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

you ought to make things look a bit nicer."
A feeling like a sigh whiffled through Kel's skull. Mortal, what do you want? demanded the
Chamber. Its face - the face cut into the keystone over the inside of the iron door - formed in the
dirt in front of her. It was lined and sexless, with lips so thin as to be nearly invisible. The deep-set
eyes glinted yellow at Kel. The task you have been set is perfectly clear. You will know it when you
find it.
Kel shook her head. "That's no good. I must know when and where. And I'd like another look at
the little Nothing Man, if you please."
Instantly the dirt beneath her was gone, the air of the plain turned to shadow, as if she dreamed
again. She fell like a feather, lightly, slipping to and fro in the wind. When she landed, she was set
on her feet as gently and tidily as she could have hoped.
During her Ordeal she had seen the Chamber's idea of her task as an image on the wall in a
corner of the grey stone room. Now she was living the image, placed in a room like a cross
between a smithy and a mage's workroom. Unlike her vision and then the dreams that had
followed it, this place was absolutely and completely real. Behind her a forge held a bed of fiery
coal. An anvil and metal-working tools lay nearby. Along one wall stood open cupboards filled
with dried herbs, crystals, books, tools, glass bottles and porcelain jars. Between her and the
cupboards was a large stone worktable with gutters on the sides. It was covered with black stains.
To her left was another, smaller, kitchen-style hearth set into the wall. Its fire had burned out.
Kel inhaled. Scents flooded her nose: lavender, jasmine and vervain; damp stone; mould; and
under it all, the coppery hint of old blood.
There he was, scrawny and fidgeting as he stood beside the worktable chewing a fingernail. Kel
shrank back.
It is safe, the Chamber said. He cannot see you.
The Nothing Man was just as she remembered, just as he'd been in all those dreams she'd had
since Midwinter. There was nothing new to be learned from this appearance.
In the shadows to Kel's right, metal glinted. She gulped and backed up as a killing device
walked out of the shadows, dragging a child's body. The devices also looked just as she
remembered, both from her Ordeal and from a bloody day the previous summer, when she and a
squad of men from the King's Own had managed to kill one. The device was made to give anyone
who saw it nightmares. Its curved black metal head swivelled back and forth with only a thin
groove to show where a human neck would be. Long, deep pits served as its eyes. Its metal
visor-lips could pop open to reveal clashing, sharp steel teeth. Both sets of limbs, upper and lower,
had three hinged joints and ended in its nimble dagger-fingers and -toes. Its whiplike steel tail
switched; the spiked ball that capped it flashed in the torchlight.
The little man flapped an impatient hand. The machine left the room through a door on Kel's
right, towing its pitiful burden.
Moments after it was gone, a big man came in. He was tall enough to have to stoop to get
through the door. His greying blond hair hung below his shoulders. A close-cropped greying blond
beard framed curved, narrow lips. Brown eyes looked out over a long, straight nose. He wore a
huntsman's buff-coloured shin, a brown leather jerkin, and brown leather breeches stuffed into
calf-high boots. At his belt hung axe and dagger. He stopped in front of the Nothing Man and
hooked his thumbs over his belt.
"We just shipped twenty more to King Maggur. That leaves you with ten, Master Blayce," he
said, his voice a deep baritone. He spoke Scanran. "Barely enough to make it to spring."
Blayce, Kel thought intently.
"It'll do, Stenmun," Blayce replied. His voice was a stumbling whine, his Scanran atrocious.
"Maggur knows - "
Suddenly Kel was back in the Chamber's dreary home. She spared a glance around - did she see
a tree in the distance? - before she turned to glare at the face in the pale stone. "Where is he?"