"Tamora Pierce - Protector Of The Small 4 - Lady Knight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pierce Tamora)

Tamora Pierce

Protector of the Small 04
Lady Knight

ISBN 0 439 99241 9
Copyright ┬й 2002 by Tamora Pierce.



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 To the people of New York City:
I always knew the great sacrifice and kindness
my neighbours are capable of, but now the rest
of the world knows, too
 The palace in Corus, the capital of Tortall, in the twenty-first year of the reign of Jonathan and
Thayet, his queen
Mid-March, 456 HE (Human Era)

1

STORM WARNINGS

She lay with the comfortable black blanket of sleep wrapped around her. Then, against the blackness,
light moved and strengthened to reveal twelve large, vaguely rat- or insect-like metal creatures, devices
built for murder. The killing devices were magical structures made of iron-coated giants' bones, chains,
pulleys, dagger-fingers and -toes, and a long, whiplike tail. The seven-foot-tall devices stood motionless
in a half circle as the light struck what lay at their feet: a pile of dead children.
With the devices and the bodies revealed, the light spread to find the man who seemed to be the
master of the creations. To Keladry of Mindelan, known as Kel, he was the Nothing Man. He was
almost two feet shorter than the killing devices, long-nosed and narrow-mouthed, with small, rapidly
blinking eyes and dull brown hair. His dark robe was marked with stains and burns; his hair was
unkempt. He always gnawed a fingernail, or scratched a pimple, or shifted from foot to foot.
Once that image - devices, bodies, man - was complete, Kel woke. She stared at the shadowed
ceiling and cursed the Chamber of the Ordeal. The Chamber had shown Kel this vision, or variations of
it, after her formal ordeal of knighthood. As far as Kel knew, no one else had been given any visions of
people to be found once they were knighted. As everyone she knew understood it, the Ordeal was
straightforward enough. The Chamber forced would-be knights to live through their fears. If they did this
without making a sound, they were released, to be proclaimed knights, and that was the end of the
matter.
Kel was different. Three or four times a week, the Chamber sent her this dream. It was a reminder of
the task it had set her. After her Ordeal, before the Chamber set her free, it had shown her the killing
devices, the Nothing Man and the dead children. It had demanded that Kel stop it all.
Kel guessed that the Nothing Man would be in Scanra, to the north, since the killing devices had
appeared during Scanran raids on Tortall last summer. Trapped in the capital by a hard winter, with
travel to the border nearly impossible, Kel had lived with growing tension. She had to ride north as soon
as the mountain passes opened, if she was to sneak into Scanra and begin her search for the Nothing
Man. Every moment she remained in Tortall invited the growing risk that the king would issue orders to
most knights, including Kel, to defend the northern border. The moment Kel got those orders, she would
be trapped. She had vowed to defend the realm and obey its monarchs, which would mean fighting