"Michelle West - The Memory of Stone" - читать интересную книгу автора (West Michelle)

and tools, and you must try."
"Just hands?"
"For now, Cessaly. Just hands." Speaking, he began to walk, the steps as solid and re
the fading light of day, the passage of time, the Holy Isle.

After she had made her way up the stairsтАФand in his estimation it took some
hoursтАФshe had to face the gauntlet of the great hall.
It was in the great hall that his envy, his bitterness, his resentment gave way to somet
more visceral: fear.
She screamed.
She screamed, and pulled away from him. Pulled back, turned to flee. He lost her, then.
hall swallowed her whole. She was gone.
He cursed as he had not done in years, the reserve and distance of age swallowed whol
the intensity of emotion.

She heard the voice of stone. The voice of mountains, old as the world; the voice o
molten rock in the heart of its ancient volcanoes; the voice, insistent, of its cracking, sli
fall. All the voices she had heard in her life were made small and insignificant; she lifted h
to capture them, and they came up empty.
She had no tools. No way to speak to stone with stone's voice, no way to soothe it.
But that didn't stop her from trying.
Trying, now, clawing at things too heavy and solid, her arms aching with effort, h
bleeding.

Past midnight, the fear left him, sudden as it had come. He was drained of it, li
shattered vessel of liquid, and what remained was the residue that had haunted his adult life
Think. Think, Gilafas.
What a maker heardтАФif a maker heard what an Artisan heard at allтАФdid not destroy
world; it did not unmake a reality. Fa-bril's reach, in all its frustrating, distant glory, was t
before him. And he knew that the girl had come with him, slowly and hesitantly,
wandering across the face of its carved, misshapen walls.
And what of the door, Gilafas? What of the door that did not exist until she placed h
against wall?
It did exist. It always existed. I never found it. I never thought to look. I knew wha
shape of the tower wasтАФand isтАФ/ knew that such a door at that place could not exist.
Think.
He ran to the closed doors of his workrooms, those vast, open spaces in which
dwelled when there was any light at all. He opened drawers and cupboards, looking
chisels, for the knives which woodworkers used; wood was not his medium, but all make
note often dabbled.
When he dropped a drawer on his foot, when the slender tubes made for blowing g
shattered about him, he paused long enough to avoid its splinters. Just that.
He did not think to call Sanfred, and would wonder why later. For now, he continue
search until he found the oldest of his supplies; blocks of wood as long as his forearm.
Thus armed, he paused again. Think, Gilafas. Think.
No. Not think.
Listen.

By dawn, he found her, and in finding her, he found a room that he had never seen.
It lay behind the stonework on the west wall, between the arch made of the raised arm