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

But those moments had led to this one.
"How long?" her grandmother said, when the man in robes came out from the di
building and walked down the streets, a pitcher of water in hands as callused as her fath
She asked it again when he was ten feet away, repeated it when he was before them.
His face was lined with shadow, eyes dark; his chin was bereft of beard. But he sm
and if the smile was curtтАФand it wasтАФit was also friendly. "I fear, good lady, that it wi
some hours yet. You are not at the halfway mark."
"You're sure that they'll see us all?"
Again, he offered her a curt smile. "Indeed."
"We've brought some of her work," her grandmother said. "If you'd like to see it."
"I would, indeed." His tone of voice conveyed no such desire. "But I fear that my opin
and the opinion of the guildmasters, do not have equal standing here."
Her grandmother frowned and nodded, allowing him to pass.
There were others in the line who were just as thirsty as they were, after all, and if she
anxious, she wasn't selfish.
"Cessaly, stand straight, girl."
I was, she thought sullenly, but she found an extra inch or two in the line of her shou
and used it to blunt her grandmother's nervous edge.
Her mother had not spoken a word.

The halls of the guild's upper remove were unlike the simple, unadorned stone that grac
its lower walkways. They were also unlike the halls in which the makers worked, for those
stone walls were decorated, from floor to vaulted ceiling, with the paintings and tapestries,
statues, the interior gargoyles, that were proof of the superiority of the artists that had guild
sanction.
No; in the halls of Fabril's reach, the walls were of worked stone. These contours, t
rough surfaces, these smooth domes, took on the shape of trees, of cathedrals, of Lords
Ladies, of gods themselves; they began a story, if one knew how to read it. There were
few who could, in the history of the Guild of the Makers, for such a reading could no
taught; it could be gleaned if one had the ability and the time.
No, Gilafas thought, with a trace of bitterness. It was the ability that mattered; time
what the inferior could add, if they lacked ability in greater measure.
Guildmaster Gilafas, to his shame, was only barely an Artisan. No Artisans had survive
the generation that preceded him in the guild, and no men remained who might have seen
spark of his talent in time to kindle it, to bring it to fruition.
Or so he had told himself. It was not his fault; it was not his failing. And on the day th
had been completely overtaken by the voice of the ocean, on the day that he made, ou
crystal, a decanter that returned to the waters of that great body the clarity and the purity o
essential nature, the acting guildmaster had cried tears of joy.
There is magic here, Gilafas. Look. He had lifted the decanter to the eye of the sun.
waters placed in this vessel can safely be drunk. Do you understand? You are n
simple makerтАФyou are an Artisan.
The old man had, with great ceremony, ordered the opening of the upper remove,
installed the young man within its stone folds. What you need to learn, you will learn here
so our history says.
Aye, history.
That old man had been dead twenty years. Dead, a year and twelve months after the da
had made his joyful discovery. Gilafas had attended him for the two weeks he lingered
with a fever that he could not shake. Healers had been sent for, and healers had been tu
away; the guildmaster would have none of them.