"Janny Wurts - The Cycle of Fire 3 - Shadowfane" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wurts Janny)

JANNY WURTS
Shadowfane

Prologue
The seeress of the well in Gaire's Main woke gasping in the straw of the
stables where she sheltered. She shivered, blind eyes milky in the moonlight
that spilled from the loft. The visions that had broken her sleep racked her
still, bringing terror beyond anything mortal. The seeress stirred ancient
joints and rose. Clothed in scraps of knotted leather, she groped down the
dusty ladder and made her way past stall and grain stores, then out into the
waning autumn night.
Beyond the barn lay a crossroad and a trough awash with muddy puddles. The
folk of Gaire's Main presently used the sacred spring as a watering place for
beast and household; to them the seeress was a senile beggar woman given to
strange outbursts and mumbling. But tonight no confusion blurred her
movements. She knelt on the chill ground and scrabbled through pig droppings
until she located the stone that founded the mystery of her craft.
The slab was black, laced with metallic streaks of gold, and rinsed clean by
overflow from the spring. Tears brimmed from the seeress's lashless eyes as
she laid her palms against the talisman. Energy welled from the contact. With
a cry of agonized relief, she surrendered her burden of dreams to its
current...
In the wind-whipped darkness of an ocean roiled by the aftermath of a gale, a
boat with tattered sails rolled hove to in the swell. There a black-haired man
dressed in the
cottons of a fisherman reached out to an injured Thienz-demon who clung to a
drift of timber in the waves. Neither kindness nor compassion prompted the
man's action; his spirit was not human, an evil sensed palpably across the
fabric of the seeress's dream.
The rescued demon was not to survive its deliverance from the waves. As its
toadlike fingers closed upon the man's wrist, the seeress sensed its agony,
the burning sting of salt splashed into its gills. Poisoned beyond healing,
the demon endured only long enough to deliver its death-dream, which held
intact the death-dreams of others who had perished earlier, in a backlash of
forces brought about by no natural means.
These memories the Thienz impressed directly into the mind of the human in the
boat, for their significance to mankind's enemies offered proof that an
artifact of paramount significance still existed. Untempered and entire, the
death-dream of the Thienz seared like magma through the young man's awareness.
When he screamed, the seeress screamed with him, and the well-stone beneath
her hands relayed the dying demon's legacy to mankind's most ancient defender
. ..
On an islet far distant from Gaire's Main, the old woman's sending cut like
the cry of a dying doe across a grove of enchanted twilight; there an entity
known as the Vaere received her images with an understanding not given to
mortal men. The news promised grimmest consequences. The dying Thienz had
stumbled upon a secret centuries old. When that knowledge reached the demon
compact at Shadowfane, its full import would be recognized. Then would the
wardenship of the Vaere itself become threatened. Now the untried talents of
the sorcerer's heir but recently come to sanctuary offered the only expedient.