"L. E. Modesitt - Recluce 04 - The Chaos Balance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Modesitt L E)

file:///F|/rah/L.%20E.%20Modesitt/Modesitt,%20L%20E%20-%20Recluse%2004%20-%20The%20Chaos%20Balance.txt

The Chaos Balance
by L. E. Modesitt, Jr.
Copyright й 1997
Edited by David G. Hartwell
A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010
Torо Books on the World Wide Web: http://www.tor.com


To Lara, and her mother


I

THE ANGELS OF darkness made the Roof of the World their home, and after deceiving the followers of
light who had eagerly welcomed them, they wielded the ancient and dreadful weapons of Heaven and
vanquished those who rejoiced in the light.
In those first dark years, there were none at first among the dark ones who could descend to
the lower lands and bear the heat, and the lords of mankind, their true daughters, and their
consorts rejoiced that this was so.
For the angels of temptation bore blades that slashed through armor and loosed arrowheads that
treated iron bucklers as if they were rotten wood, and they raised a mighty stronghold called
Westwind, anchored on Tower Black, that rivaled Freyja in power. And the followers of light, who
had ages earlier forsaken the powers of the heavens, relinquished the barren heights to the dark
angels and their evil powers.
The dark angels were women who made a mockery out of hearth and home, who reviled men and
laughed as they destroyed all the armies of the Westhorns sent against them, as they forced the
great lords to heap dust and ashes upon their own heads and to bend their knees and pay tribute,
and to stand helplessly as their daughters were tempted from their hearths and consorts.
Yet an even more deadly evil was to flow from the Roof of the World, and none knew it, from the
mighty Nylan, smith of the angels, he who builded the Tower Black, he who forged the blades of
night and the arrows of the storms....
Colors of White
(Manual of the Guild at Fairhaven)
Preface


II

THE WIRY AND silver-haired man paused at the end of the causeway from Tower Black, his breath
white in the sunlit chill. His eyes lifted from the cleared stones that led from Tower Black- the
tower whose stones he had wrested from the mountains, the tower he had raised to shelter the angel
crew of the Winterlance.
Another dozen steps before him, the causeway melded into the metaled road. Beyond the road was
the expanse of softening snow that stretched in every direction-eastward to the kay - plus - deep
drop-off that overhung the high forest, and to the mountains that bordered Westwind on the south
and west. Softening or not, the snow was still well over Nylan's head just about everywhere and
twice that in spots. That depth explained the ski traces and trails that paralleled the road,