," the mage said, inflexible, and yet with a kind of good humor that
appeased Arren's temper. Indeed he was startled by his own anger; he had never thought to speak
thus to the Archmage. But then, this was and was not the Archmage, this Hawk with the snubbed nose
and square, ill-shaven cheeks, whose voice was sometimes one man's voice and sometimes another's:
a stranger, unreliable.
"Does it make sense, what he told you?" Arren asked, for he did not look forward to going
back to that dim room above the stinking river. "All that fiddle-faddle about being alive and dead
and coming back with his head cut off?"
"I don't know if it makes sense. I wanted to talk with a wizard who had lost his power. He
says that he hasn't lost it but given it traded it. For what? Life for life, he said. Power for
power. No, I don't understand him, but he is worth listening to."
Sparrowhawk's steady reasonableness shamed Arren further. He felt himself petulant and
nervous, like a child. Hare had fascinated him, but now that the fascination was broken he felt a
sick disgust, as if he had eaten something vile. He resolved not to speak again until he had
controlled his temper. Next moment he missed his step on the worn, slick stairs, slipped,
recovered himself scraping his hands on the stones. "Oh curse this filthy town!" he broke out in
rage. And the mage replied dryly, "No need to, I think."
There was indeed something wrong about Hort Town, wrong in the very air, so that one might
think seriously that it lay under a curse; and yet this was not a presence of any quality, but
rather an absence, a weakening of all qualities, like a sickness that soon infected the spirit of
any visitor. Even the warmth of the afternoon sun was sickly, too heavy a heat for March. The
squares and streets bustled with activity and business, but there was neither order nor
prosperity. Goods were poor, prices high, and the markets were unsafe for vendors and buyers
alike, being full of thieves and roaming gangs. Not many women were on the streets, and the few
there were appeared mostly in groups. It was a city without law or governance. Talking with
people, Arren and Sparrowhawk soon learned that there was in fact no council or mayor or lord left
in Hort Town. Some of those who had used to rule the city had died, and some had resigned, and
some had been assassinated; various chiefs lorded it over various quarters of the city, the harbor
guardsmen ran the port and lined their pockets, and so on.
There was no center left to the city. The people, for all their restless activity, seemed
purposeless. Craftsmen seemed to lack the will to work well; even the robbers robbed because it
was all they knew how to do. All the brawl and brightness of a great port-city was there, on the
surface, but all about the edges of it sat the hazia-eaters, motionless. And under the surface,
things did not seem entirely real, not even the faces, the sounds, the smells. They would fade