"Andre Norton & Lackey, Mercedes - Elvenbane 1 -The Elvenbane" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

was done to them.

Yet she was utterly disgusted by the way the woman had let herself be
manipulated, geas or not. The human was intelligent, she saw what was
happening, and Alara guessed that she had come very close to breaking her
own geas a time or two. Yet nothing of what she saw mattered to her, only
her own well-being, her luxurious life. Perhaps at one time she would have
felt something--but that time had vanished with her childhood.

Even freedom didn't matter to her. Only pleasure.

I really should just abandon her here to die, Alara thought, feeling as if she
had bitten into something rotten. She didn't owe the woman anything. She
wasn't of the Kin. She wasn't even worth saving. Alara could almost agree
with the elvenkind about these humans, how base they were, how much they
really deserved to be slaves. She could at least agree with Dyran's faction,
anyway.
Alara had often discussed politics in her guise as a low-ranking elven lord, or
had them discussed in her presence as a human slave. Having served as an
elven page for several Council sessions, and eavesdropped in many ways and
many forms on others, Alara knew considerably more about elven politics
than Serina had ever learned, especially where the treatment of humans was
concerned. Oddly enough, for all his cruelty, Dyran was one of the better
masters. The Council faction he headed held that humans were something--
slightly--more than brute beasts. He allowed his human slaves to rise as
high as overseer, as he had Serina's father. He obviously believed what his
party used as their platform: that one could despise, or even pity one's human
slaves, but that there was potential there to be exploited. So long as human
greed and elven magic held, humans could be allowed a bit of freedom on
their leashes, and permitted to make decisions on their own. Such freedom
was profitable to the master, after all--it meant that he needed fewer elven
subordinates, whose loyalty night be in question, and whose interests were
undeniably their own. The humans owed everything to their lords; the elves
might well decide to seek greener pastures. Humans were simple in their
greed; elven emotions were more complex and harder to manipulate, even
for a master like Dyran.

From what Alara had gleaned, Dyran's faction was slightly in the minority.
The majority of the Council were of the other party; the party that felt that
the humans were dangerous, near-rabid creatures, unpredictable and
uncontrollable. That every human should be kept under guard, with the
strictest kind of supervision; coerced into their duties, with that coercion
aided by magic whenever possible. And that those humans that showed any
signs of independent thought must be destroyed before they contaminated the
rest.

Predictably enough, Dyran's faction contained most of the younger elves,
who looked upon the survivors of the Wizard War as reactionary old fools,
frightened by an uprising that could never recur into watching their very
shadows.