"Sheri S. Tepper - The Vistor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

halved-west from east-by the slither of a glassy wall, while from north to south the
tamed terrain is cracked by little rivers bounding from the snowy heights toward the
canyons farther down.

Picture this:

Inside the towered building, galleries crammed with diagrams and devices; atria packed
with idols, images, icons; libraries stacked with reference works; studios strewn with
chalk-dust, marble-dust, sawdust, aromatic with incense-cedar and pine and sweet oil of
lavender, yes, but more mephitic scents as well; cellar vaults hung with cobweb, strewn
with parchment fragments, moldering cases stacked high in shadowed corners. All this
has been culled from prior centuries, from wizards now dead, sorcerers now destroyed,
mysterious places no longer recognized by name or location, people and places that
once were but are no longer, or at least can no longer be found.

Even the man who built the place is no longer. He was Caigo Faience of Turnaway (ca
701-775 ATHCAW-After The Happening Came And Went), once selected by the Regime
as Protector of the Spared Ones, Warden of Wizardry, but now well over a century gone
Upon his death the books were audited. When the results were known, the office of
Protector was abolished and the function of Warden was transferred to the College of
Sorcery under the supervision of the Department of Inexplicable Arts. DIA has taken
control of the place: the building, the walls, the mazes, the warden's house (now called
the Conservator's House), the whole of Faience's Folly together with all its very
expensive conceits. It is now a center for preservation and restoration, a repository for
the arcana of history. When The Art is recovered, Faience will become a mecca for
aspiring mages under the watchful eye of the Bureau of Happiness and Enlightenment,
yet another brilliant in the pave crown of the Regime.

Picture this.

A Comador woman, her hazelnut hair drawn sleekly back into a thick, single plait, her
oval face expressionless, dressed usually in a shapeless shift worn more as a lair than a
garment, a shell into which she may at any moment withdraw like a turtle. She is
recently come to womanhood, beautiful as only Comadors can be beautiful, but she is
too diffident to let her beauty show. Possibly she could be sagacious, some Comadors
are, but her green eyes betray an intellect largely unexplored. Still, she is graceful as she
slips through the maze to its center, like a fish through eddies. She is agile as she climbs
the tallest trees in the park in search of birds' nests. She is quiet, her green eyes
ingenuous but speculative as she lurks among shadows, watching, or stands behind
doors, listening, the only watcher and listener among a gaggle of egos busy with sayings
and doings.

Picture her on a narrow bed in the smallest bedroom of the Conservator's House,
struggling moistly out of tangle-haired, grit-eyed sleep, lost in what she calls the mistaken
moment when her heart flutters darkly like an attic-trapped bird and she cannot
remember what or where she is. This confusion comes always at the edge between sleep
and waking, between being here now, at Caigo Faience, and being ... other, another, who
survives the dawn only in echoes of voices:

"Has she come? Has she brought all her children? Then let her daughter stand upon the battle