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

"I'm an old man," he had said, "And close to death, and I'll not drag a healer there and
for the scant benefit of a few more months of life." His hair across the pillows was his shr
his chosen shroud. "And I'm happy to go, Gilafas. You're here. You're Artisan. You will g
our guild."
"The Artisans," he had said, "all went mad, Nefem."
"Not all."
"All of them."
"Not Fabril."
"I'm not Fabril, Nefem."
"No. But you will be guildmaster. You are an answer to the only prayer I have ever ma
give you the responsibility of the guild, and its makers. They are fractious. You've seen
But fractious or no, there is no greater power in the Empire." He lifted a hand. "Say what
will. The mages can kill men; they can raise them to power. But they cannot accomplish
we have built here."
 "The KingsтАФ"
"Even the Kings, when they choose to come here, come as supplicants. Be the guildma
Gilafas. While you are alive, the guild will have no other. Listen to the halls in the u
remove, hear the voices that we cannot hear. You have the ability." His cheeks were
"Protect what I have built."
The maker's cry. "Protect what I have created." Never "protect me."
Gilafas had become a maker without parallel, and in the streets of the city, in the stree
the Holy Isle, that counted. But here, within the stretch of the great hall in which the Arti
had lived and worked since the founding of the guild, he was almost inconsequential.
walls spoke to him seldom, and when they did, they spoke in a language that was al
entirely foreign. Until the day the demon voices had filled the Old City with the cries o
dying.
The halls had been dark as thunder-clad sky when he had come to them, gasping for
desperate now for the answers that his meager talent denied him. He had starved himself o
sustenance: company, food, and water. For three days, while the moon rode high in the har
sky, while the winter waxed with the bright, jeweled ghosts of the Blood Barons and
legacy of indulgence and death, he had had for company, for clothing, for sound, nothing bu
walls themselves.
The walls. He had traced their passage from one end of the hall to another, over and o
creating a maze of his movements. Closed eyes, open eyes, breath creaking through the pas
of a tight, dry, throat, he had lost his way. Become lost in his home of decades. Lo
stonework. Lost to the hand of the Artisan.
And lost now, absolved of all dignity, of all power granted him by the accolades of o
men, he had come at last to the altar.
It was in a room that did not exist. Sanity knew: sanity had denied him entrance. Some
of his mind, stubborn, sane, anchored to the world of his compatriots, could not be dislod
but it had been shaken so thoroughly he had at last his proof of the truth of his existence.
The halls had opened the way, for him, and he had walked it. And he wept, to think of i
now; wept bright tears, salt tears. Ocean tears.
For he had come across the broken body of a young woman, her pale, pretty face scarre
three places by the kiss of blade's edgeтАФher only kisses, he thought, the only ones she
been permitted. Hands bleeding and blistered by some unseen fire, she was the sacrifice.
Demon altar. Dark altar.
And upon it, across the naked skin of her pale, upturned breasts, she clutched t
broken, the Rod and the Sword of Kings.
He heard laughter; could not think that it could be hers, she was so still. This w