"Benjamin Rosenbaum - Embracing The New" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rosenbaum Benjamin)

master asked. Pushing aside the curtains, he gestured over
the wagon's side at the blasted red crags around them.
"We defeat the Godless in battle because the gods favor
us, master," Vru recited.
Khancriterquee snorted. "It is not that the gods favor us. It
is that we favor the gods."
Vru did not understand, and bent to massage the master's
flesh. Khancriterquee pushed Vru's holding-hands away with a
claw and, wheezing, sat up. He stared at Vru with disgust.
Vru realized that he was clicking his claws together, and
forced himself to stop. The master watched himтАФ
remembering Vru's every twitch into the Ghennungs the
journeymen would soon carry.
Vru pulled himself erect. "Master, there is something I
have never understood."


4
 Embracing-The-New
by Benjamin Rosenbaum


Khancriterquee's eyes glittered with interest, or suspicion.
"Ask," he said.
"How can the Godless really be godless?"
The master frowned.
"I mean, how can someone without a god not go mad
when he takes new Ghennungs?" Vru remembered the day he
had taken Delighting-In-Beauty as his goddess, to be the
organizing devotion of his life. As the doctors had gently
separated the Ghennungs from his father's cooling corpse in
the Great Hall below, he had wanted to cling to childhood,
wanted to wait before choosing a god. But the priest had
lectured him sternlyтАФfor without a god, a person would just
be a shifting collection of memories. The allegiances, desires,
and opinions of his various Ghennungs would be at war, and
he would be buffeted like a rowboat in a hundred-year's
storm.
"Ah, my apprentice is ambitious," Khancriterquee
whispered. "The master is old and weak. Perhaps the
apprentice should attend the high military councils in my
stead. Perhaps he should learn the secrets of our war against
the GodlessтАФ"
"Master, I meant noтАФ"
"The Godless do not trade Ghennungs," Khancriterquee
said.
"What?"
"Perhaps at a very young age they do," Khancriterquee
said, waving his holding-hands, "or to trade certain very
specific skills only, without other memories, using some kind