"Silistra - 02 - The Golden Sword" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morris Janet E)

south wind died away, all that could be seen of me was the scintilнlating spiral
sparkling in the sand.
The receding wind bore the darkness with it, and the light of sunТs rising was
again upon the land. It rainbowed the ShaperТs seal that was upon the cloak that
my father had given his daughter.
Sensation consumed me. My eyes and nose and mouth were filled with grit. My
swollen tongue was unable to give comfort to my cracked and blistered lips. My
savaged feet throbbed and pulsed.
Surely, I told myself, my father had good reason for depositing me here.
Doubtless, .I comforted myнself as I lay in the dark under my cloak, that reason
would be made clear. My lungs burned and ached. They had been hard put to adjust
to the thinner Silistran air, although it was Silistran air I had breathed for
three hundred years, until my need to discharge the chaldra of the mother had
led me to the Falls of Santha, to the cavern beнneath them, and to MiТysten.
I thought of MiТysten, that world out of time, of Estrazi and Raet, child of the
Shapers, while my body lay resting. I could not ask more from my tortured flesh,
not now, with the heat of the day upon the land.
Estrazi, my father, for whom I had forsaken my position as Well-Keepress of
Astria, for whom I had searched so long; it was he who had put me here. By his
design was I created, in his hands was I pawn. On MiТysten had I given back to
him his ring that I had worn threaded through my chald across the plain to
Arlet, amid the mountains of the Sabembe range, below the Falls of Santha. Even
in the solitary confinement of the crystal cube of MiТysten had I worn it, even
while at the mercy of Raet had I retained it. To give it back to him. To
discharge my chaldra, my responsibility and my duty, to my dead mother, Hadrath,
had I withstood Raet and met with Estrazi upon his world, MiТysten.
And when it was done, when the ring was reнmoved by my hand from my chald belt
of interнwoven chains and placed in the bronze-glowing hand of my father,
Estrazi, I had found myself, naked but for cloak and chald, upon my back in the
Parset desert, looking upon the constellations of the night sky of Silistra. So
many questions unanswered, he had delivered me home. I had lain a long while
looking up at the sky. That the sand under me was Parset sand I had determined
from the placement of the stars above me. Groistu, the stones-wielder, was only
half-risen in the north. Wiurer, the winged hulion, held court directly above
GroistuТs head. The tip of his tufted left ear, where the north star Clous
twinkled, was barely discernнible upon the horizon. From no other place upon
Silistra would the night sky so display herself.
I had wept for joy, to feel Silistra again supportнing my flesh, to breathe the
thinner, righter air ofЧthe planet of my birth. I had not thought, then, of what
the desert day would bring. I had been so long away from the cycle of day and
night, and from weather, and from nature herself, I had forgotten. But the
morning sun taught me, after I had wasted the night cool in introspection. I
quickly relearned Сmy vulnerability. My MiТysten schoolнing did me little good.
I had shaped water, creatнing a bare trickle with my limited power, and the
desert sucked it away. As it tried to suck away my life, in the three days that
followed. By the north star Clous, and the crouching crags of the southern-most
tip of the Sabembe range, did I set my course, northeast to Arlet.
I had, I reminded myself in the dark of my tented cloak, come far in three days.
I blew breath hard out of my mouth, trying to spit the grit from my gul let.
In a little while, I would set out again. I was safe, in the heat of the day,