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

"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 made. I give you the responsibility of the guild, and its makers. They are fractious. You've seen that. But fractious or no, there is no greater power in the Empire." He lifted a hand. "Say what you will. The mages can kill men; they can raise them to power. But they cannot accomplish what we have built here."
"The KingsЧ"
"Even the Kings, when they choose to come here, come as supplicants. Be the guildmaster, Gilafas. While you are alive, the guild will have no other. Listen to the halls in the upper remove, hear the voices that we cannot hear. You have the ability." His cheeks were wet. "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 streets of the Holy Isle, that counted. But here, within the stretch of the great hall in which the Artisans had lived and worked since the founding of the guild, he was almost inconsequential. The walls spoke to him seldom, and when they did, they spoke in a language that was almost entirely foreign. Until the day the demon voices had filled the Old City with the cries of the dying.
The halls had been dark as thunder-clad sky when he had come to them, gasping for air, desperate now for the answers that his meager talent denied him. He had starved himself of all sustenance: company, food, and water. For three days, while the moon rode high in the harvest sky, while the winter waxed with the bright, jeweled ghosts of the Blood Barons and their legacy of indulgence and death, he had had for company, for clothing, for sound, nothing but the walls themselves.
The walls. He had traced their passage from one end of the hall to another, over and over, creating a maze of his movements. Closed eyes, open eyes, breath creaking through the passage of a tight, dry, throat, he had lost his way. Become lost in his home of decades. Lost to stonework. Lost to the hand of the Artisan.
And lost now, absolved of all dignity, of all power granted him by the accolades of other 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 part of his mind, stubborn, sane, anchored to the world of his compatriots, could not be dislodged, 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 it now; wept bright tears, salt tears. Ocean tears.
For he had come across the broken body of a young woman, her pale, pretty face scarred in three places by the kiss of blade's edgeЧher only kisses, he thought, the only ones she had 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 them, broken, the Rod and the Sword of Kings.
He heard laughter; could not think that it could be hers, she was so still. This was a monument the Barons would have been proud to own.
When Sanfred and Jordan found him again, wandering naked, bleeding, skeletal, they had taken him in silence to the lower halls, and he had made good his escape.
But in escape, he carried knowledge: the Rod and the Sword would fail. The orb would be shattered, and the runes on the blade would speak in the tongue of an accusation he understood well: they were hollow vessels, their metal and their finery too superficial for the task at hand.

The line stretched on forever. Grandmother, mother, and daughter, they faced it like a family faces drought: grimly, silently. Ces-saly was uncomfortable in the present, and she was young, adept in ways that her elders, too slow and rigid, could no longer be. She sought past. Found it.
Cessaly's father, his pride contained in the scarcity of his words, had taken some of the things she had made to market when the merchants began their spring passage through the Free Towns on their way to the Western Kingdoms, those lands made distant and mythical because she would never set eyes upon them.
She had been younger, then; a good five years younger, and still prone to be mistaken for a boy whenever she traveled in the company of her brothers. But she had gone with her da when he took the wagons into the common, and she had stood by his side while he offered the merchantsЧat some great costЧthe fruits of her half-forbidden, half-encouraged labor.
She had made horses, that year. Horses fleet of foot and gleaming with sunlight, manes flying, feet unfettered by the shod hooves that the merchants prized.
"You made these?" the merchant said, lifting the first of the horses.
Her father had shrugged.
"These are Southern horses. You've seen action, then?"
He said nothing. The Free Towners knew that her father had been born on the coast; knew that he had survived the border skirmishes that were so common between the North and the South. They also knew better than to ask about them.
"You've a good hand," the merchant continued, eyes narrowing slightly. "What do you want for them?"
Her father had named a price.
The merchant's brows rose in that mockery of shock that was familiar to any Towner who had cause to treat with him.
They had bickered, argued, insulted each other's birthplace, parents, heritage. And then they had parted with what they valued: her father with the small horses, the merchant with his money.
It might have ended that way, but Cessaly, impatient and bursting with pride and worry, had said, "What'll you do with 'em?"
The merchant raised a brow. "Sell them, of course."
"To who?"
"To a little girl's parents in the West. Or in the East. They are . . . very good. Perhaps if you had paint," he had added, speaking again to her father. "For a priceЧa good priceЧI might be able to supply that."
"You wouldn't know a good price if it bit you," her father replied, mock angry.
"We want the paint," she'd answered.
And he turned to look at her, at her eager eyes, her serious face.
"What will you do with paint, child?"
She smiled. "I don't know."
And then he frowned. "Did you make these?"
"Yes."
"By yourself?"
"Yes."
"And who taught you this, child?"

Her turn to frown, as if it were part of the conversation. She shrugged.
The merchant went away. But when he came back, he handed herЧher and not her fatherЧa small leather satchel. "You can keep these," he told her, "if you promise that I will have first pick of anything you make with them."
"If the price is right," her father told the man. "If we don't like the price, we're free to take them elsewhere."