"Holly Lisle - Secret Texts 3 - Courage Of Falcons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

She could smell his fear as clearly as she could smell her own. She cared about himтАФhe was her friend, even if she couldn't love him the
way he wanted. She said, "I don't want you to die unnecessarily if this doesn't work."
"That goes without saying."
"Please . . . I'll be able to focus on this better if I'm not worried that something might happen to you."
"Kait. . . ." He stepped into her line of sight. He was frowning. "I understand what you're saying, but I can't leave you alone. I can't. You I don't know what will happen, so you can't know whether or not you might need me. So I have to stay."
She couldn't tell him that he was wrong. He was correct when he said she didn't know. So she nodded and said, "Thank you, Ian."
He pressed his lips together and retreated to his place behind her against the wall; he'd said nothing, but she could guess at his thoughts.
She rested her palms on the rim of the Mirror. The next three buttons she pushed would reopen the connection between the Mirror of Souls and the souls of the Dragons.
They lay in a neat cluster to her right, marked with the glyphs pethyose and neril and inshus. Modulate, gather, and set-hold. She pressed golden cat's-eye, glittering jacinth, and pale aquamarineтАФand then she held her breath.
Again the soft clicks, again the light shining through the depressed hieroglyphs. The soft whispering sound that emanated from the Mirror rose in volume and pitch, and a faint breeze stirred the air
in the room. The light from the soulwell intensified, and began to take on a greenish cast. She began to think she could almost catch indi-
vidual words in that soft, steady whispering. Gooseflesh rose on her arms and a bead of icy sweat rolled down her neck, slid along her spine, and left her shivering in its wake. The room felt both hot as a furnace and cold as death.
She could hear Ian breathing rapidly. She felt her own blood bounding through her veins as if racing for a way out. The energy that swirled in the pool of light in the center of the Mirror of Souls felt heavy, hungry, and watchful.
And she was going to have to embrace it. She had to let it use her body as a lightning rodтАФshe had to ground that swirling green fire.
She sought the glyph peldoneтАФdrawтАФand let one index finger hover over it. She found galoinтАФreverseтАФand placed her other index finger over that. Pressing both together would reverse the direction that the souls had flowed before, and would draw them back to the Mirror. With them would come all the energy that had been stolen from the lives of the Iberan people. That energy would, if Dafril's theory was correct, leap from the Mirror of Souls to the nearest available living body, and from that body would stream back to the places from which it had come. It might be a violent process. It might destroy her. It had never been attempted before, so not even the memories of the Dragon Dafril could offer her reassurance.
Dughall said, I'm still with you, Ka.it. I'll be with you no matter what happens.
She sent him her love, and jabbed her fingers against the two jeweled hieroglyphs simultaneously
The green light changed to hypnotic, brilliant blue. She felt the slight breeze in the room become a rush of wind, and felt the wind pulling against her, tugging her nearer to the twisting column of light that burst upward through the ceiling and down through the floor. The whispering became shouts inside her skull. She felt the building around her begin to tremble, and saw ghostly forms erupt from the walls. The room filled with fog, cold and damp and thick as baled cotton. It swirled around the Mirror of Souls and fed itself into the column of light, and the scent of honeysuckle became a gagging, thick miasma overlaid by the sweet rottenness of decayтАФthe scent which she'd learned was the smell of Dragon magic. The fog in the room kept her from seeing anything but the blue light that rose like a sword from the Mirror. But she heard crackling and rumbling in the distanceтАФthunder and lightning, coming closer with the speed of a cyclone's wind.
The walls shook, the floor shook, and to the invisible accompaniment often thousand tortured screams, a cascade of blue light poured
into the Mirror and burst from it, slamming into Kait like a man-sized fist. Her arms flew out to her sides, her legs pushed away from each other so hard that both her hips made cracking sounds, her lower jaw snapped open and stretched wider and wider, her fingers pushed away from each other, her hair stood on end, her eyeballs pushed out-as if they would crawl from their sockets and flee. Every joint in her body stretched and pulled, as if her bones could no longer stand each other's company.
She couldn't breathe, she couldn't move, she couldn't scream. Thousands of arrow-thin bolts of blue light erupted from her body and shot outward in all directions. Fire burned beneath her skin; screaming deafened her, thunder shook her, dust fell from the ceiling. Pain racked her; her sight dimmed from lack of oxygen; she began to
Then the blue fires pouring out of her weakened; first a few wa-vered and disappeared, and many in a rush, and finally the last dozen straggling bolts.
