"Liz Williams - The Age of Ice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Liz)

Ordinarily, this would have created disagreement throughout the Matriarchy, purely for the sake of it:
Gennera was thought to be too popular in Winterstrike, and was therefore resented. But the situation had
become desperate. A conclave was held in secret and they contacted me within the hour.
"They remember what you did in Tharsis," Gennera said. "You were trained out on the Plains, and these
days you are the only soul-speaker in Winterstrike. You have a reputation for accomplishing the
impossible."

"Tharsis was not impossible, by definition. Only hard. And that was thirteen years ago, Gennera. I'm not
as young as I once was, soul-speaker or not."

"That should benefit you all the more," Gennera said.

"If I meet a man-remnant on the Plain, maybe not. My fighting skills aren't what they were."

Even over the ├втВм╦Ьscribe, I could tell that she was smiling. "You'd probably end up selling it something,
Hestia."

But I had not come to Caud to sell, and I was running out of time.

In the morning, I returned to the library. I had to dodge down a series of alleyways to avoid a squadron
of scissor-women, all bearing heavy weaponry. These morning patrols were becoming increasingly
frequent and there were few people on the streets. I hid in the shadows, waiting until they had passed by.
Occasionally, there was the whirring roar of insect craft overhead: Caud was preparing for war. My
words to Gennera rose up and choked me.

I reached the ruin of the library much later than I had hoped. The remains of the blasted roof arched up
over the twisted remains of the foremost stacks. The ground was littered with books, still in their round
casings. It was like walking along the shores of the Small Sea, when the sand-clams crawl out onto the
beaches to mate. I could not help wondering whether the information I sought was even now crunching
beneath my boot heel, but these books were surely too recent. If there had been anything among them,
the matriarchy of Caud would be making use of it.

No one knew precisely who had attacked the library. The matriarchy blamed Winterstrike, which was
absurd. My government had far too great a respect for information. Paranoid talk among the tenements
suggested that it had been men-remnants from the mountains, an equally ridiculous claim. Awts and
hyenae fought with bone clubs and rocks, not missiles. The most probable explanation was that
insurgents had been responsible: Caud had been cracking down on political dissent over the last few
years, and this was the likely result. I suspected that the library had not been the primary target. If you
studied a map, the matriarchy buildings were on the same trajectory and I was of the opinion that the
missile had simply fallen short. But I volunteered this view to no one. I spoke to no one, after all.

Even though this was not my city, however, I could not stem a sense of loss whenever I laid eyes on the
library. Caud, like Winterstrike, Tharsis, and the other cities of the Plain, went back thousands of years,
and the library was said to contain data scrolls from very early days. And all that information had been
obliterated in a single night. It was a loss for us all, not just for Caud.

I made my way as carefully as I could through the wreckage into the archives. No one else was there and
it struck me that this might be a bad sign, a result of the increased presence of the scissor-women on the
streets. I began to sift through fire-hazed data scrolls, running the scanning antenna of the ├втВм╦Ьscribe up