"Modesitt, L E - Recluse 10 - The Magic Of Recluse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Modesitt L E)

"Just about on schedule." Her voice was polite, but bored. "Once you go through the gate, turn left and go straight to the small building with the green triangle beside the door. Don't go anywhere else."
"And if I do?"
"Nothing. Nothing at all. Except you'll waste your time, and someone else's, if they have to go find you. Anyone who sees you will direct you back to the orientation building." Her voice was so matter-of-fact that I felt chilled again.
"Thank you."
She did not speak, but nodded as I passed beneath, through the archway that was another fifteen cubits overhead. The walls were thicker than I'd thought, perhaps as thick as they were tall. Up close, each stone looked like granite, but I had never seen black granite. Inside the archway, the shade and the breeze from the water were both a welcome relief.
Once back into the sunlight, I stopped at the crossroads for a moment to take in Nylan. One road went right, toward a squarish and massive low building. Another went left, and the largest split in a circle around a black oak and headed due west.
The city itself was a disappointment in some ways, fascinating at first glance in others. Trees, welcome after the featureless plains and fields that had led up to the wall, were scattered throughout Nylan. Some of them were apparently ancient, like the huge black oak lying directly before me that stood taller than the wall itself. I stepped several paces to the left and kept looking. All the ways were paved in the same black stone as the walls, and the low buildings, none more than a single story, were also of the same stone. The roofs were shingled with black stone, and although the color matched the rest of the stone, the texture seemed more like slate.
No building was closer than fifty or sixty cubits from another, although several rambled quite extensively.
The grass was emerald-green, brilliant, in contrast to the sun-faded grasses I had observed from the High Road and throughout Eastern Recluce. Few people seemed out and about, and most of those that were wore black.
Nylan stretched further westward than I had thought, easily another five kays before reaching the tip of the peninsula where, I presumed, existed the Brotherhood's walled and protected seaport. From what I could see, the ground sloped gently downward toward the west, allowing me to see that the pattern I saw close by generally continued further westward. The trees and areas of park land made it hard to tell for certain.
Outside of all the black, it looked pleasant enough, almost like an oasis of sorts. But the black was hard to ignore. It wasn't depressing. It was just there.
Finally I flexed my shoulders, grasped the staff, and walked down the black stone road. Why the woman had even bothered to say that the building had a green triangle by the door was a wonder. The narrow road ended at right angles to a much wider road heading westward. The only building there was the one with the triangle. I supposed that the colored shapes were used as some sort of identification. How else would you give directions when all the buildings, homes, and shops were the same color and construction? It seemed rather ; dull, almost boring. If you were as powerful as the masters were, why build everything the same?
The black-oak door was open, and I walked in. The door itself was well made, almost as good as anything that Uncle Sardit had done. So was the rest of the woodwork, although I could see I would be bored stiff if all the masters used were black oak and black stone.
"Another one . . ."
I looked up from my study of moldings to realize that I stood in an upper foyer. At the bottom of three room-wide stone steps sat five people, three women and two men, on two long benches.
I nodded and stepped down, realizing as I drew closer that, with the possible exception of one of the women, a muscular blond, I was easily the youngest, and the only one with a staff. Everyone else had a pack by their feet.
"Lerris," I announced myself.
An older man, perhaps in his late thirties from his looks, stood. "Sammel." He was balding and brown-haired, with deep-set circled eyes.
"Krystal." She was black-haired, black-eyed, white-skinned, and thin, with fine hair that spun down to her waist.
"Wrynn." Blond, wide-eyed, with wide shoulders and callused hands, she dismissed me instantly. '
"Dorthae." Flat-voiced, olive-skinned, with strawberry ringlets of hair, she flashed a gold ring from every finger.
"Myrten." Sharp-nosed, with the eyes of a ferret, and hair like a shaggy bison, he spoke with a voice both high and cutting.
I nodded to all five of them and came down the steps, unslinging my pack and laying it carefully in the corner next to the empty spot at the far left end of the left-hand bench. I stood my staff in the corner as well.
"There is one more on the way, or so we have been told," added Sammel in a quiet and deep voice. He reseated himself and sat down.
I did not sit down. My feet were sore but sitting down was boring, and besides, I hadn't had a chance to look around.
The foyer, waiting room, whatever it was, was maybe ten cubits wide and not quite that deep. There were three doors besides the entry, one in the center of each wall. The benches were backed up against the wall opposite the front doorway and the stairs, separated by a closed door. All the doors were hung to open away from the foyer. All were black-stained black oak, bound in black steel, and all were closed.
The walls looked to be timbered and covered with rectangular dark oak-veneered panels, each panel edged with a finger-width molding. The three interior walls were topped with a triangular crown molding. The gray-plastered ceiling seemed almost bluish against all the black.
A portrait hung above each bench-a woman on the right, a man on the left. Naturally, they both wore black. Black was getting boring.
Nobody wanted to say anything; that was clear. I looked at Krystal, with her dusty-blue smock and trousers. She looked through me. But she was too thin and distracted-looking anyway.
Wrynn wouldn't look at me at all, just kept looking at the floor. She had nice legs. Even the fringed leathers she wore couldn't hide that.
Dorthae kept looking at Myrten, the thin-faced man, who returned the look.
Sarnmel just sat there, sadly looking nowhere.
And I wandered around trying to figure out what kind of tools the woodworkers had used to carve the panels, because I still didn't know anything about the dangergeld except that I had to do it.
What a sorry bunch.
Click, click, click.
Everyone looked up at the newcomer.
She carried a staff, too. Black as mine, but somehow more . . . used. Her hair was flaming red, and I could tell that her eyes were ice-blue. Dust covered a freckled face that made her look younger than she was. She could have passed for my age but was much older, at least five or six years.
"What a sorry bunch." Her voice was cheerfully hard.
"Speak for yourself." I hadn't realized I'd spoken until I heard the words.
"I am speaking for myself."
"I'm Lerris. Who are you?"
"Tamra will do." Her hard eyes scanned the others and ended up back on me. "Aren't you a little young to be here?"
"Aren't you a little presumptuous?"
"Tamra . . . Lerris," interjected Sammel, standing up. "Whoever is here is here with the acceptance of the masters. Can we leave it at that for now?"
"Fine with me." I was ready to throttle the red-haired bitch in her hard-heeled black boots and dark-gray trousers and tunic. She was wearing as close to black as she could decently get away with in Recluce, and flaunting it.
"The masters this, the masters that . . . what difference does it make?" Her voice was disgusted, but she took off her pack just like the rest of us as she came down the stairs. Then I realized she only came to my shoulder but she had carried a pack fully as big as mine, and while she was fine-featured and slender, she was not thin like Krystal nor muscular like Wrynn. She was about the same size as Dorthae, but she had a certain presence.
She didn't sit down either, but put her pack at the end of the right-hand bench, next to Sammel's stuff. Then she looked at the pictures, which outside of their somberness seemed unremarkable to me. She ignored the quality of the woodwork and kept comparing the pictures.
Since she was ignoring me, like the whole sorry bunch, I walked over and stood in front of the picture on the left, trying to figure out why Tamra felt it was so interesting.
The man in the picture was in black, but not in the official-type robes of a master, and his hair was silvered gold, much like my father's. Even though they didn't look much alike, the more I looked at the portrait, the more I could sense a certain likeness. I pushed that thought away and looked for the technical details.
A shadowed bar behind his right shoulder caught my attention next. The height and the positioning indicated that it had to be a staff of some sort, but unlike the detail shown in the man's face, none of the background was depicted clearly at all.