She sucked air into her tortured lungs and collapsed to the floor, pain consuming her. She rolled into a ball and stared at nothing, and her vision began to clear.
The fog around her thinned. The blue light dimmed. She held her breath. The screaming faded back to soft, steady whispering. And the last of the fog gathered itself by wisps and tatters into the column of lightтАФKait could only think of a giant sucking in smoke as she watched it swirling into the center of the room and vanishing.
The last of the light flowing into the Mirror seemed to crawl down itself, pressing and shrinking and squeezing to fit as it slipped inward. It filled the soulwell and spiraled around the basin of the Mirror of Souls again. It wasn't the same as it had been before she pressed the hieroglyphs, however. It felt at that moment the way it had when she found the Mirror back in the ruins in North Novtierra. It felt full, and she hadn't been aware of the difference until right then.
Now the whispers were clearтАФdozens of them, maybe even a hundred, all scrabbling at the same time, all fighting to reach her
mind. When she felt for the energy that she needed to shield herself from those evil whispers, it was there, and she drew a shield around herself, and then around Ian. She knew what those voices had to say. She knew, and she wouldn't listen again.
It worked, Dughall told her. By all the gods, it worked. We're saved and the Dragons are defeated.
Then she felt Dughall react with surpriseтАФthe connection that bound him to her changed in shape and form, and a spirit that was not her and was not Dughall moved through her and shimmered out of her fingertips, making the leap to the Mirror of Souls. Behind her, Ian hissed and drew his sword; she backed away from the Mirror. The smooth surface of the pool of light began to curve inward on itself, rising into a round bubble that stretched after a moment into an oblong, and then developed indentations that became eyes and a mouth, and protrusions that shaped themselves into a nose and ears. Kait's heart began to race.
"Kait," the face in the center of the Mirror said, "it's me. Hasmal."
"Hasmal?"
Dughall said, That was Hasmal. I left him with Alarista, but that was him.
Hasmal said, "You aren't done yet. You're only where you would have been if we could have gotten the Mirror to Glaswherry Hala without the Sabirs getting it."
She nodded. "I know. I'm going to release the souls into the Veil."
"And then what?"
"Then Ian and Ry and I are going to hide the Mirror in Galweigh House."
"Not good enough. How many people would willingly ignore the promise of immortalityтАФof godhood? If you permit the Mirror of Souls to exist, someday someone else will use it."
"The Dragons are captured. Soon they'll be gone forever. No one else knows how to build an immortality engine, or how to use the Mirror."
"I do," Hasmal said. "Dughall does. You do."
She started to protest that of course she didn't know that. But she discovered that in fact she did. She knew everything the leader of the Dragons had known; she could make herself a god. She could make Ry and Dughall and Hasmal and Alarista gods. They could live forever.
They could live forever.
She stared at the Mirror of Souls, feeling her skin prickle, tasting the scent of honeysuckle and rot growing stronger all around her. She knew the magic to stave off death. She knew, as well, its horrible price. She could feel the stain of the Dragon's soul within her, could feel the marks branded into it by the annihilation of uncounted other souls.
In her mind, Dughall said, It could be used for evil, Kait, but it could be used for good, too. Consider Hasmal. We need him to rebuild, Kait. And Alarista needs him. After you purge the Mirror of the Dragons' souls, you could use it one final time to put Hasmal into Crispin Sabir's body. You could give him his life back.
The Mirror drew its magic from the lives of others. She considered that. She knew how it worked. She could draw energy for the spell only from those who had hurt others. The Sabir Wolves, murderers, thieves, rapists and torturers and pedophiles. Maybe slavers. Maybe . . .
She felt herself standing at the edge of an abyss. She didn't let herself look too closely at the gaping void beneath her feet. She said, "Hasmal, I could give you Crispin's body. You could be with Alarista again."
His image stilled. For a time that seemed like an eternity, he hung suspended above the Mirror, silent, unmoving, unblinking.
"Oh, Vodor Imrish," he whispered, "I would give almost anything to be with her. You cannot know. . . ."
Dughall spoke into her mind. Tell him 1 need him. I'm but one, and so many of the other Falcons are deadтАФI need someone to help me.
Kait relayed the message, her voice quavering.
Again he was silent for a long time. "I can't lie, Kait. I want to