"Paul McAuley - The Book of Confluence 02 - Ancients of Days" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

 "That is what Tamora thinks, too."
"Then at least she has some sense. But she is an ordinary cateran. I believe that you are
capable of greater things."
Yama said warily, "You do?"
Yama's wise but unworldly stepfather had not known what Yama was. He had sent the
apothecary, Dr. Dismas, to the Palace of the Memory of the People to discover what he could
about Yama's bloodline, but Dr. Dismas had lied to the old man and claimed to have found
nothing, and then tried to kidnap Yama for his own purposes. For the first time Yama wondered
whether Syle, kin to his sweetheart and to one of the curators of the City of the Dead, who had
shown him that he was of the bloodline which had built the world according to the will of the
Preservers, was part of their conspiracy.
Syle said, "We have forgotten how to speak plainly here. In a department as old as this,
words raise such echoes that their meaning might never be clear. Forgive me."
"But we are in the open air now."
"Luria has been pythoness for more than a century, but the Department is more than two
hundred times older. I must be loyal to the Department first."
Yama saw the man's distress. He said, "No one can overhear us here."
"Except the Preservers."
"Yes. We must always speak truthfully to them."
Syle gripped the fragile rail and stared into the night, toward the first light of the Eye of the
Preservers. He said, "The truth then. I know what you are, Yama. You are one of the Builders.
Your bloodline was the first of all the bloodlines the Preservers raised up to populate Confluence,
and the machines which maintain this world have not forgotten your kind. All machines obey
you, even those that follow the orders of other men. Even those which will not obey anyone else."
He laughed. "There, I have said it. Rega thought I could not, but I have. And the world has not
ended."
Yama said, "How did you find out what I am?"
Wind blew Syle's white, feathery hair back from the narrow blade of his face. He said, "Our
library is very extensive."
Yama's heart turned over. Perhaps his quest was already over, before he had hardly begun.
He said, "I came to Ys to search for my bloodline, and would very much like to see that book.
Will you show me now?"
Syle said, "No, not yet. The library is closed to all but the pythonesses and the highest
officers of the domestic staff. I would show you all I can, Yama, but I fear that I am more in need
of help than you. I'm told that the Preservers act through you. If that's true, then whatever you do
cannot be evil. You cannot help but do good. Don't deny the powers you have. I know, for
instance, that the Temple of the Black Well was burned down on the day you entered the Palace.
It seemed that someone woke the thing in the well and then destroyed it. As for us, a lesser
miracle would suffice."
 Yama had encountered two feral machines since he had arrived in Ys. In a desperate
moment, he had called down the first without knowing what he was doing. The second had fallen
in the wars of the Age of Insurrection, and men had later built a temple over the hole it had burnt
through the keelrock. The machine had lain brooding within a tomb of congealed lava for an age,
until woken by the same call which had brought down the first. With the help of the ancient
guardians of the temple, Yama had reburied it.
Machines like those had destroyed half the world in the Age of Insurrection, and although
their time was long past, and their powers had faded as the lights of the fireflies had faded, they
were still powerful. They shadowed the world from which they had been expelled, waiting, some
said, for the Preservers to return to begin the final battle when the just, living and dead, would be
raised up, and the damned thrown aside.