"Michelle West - Echoes" - читать интересную книгу автора (West Michelle)

And words were allowed them because the clansmen sought information. He could think of those killer,
those deaths, without passion. He accepted what that said about him as he had accepted all things that
might once have been considered atrocities.

They had spawned a child with demonic powers: the ability to use his voice to command men to
unnatural actions. They wanted that child. He ran, leaving behind his youth in the Terrean of Mancorvo,
more than a lifetime away.

Would he have returned to it? No. Not that life. But he had lived more than one. He did not dwell on
what happened between death and the Tor; but as he sat, with Salla in his lap, he remembered the shape
of the begging, bowl in his lap, the pain of blistered skin, the stares his unusually pale hair received
whenever someone paused for a moment to notice how much he stood out from the others whose
profession it was to beg and plead for the crumbs of the clansmen.

He was careful. He did not use his curse except when the hunger made him weak. He merely sat, letting
the advantage of his unusual appearance speak for him.

He had been in the Tor Leonne for three weeks when the old man found him. He had gone from a
robust, hefty villager to a slender, gaunt wraith; he had watched his shadow thin with the passage of time.
On the second day in which he had gone without food and with little water, he thought that when the
shadow disappeared entirely, he would be gone with it, and he wasтАж comforted. He hadn't the courage
to take his own lifeтАФnot then. The courage to destroy life would come later, when he had something to
live for.

But his shadow and a taller shadow had converged, and when they remained, locked against the ground,
he looked up to see who had cast it. An old man. Or a man he had thought old, from the vantage of
youth and hunger.

"Why are you here, boy?"

He had started to speak, and the words had died.

He felt their echo in his throat, just as Salla echoed the bowl in his lap.

"This is not the place for you. Can you stand?"

"IтАж don't know. Yes."

"Good. Stand. Walk if you can." The old man smiled, and the smile was strange; it wasтАж kind. It was
not a smile he had thought to see again. It hurt him. He watched his shadow separate from the old man's
and he hesitated a moment as light appeared between them., revealing the colors of dust, of dirt, of
summer heat. As simply as that, shadows were transformed. He ran into darkness, his breath catching in
his throat after only a dozen steps.

The old man turned. His smile was gone, but the look in his eyes had not changed. "I am old enough to
have fathered you. But I am not, and will never be, your father." He held out a hand. "In time, if I am
worthy of you, and you are worthy of me, I will be your brother.

"And between brothers, nothing is forbidden. No weakness and no strength. If you need help, I will help
you. If I need help, you will help me."