"Patricia A. McKillip - In the Forests of Serre" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

ended at the bone that marked the threshold of the witch.



TWO

Earlier that summer in Dacia the scribe Euan Ash, translating a poem out of a
long-dead language, was lulled by bees and the scent of sun-warmed roses into
a dream of the poem. His eyes closed. The ragged breathings and scratchings
from dozens of noses and pens, the occasional curse let loose as gently as a
filament of spiderweb, faded around him. He walked down a dusty road in a
strange dry landscape, eating a handful of stones. In that land, stones turned to
words in the mouth. Words tasted like honey, like blood; they vibrated with
insect wings between the teeth. He spat them out after he had chewed them.
Bees flew out of his mouth, birds circled him, bushes took root in the parched
ground and flowered; he was speaking a landscape to lifeтАж Then something he
spat out took shape in the distance where the road narrowed to a point. A dark,
rectangular object, like a column or a book, travelled swiftly to meet him,
casting a shadow over the dream. It had no face or mouth, but it towered over
him and spoke a word like a book slamming shut.
Euan woke with a start and saw the wizard.
Sightings of him were quite rare, and the sleepy scriptorium, a curve like a
question mark at the end of a long hallway in the kingтАЩs library, was the last
place Euan would have expected to see him. He stared, still drugged with
dreaming. The wizard who called himself Unciel spoke softly to Proctor Verel,
who was nodding vigorously, looking, to EuanтАЩs dazed eyes, like one small ball
rolling on top of a much larger ball. The wizard, around whom legends
swarmed and clung, each more fabulous than the last, seemed worn by the
burden of them. He was tall and spare, his lined face honed to its essence of
muscle and bone, his cropped hair dead white. He was the son and the grandson
and the great-grandson of a long line of powerful sorcerers, and he had become
the most powerful of them all. That was one rumor Euan had heard. Another had
him born in a land so old all but its name had been forgotten; he had tutored the
first King of Dacia in the magical arts. He had wandered everywhere into the
known and the unknown. According to most recent tales, he had overcome some
great evil, some fierce, deadly monstrosity that had challenged his strength and
power beyond endurance. But he had endured, and had returned to peaceful
Dacia to recover. He did not look injured, but the weariness that emanated from
him seemed almost visible to Euan; it must have come out of his heartтАЩs
marrow.
The wizard stopped talking and turned his head. Every pen had stilled, Euan
realized; everyone was staring at the wizard, whose light eyes, cloudy with
fatigue, were gazing back at Euan. The scribe woke completely then, with a jerk
that shook his high, slanted desk and tipped the inkstand over onto the poem he
had been transcribing. Black welled across the parchment, eating words as
swiftly and irrevocably as fire.
Euan righted the ink hastily, tried to dam the flood with his sleeve. He heard
snickers, a sharp, impatient breath from the proctor. Then a hand touched the
paper. Ink seeping into EuanтАЩs sleeve vanished. Words reappeared, lay across
the dry landscape of paper as neatly and clearly as footprints down a dusty