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

"Really don't know much about it," I admitted.
"First one I've seen who's willing to admit that there is a world off this overgrown island."
I didn't say much to that. What was there to say?
"Strange place. The women won't look at you unless you take a bath at least three times a week, and they don't talk to you anyway, except to buy or sell. Those characters in black, they have everyone scared, I guess. Even the empire doesn't mess with them."
"Empire?"
"Haven't you heard of Hamor? The Empire of the East?" By now, the trader had put one foot up on the other end of the bench.
He was just like all the other traders. Boring. He'd seen something I had not, and that made him feel better.
"You don't like me, boy? Just like everyone else? If you want my jewels, or you want to sell something-Tira! You don't have anything worth selling, except maybe that staff. Good work, there."
He reached for it, as if I weren't standing there.
The staff was somehow in my hands, although I didn't remember grabbing it, and I had brought it down on the back of his extended wrist.
Crack. Hsssss.
"Another damned devil-spawn! . . ." He backed away, his unhurt hand on a knife.
I could tell he was deciding whether to throw it, and I could feel my guts tighten. I hadn't meant to hit him, or do whatever the staff had done.
"The masters wouldn't like it if you did." It was a struggle to keep my words even, but I managed it.
"Devils take your masters . . ." he gasped. But he didn't use the knife. He took another long look at me.
I brought the staff down. It felt warm to me, as though it had been in the sun or next to the fire.
"So you're another one of them . . ." He was slowly backing away from me, although I had not moved. "I'm nothing . . . yet."
"Damned isle . . ." He was next to his horse.
I swung the pack onto my back and started toward the near steps, the ones closest to Nylan.
"You can stay. You need the rest."
He watched me, but said nothing else.
I could feel his eyes on me, and the hate, deep as the North River in flood, and almost as wild. But I put one sore foot in front of the other, wanting to get as far from the waystation and the trader as possible.
Were all traders like that, underneath, when they thought people were helpless? And why had the staff burned his wrist? I knew woods, and some about metal, and the staff was just that-lorken and steel . . . wood and forged metal. Almost a work of art, and that was why the trader had wanted it, but no more than wood and steel, certainly.
I knew some staff-play, just because my father had insisted on it as an exercise. That had been years ago, before I had been Uncle Sardit's apprentice. I guess you don't forget some things, but even remembered practice and fear wouldn't make a staff burn someone.
Could it be that the trader was a devil? I couldn't believe that, much as the old legends spoke of devils that burned at the touch of cold iron.
I shivered as I walked, despite the sunshine, the heat, and the dust. Did all the reaction of the woman on the road and the trader have something to do with me? Or with the staff?
But there was no magic in Recluce, and I was certainly no magician.
I shivered again and kept walking.


VI

NYLAN HAS ALWAYS been the Black City, just like forgotten Frven was once the White City. It doesn't matter that Nylan has little more than a village's population, or that it is a seaport used only by the Brotherhood. Or that it is a fortress that has never been taken, and tested but once.
Nylan is the Black City, and it will always be that.
From the High Road, at first it looked like a low black cloud of road dust, then like a small hill. Only when I came within a kay or so did I recognize its size. The walls are not high, perhaps sixty cubits, but they stretch from one side of the peninsula to the other, with the one gate, the one that ends the High Road. I'd seen paintings of the walls and castles of Candar, Hamor, and Austra, but Nylan was different. The walls were featureless. No embrasures, no crenelations. And no ditch, no bridge, no moat. The High Road ran straight to the gate.
The other end of the High Road is at Land's End, nearly a thousand kays eastward. Land's End is just that-where Recluce ends. Once it was a seaport, before the currents and the winds changed the Gulf of Murr from a sheltered haven into the most storm-tossed section of the Eastern Ocean. Ships landed there occasionally, but not generally by choice. The only official port was Nylan, which seemed strange to me even when Magister Kerwin taught us that.
The walls are not the most impressive feature of Nylan. The cliffs are. Black as the stone walls, smooth as black ice, they drop two hundred cubits to the dark gray-blue of the waves that crash against them.
I saw both walls and cliffs at midday, with the sun full upon them. Even in full sunlight, they resembled shadows. I shivered, grasping my staff, which felt warm in my hands, as if it were trying to dispel that inner chill.
Just looking at the massive black metal gates, the black stone, and the cliffs, I could see why they called it the Black City. I could also see another reason to worry about what I was getting into. Except I didn't have much choice.
The gate was open, wide open, with no one in sight.
So I walked up the last cubits of the High Road and into the narrow band of shadow before the gate itself, looking up at the featureless walls.
"What's your reason for being here, traveler?"
The voice was pleasant enough, and I looked for the speaker, finally locating her seated on something in a walled ledge seven or eight cubits above the road and beside the archway. Where she sat would be covered by the gates when they closed.
She wore black-black trousers, black tunic, black boots. A staff, dark like mine, rested by her hand. Her hair looked to be brown in the shadow.
"Your reason for entering Nylan?"
"Dangergeld," I answered slowly.
"Your name?"
"Lerris."
"From where?"
"Raised in Wandernaught; apprenticed in Mattra."