"West,.Michelle.-.Memory.of.Stone.(txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (West Michelle)

"The gem in the sword hilt."
"It is as it has always been."
"And the runes upon the blade itself?"
"The King has had no cause to draw the Sword."
"He has cause," Gilafas said, forcing strength into words that wanted to come out in a whisper. "Tell himЧask himЧto draw the blade. Read what is written there. Return with word of what it says."
"I suspect, from your demeanor, that you already know." Duvari held his gaze, and that, too, was a threat. "Very well. I will return with your answer." He walked away then, and only when he reached the doors did he turn and proffer the most perfunctory of bows.
Gilafas waited until he left, and then he made his way to the grand desk that served as this great room's foundation. There he paused, running his hands over the surface of a very simple box. It was a deep, deep red, and the carvings across its face were not up to the standards of the least of the guild's makers.
But he had been told what lay within.

Cessaly stood between the twin pillars of her mother and her grandmother, her knuckles white as the alabaster statues in the distance.
Distance was a tricky thing to measure. There were men who could do it; they could tell you things by the length of cast shadows, the rise of buildings beneath the fall of sunlight some arcane measure of the shape of the land. Or so her father had once said. He had stayed in the Free Town of Durant. Said his good-byes at the edge of the fields that had yet to be tilled and planted, his face dark, his eyes squinting against the light. Except that the sun had been at the back of his head, a shining glint over the brim of his weathered hat.
Her brothers, Bryan and Dell, had hugged her tight, lifting her in the twirl and spin of much younger years. They hadn't said good-bye. Instead, they had offered her the blessing of Kalliaris, asking for the Lady's smile, and not her terrible frown.
She had offered them gifts. Wood carvings, things made from the blunt edge of chisel and knife. To remember me by, she'd said. In case I don't come back.
A bird. A butterfly. Nothing useful.
But in those two things, some quickness of captured motion: tail feathers spread for flight, beak open in silent song; wings, thin and fine, veined and open, devoid only of the color that might have lent them the appearance of life.
Dell had handled the butterfly as carefully as he might had it been alive; his clumsy, heavy hands, callused by the tools of their father's trade, hovering like wings above wings, membrane of wings, afraid that his grip might damage the insect's flight.
Her father had taught them that, each in their turn, and butterflies sometimes sat on the perch of their steady fingers, wings closed to edge, feelers testing wind. Birds had been less trusting, of course, and they were predators in their fashion, beaks snapping the skein of butterfly wings in a darting hunt for sustenance.
Cessaly loved them, hunter and hunted, because they were small and delicate when in flight. She had never been large.
Her brothers took after their father; they were broad of shoulder,
silent, slow to move. But they put their backs into the labor that had been chosen for them, taking comfort in the Mother's season.
Cessaly had tried to do the same, she a farmer's daughter. But the hoes and the spades, the standing blades of the scythes, often spoke to her in ways that had nothing to do with the Mother. She might be found carving mounds of dirt, or fallen stalks of wheat, into shapes: great fortresses, sprawling manors, even small castlesЧ although the poverty of her splendor had become apparent only when she had reached the outskirts of Averalaan.
They thought her clever then.
Her father would often cry out her mother's name, and the deep baritone of his voice, cracked by the dry air of the flat plains, returned to her. Cecilia, come see what your daughter has made!
Even her mother's habitually dour expression would ease into something akin to a smile when she came at her husband's call, and they would stand, like a family of leisure, for moments at a time, oohing and aahing.
She had loved those moments.
But those moments had led to this one.
"How long?" her grandmother said, when the man in robes came out from the distant building and walked down the streets, a pitcher of water in hands as callused as her father's. 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 smiled, and if the smile was curtЧand it wasЧit was also friendly. "I fear, good lady, that it will be 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 opinion, 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 was 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 shoulder, 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 graced 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, the 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, these rough surfaces, these smooth domes, took on the shape of trees, of cathedrals, of Lords and Ladies, of gods themselves; they began a story, if one knew how to read it. There were very few who could, in the history of the Guild of the Makers, for such a reading could not be 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 was 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 survived in the generation that preceded him in the guild, and no men remained who might have seen the 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 that he had been completely overtaken by the voice of the ocean, on the day that he made, out of crystal, a decanter that returned to the waters of that great body the clarity and the purity of its 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. The waters placed in this vessel can safely be drunk. Do you understand? You are not a simple makerЧyou are an Artisan.
The old man had, with great ceremony, ordered the opening of the upper remove, and installed the young man within its stone folds. What you need to learn, you will learn here. Or so our history says.
Aye, history.
That old man had been dead twenty years. Dead, a year and twelve months after the day he had made his joyful discovery. Gilafas had attended him for the two weeks he lingered abed with a fever that he could not shake. Healers had been sent for, and healers had been turned away; the guildmaster would have none of them.
"I'm an old man," he had said, "And close to death, and I'll not drag a healer there and back for the scant benefit of a few more months of life." His hair across the pillows was his shroud, his chosen shroud. "And I'm happy to go, Gilafas. You're here. You're Artisan. You will guide our guild."
"The Artisans," he had said, "all went mad, Nefem."
"Not all."