"Mitchell Smith - Moonrise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Mitchell)

MOONRISE
Book Three of the Snowfall Trilogy
BY
MITCHELL SMITH

Copyright ┬й 2004 by Mitchell Smith
ISBN 0-765-34059-3
Version 1.0



My Lord lives still, in his son тАФ the child with strangers, but alive.
Last words of Michael Razumov, Khanate Chancellor, at his execution


Do the seasons warm? Perhaps a very little, though the wall of ice still stands across the continent, the seas
lie shrunken, and Lord Winter rules more than eight Warm-time months each year.
If Warm-times do come again, I will not see them, since I am dying, and so leaving the service of the
Achieving King. And, after all, I have seen enough. I cannot believe in the Shadow World, though I wish to,
for there my friends would be waiting for me. My dear Catania, and Newton тАФ sad, reluctant ruler.
Dangerous Jack Monroe... my Gardens Lady Bongiorno, and the late great Queen of Kingdom River. They
have seemed too grand, too vivid for death's idiot emptiness.
I have not been so grand, so vivid. Still, I will miss my breakfasts.
NOTE FOUND IN THE DESK OF NECKLESS PETER WILSON, LORD LIBRARIAN AT ISLAND. FILED IN THE DAILY
BOOK BY HER HONOR, THE LADY PORTIA-DOCTOR.




Introduction

Knowledge of one's self тАФ a study often unrewarding as a southern songbird's battering at its own
reflection. Futile as complaining of cold in a world gone to cold for six hundred years, thanks to treacherous
Jupiter's altered orbit.
I have seen persons cry, of course, and found it odd.... No longer. Imagine my startlement, imagine
the sudden pain in my eyes as tears, hot tears in my rooms carved from ice, came welling at the news that
Small-Sam Monroe, an old тАФ May I call him friend? I believe I may. тАФ When news came to me that he
and his queen had perished in a storm on the Gulf Entire. Their ship, aptly named Unfortunate, had
foundered.
I had seen him last тАФ he was not yet called the Achieving King тАФ almost twenty years before. Only
his first great victories were behind him. Still to come were the campaigns against Manu Ek-Tam in
Map-California, and the organizing of the Great Rule of North Map-Mexico, Middle Kingdom, and the
West.... Young, stocky, and strong, with beautiful eyes in a fighting man's grim face, he'd kissed me
good-bye (our only kiss), and helped me up onto the occa's back тАФ a stupid and inferior occa, sent up by
my Second-cousin Louis from Map-McAllen.
The Made-beast had been sent to save me weeks of Walking-in-air back to New England тАФ to
which, I'd thought then, I'd been so foolishly recalled. Thought that, and wrongly, since my order home was
to an appointment of infinitely greater honor than even that of Ambassadress to a Kingdom certain to grow
greater.
The occa had grunted, groaned, flapped up from Island's East battlement into the freezing river