"Christopher Rowley - Bazil 03 - Dragons of War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rowley Christopher)

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Dragons of War by
Christopher Rowley
To Veronica Chapman with thanks for her help and advice.

CHAPTER ONE
The sun burned down on the heart of the continent, the ancient land of
Padmasa, but there was no warmth in it. Instead a chill wind from the
northwest sucked the heat out of the day, leaving the dun-brown hills and
withered meadows of lichen as mute testimony to its power. This was a
place ruled by winds. A glance at the fantastic shapes carved from the rock
pinnacles could tell the traveler that in a second.

Sandstorms blew in from the west, snowstorms came from the north,
and desiccating chinooks came down from the mountains to the south.
Vegetation of any sort struggled to survive here, and yet this was the
center of the greatest power in the world.

Coming over the pass at Kakalon, looking down into the widening
valley, the magician Thrembode the New saw the mass of the Square
clearly outlined on the dominating, central rise. The jarring straight lines
and white stone informed the world that this was the work of men. The
smooth-sided walls, two hundred feet high, frowned down like bluffs of
pure adamant. The sight chilled the magician and awakened a deep
foreboding. This was a place where only wild goats uould choose to live,
and yet there stood the great slab, one mile on each side, a single vast
building thronged by more than a million people, all of them servants of
the power that ruled here.

The magician marveled to himself, for he knew that the Square, for all
its majesty was but the anteroom to the Halls of Padmasa, which lay deep
below, carved into the rock of the craton by an army of slaves, none of
whom had survived the ordeal. Indeed, their very bones had been ground
into the mortar holding together the stones.

Coming through the pass and into the valley brought Thrembode back
into the full force of the wind, which tore at his clothing. He shivered as he
fastened his coat all the way up and tightened the belt. It was always cold
here, one reason the great ones liked it. The wind shrieked as it honed the
rocks into bonelike shapes, eroding the world's flesh and exposing its very
vertebrae.

Thrembode thought of the coming ordeal, and would've prayed to the