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

But Dyran knew something that Alara was fairly certain he had not told the
others, who had been born after the Wizard War. She knew he knew this little
fact, because he himself had brought up the subject, more than once, in
Council.
Human magic was still cropping up in the race. And the elves had no idea
how or why.

Most of the younger elven lords thought that human magic had vanished
after the last of the halfbreeds had been killed and the human "mages" had
been identified and destroyed. That simply wasn't true, as this woman Serina
proved so clearly. Though untrained, she had been strong enough to trap
Alara's mind with her own. Granted, that was largely because of the strength
of her fear and hatred, since this "natural magic" was fueled by the power of
emotion. Still, Alara was a shaman of the Kin, and it took a powerful force to
trap and hold her for even an instant.

The elves had been trying to breed the "mind-magic" out of their humans for
centuries, yet the ability kept showing up, over and over again. No matter
how carefully they studied their slaves' pedigrees, no matter how many
children they destroyed as soon as the ability manifested, the powers kept
recurring.

Some children were hidden, of course, kept out of the way of overseers until
they learned to conceal their gift--and once collared, of course, the situation
was moot. Another problem: despite careful pairing, some supposed
"fathers" were no? the real sires of "their" children. Human fertility had
baffled the elves since they had taken this world for their own; and human
inheritance baffled them still further. Elven magic was inherited in simple
ways; two strong mages produced powerful children, a strong mage mated to
a weaker produced something in between, and two weak mages (like Goris,
Dorion, or Goris's unfortunate daughter) produced weak mages. Never did a
mating produce a stronger mage than the strongest of the pairing. Never did a
strong pair produce a weak child, only to have the power reappear in the next
generation. Power simply could not be passed that way.

But that sort of inheritance pattern occurred all the time in humans, and the
elves were utterly bewildered by it.

So the elf-stone-studded collars always carried two stones, as Serina's had
(and apparently sometimes a third to make sure the human wanted to wear
it)--and one of those stones nullified human mind-magic if kept in physical
contact with the human. Every human slave wore one from the time he or
she was taken from the parents; they were fitted with collars as soon as they
were placed in training, from the simple "This is a hoe" that began for the
dullest of the slaves at age six or eight, to the complicated training of the
concubines and fighters. The simplest were made of leather with a metal
clasp, with the owner's brand burned into the leather and the stones
embedded in the clasp itself; those were the collars Alara had seen. She'd
never even glimpsed anything like Serina's gold, begemmed piece of fantasy