"Eric Van Lustbader - Sunset Warrior 4 - Beneath an Opal Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lustbader Eric van)

Demoneye 189
The Anvil 204
Sardonyx 220
The Opal Moon 231
FOUR: LION IN THE DUSK
Idyll 243
The Orphans 250
And All the Stars
to Guide Me 256

us

Thus we struggle so that our
history shall become the
salvation of our children.

From the Tablets
of the Iskamen

PREFIGURE:
 On Green Dolphin
Street

Or

THE Scarred Man enters Sha'angh'sei at sunset.
He pauses before the towering cinnabar
escarpment of the western gate and turns in his
dusty saddle. Above him, a pair of ebon carrion
birds spread their grotesquely long wings,
hovering, startlingly set off by the flare of the
sky. Piled clouds riding like chariots of crimson
fire obscure for long moments the bloated ablate
of the sun as it sinks slothfully toward the heights
of the city already lost within the thickening
haze. It is a unique mark of the sunsets in
Sha'angh'sei that the city itself and the land all
around it is first engulfed by the purest crimson,
sliding, as the sun disappears behind the
man-made facade into the amethyst and violet
which heralds the night.

But the scarred man's deep-set eyes, slitted and
as opaque as dry stones, study only the winding
much-traveled highway behind him and the
steady lines of jumbled traffic ox-carts piled
high with raw rice and silk, horsemen, soldiers,
and traveling merchants, businessmen, farmers
on foot moving toward him and the city; the
outbound flow is of no import to him.