"Tad Williams - Memory Sorrow & Thorn 2 - Stone of Farewell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Tad)

returned to the Hayholt, to his castle home as it once had been, but would never be again: a
place of sun-warmed lawns, of shadowed nooks and hiding-holes тАУ the greatest house of
all, full of bustle and color and music. He walked again in the Hedge Garden, and the wind
that sang outside the cave in which he slept sang in his dreams as well, blowing gently
through the leaves and shaking the delicate hedges.
In one strange dream he seemed to travel back to Doctor MorgenesтАЩ chamber. The
doctorтАЩs study was now at the top of a tall tower, with clouds swimming past the high-
arched windows. The old man hovered fretfully over a large, open book. There was
something frightening about the doctorтАЩs single-mindedness and silence. Simon did not
seem to exist at all for Morgenes; instead, the old man stared intently at the crude drawing
of three swords that stretched across the splayed pages.
Simon moved to the windowsill. The wind sighed, though he could feel no breeze. He
looked down to the courtyard below. Staring up at him with wide, solemn eyes was a child,
a small, dark-haired girl. She lifted a hand in the air, as if in greeting, then suddenly was
gone.
The tower and MorgenesтАЩ cluttered chamber began to melt away beneath SimonтАЩs feet
like a receding tide. Last to vanish was the old man himself. Even as he slowly faded, like
a shadow in growing light, Morgenes still did not lift his eyes to SimonтАЩs; instead, his
gnarled hands busily traced the pages of his book, as though restlessly looking for answers.
Simon called out to him, but all the world had turned gray and cold, full of swirling mists
and the tatters of other dreams...

He awakened, as he had so many times since Urmsheim, to find the cave night-
darkened, and to see Haestan and Jiriki bedded down near the rune-scrawled stone wall.
The Erkynlander was curled sleeping in his cloak, beard on breastbone. The Sitha stared at
something cupped in the palm of his long-fingered hand. Jiriki seemed deeply absorbed.
His eyes gleamed faintly, as though whatever he held reflected the last embers of the fire.
Simon tried to say something тАУ he was hungry for warmth and voices тАУ but sleep was
tugging at him again.
The wind is so loud...
It moaned in the mountain passes outside, as it did around the tower tops of the
Hayholt... as it had across the battlements of Naglimund.
So sad... the wind is sad...
Soon he was asleep once more. The cave was quiet but for faint breathing and the
lonely music of high places.
It was only a hole, but it made a very sufficient prison. It plunged twenty cubits down
into the stone heart of Mintahoq Mountain, as wide as two men or four trolls lying head to
foot. The sides were polished like the finest sculptorтАЩs marble, so that even a spider would
have been hard-pressed to find a foothold. The bottom was as dark and cold and damp as
any dungeon.
Though the moon ranged above the snowy spires of MintahoqтАЩs neighbors, only a fine
spray of moonlight reached down to the bottom of the pit, where it touched but did not
illuminate two unmoving shapes. For a long while since moonrise it had been this way: the
pale moon-disk тАУ Sedda, as the trolls called her тАУ the only moving thing in all the
nightworld, crossing slowly through the black fields of the sky.
Now something stirred at the mouth of the pit. A small figure leaned over, squinting
down into the thick shadows.
тАЬBinabik...тАЭ the crouching shape called at last in the guttural tongue of the troll folk.
тАЬBinabik, do you hear me?тАЭ
If one of the shadows at the bottom moved, it made no sound in doing so. At last the