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

"Yes, Cessaly. Can you feel my hand?"
She appeared to be thinking, as if thought were her only vision. He waited.
"I can feel it."
"Good. You have never made hands," he said. "But when we arrive, I will bring you wood and tools, and you must try."
"Just hands?"
"For now, Cessaly. Just hands." Speaking, he began to walk, the steps as solid and real as the fading light of day, the passage of time, the Holy Isle.

After she had made her way up the stairsЧand in his estimation it took some two hoursЧshe 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 something more visceral: fear.
She screamed.
She screamed, and pulled away from him. Pulled back, turned to flee. He lost her, then. The hall swallowed her whole. She was gone.
He cursed as he had not done in years, the reserve and distance of age swallowed whole by the intensity of emotion.

She heard the voice of stone. The voice of mountains, old as the world; the voice of the molten rock in the heart of its ancient volcanoes; the voice, insistent, of its cracking, sliding fall. All the voices she had heard in her life were made small and insignificant; she lifted hands 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, hands bleeding.

Past midnight, the fear left him, sudden as it had come. He was drained of it, like a shattered vessel of liquid, and what remained was the residue that had haunted his adult life.
Think. Think, Gilafas.
What a maker heardЧif a maker heard what an Artisan heard at allЧdid not destroy the world; it did not unmake a reality. Fa-bril's reach, in all its frustrating, distant glory, was there before him. And he knew that the girl had come with him, slowly and hesitantly, eyes 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 hand against wall?
It did exist. It always existed. I never found it. I never thought to look. I knew what the shape of the tower wasЧand isЧ/ 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 light dwelled when there was any light at all. He opened drawers and cupboards, looking for chisels, for the knives which woodworkers used; wood was not his medium, but all makers of note often dabbled.
When he dropped a drawer on his foot, when the slender tubes made for blowing glass 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 continued to 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 arms of two men whose likenesses were said to be perfect: the first Kings of Essalieyan. They were not overly tall, and the space between them just large enough to fit a small girl with ease. A large man would not have been able to follow that passage, and if he had never felt cause to be thankful for his lack of stature before, he was grateful now.
The passageway was narrow and poorly lit; it was cold with lack of light, and almost silent; his breath was captured by folds of cloth, muted.
He could not have said why he chose to follow this path. But having begun, he heard her, and hearing her, saw her clearly, small, fine-boned, clear-eyed. He thought of what she might be, robbed of color and lent the clarity of glass or crystal, and this helped; he could imagine the fires, the glass, the workroom, the movement of hands and lip, the changing contours of a medium that was fluid, as close to the ocean in texture as anything solid could be.
He had never had to work so hard just to walk in Fabril's reach.
Fabril's reach will teach you everything you need to know.
For the first time in years, he turned those words over in his mind's eye, blending them with Cessaly until they were a part of her, a part of his making. What, Master Nefem, do I need to know? And if this is a part of it, why do I need to know it?
The hall ended; it opened into a room that had windows for a ceiling, a dome of fractured light. Crystal cut its fall into brilliant hues that traced the sun's progress.
She huddled in their center, her hands scratching the surface of the floor. She did not see him; could not see him. What she saw, he could not say, but he knew that she would see it until she found some release from it, until it was exorcised.
He could see what she could not: blood, dried and crusted upon the palms of her flailing hands.
He did not touch her. Instead, he knelt by her side and placed those tools he had found into the hands that were so ineffectual.
For the first time since he had entered the room, her focus changed. He placed the wood before her, but above the flat, smooth surface of stone.
He would take her from this room, in time. But that time was not yet come.
"Cessaly," he said, although he was certain she wouldn't hear him, "make what you must; I will return."

She loved the sound of Master Gilafas' voice.
No one had ever had a voice like his, and she marveled at it, for there was a texture beneath the surface of his words and his emotions that moved her to listen. She had thought to miss home; to miss her da and her mother; to long for Bryan and Dell, the two people who had brought her close to flight in the days of her childhood.
She forgot that longing quickly. The soles of her feet forgot the earth and the tall grass; forgot the slender silver stream; forgot the soft mosses, the heavy leaves of undergrowth. The stone spoke to her in a voice that was so close to her own she felt it as a part of her. To lose that would kill her.
And the only person with whom she could share this strange homecoming was Master Gilafas. His friends, Sanfred and Jordan, were as deaf as the man who had helped to birth her.