"Janny Wurts - Wayfinder(2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wurts Janny)

shop worked overtime to meet the demand for new blankets. Sabin crawled into bed
each evening too tired to blow out the lamp; and so it chanced that she wakened in
the deeps of night by the blood-dim glow of a spent wick. This time no forgotten
jacket needed recovery from shore. The restlessness that stirred her refused to be
denied.
She arose, dressed in haste, and let herself out the back door. Lights still
burned in the tavern, and a few drunken voices inside argued over ways to cure
sharkskin. Sabin slipped past, down the lane toward her uncle's cottage. Once there
she did not knock; every window was dark. Instead she went on down the cliff path.
Her shins brushed the stalks of purple flowers, dried now, and rattling with
seedheads in the change of season. Wind snatched her clothing and snapped at the
ends of her hair. A wild night, yet again, the kind that was wont to bring wrecks. She
completed the last, familiar steps to the chair seat, dreading what she might find.
 The horizon was clearly delineated under a waning half moon. Clouds
scudded past like dirty streamers, muddling the swells pewter and gray, and against
them, like pen strokes in charcoal, an advancing forest of black masts. Where
peaceful craft would have plied sails, this fleet cleaved against the wind, lashing up
coils of foam beneath the driving stroke of banked oars.
War galleys, Sabin identified, though the Karbasch to her were just talk. The
Wayfinder's secret was loose in the world, and his overlords returned now to claim
him. Poised to run and rouse the town, Sabin found she could not move. Her flesh
became riveted by a cry that had no sound, but ripped between the fabric of the air
itself to echo and ring through her inner mind.
The vibration negated her scream of terrified surprise, and filled her unasked
with its essence: that of rage and sorrow and mystery, and a wounding edge of
betrayal.
Dizzied almost to sickness, she clawed at the rocks for a handhold to ward
off a tumbling fall. The summons faded but did not leave silence. The grind of the
sea overwhelmed her ears with a mauling crescendo of sound. Cowering down in the
cleft of the chair seat, Sabin saw the sea roll back. It sucked in white arrows of
current off the tide flats until slate, shingle, and reef were laid bare. Fish flapped in
confused crescents across settled streamers of weed, and the scuttled, half-rotted
hull of a schooner turned turtle with a smack in the mud, Fishing boats settled on
their anchor chains, and townside, the bell in the harbormaster's house began
steadily tolling alarm.
Faintly, from the cottage behind, Sabin heard her uncle's bellow of inquiry as
the clangor aroused him from bed. Juard, also, would be tossing off blankets, and
stumbling out with the rest.
Sabin did not move. She, who had been born in a village of seafarers, and
should have been, would have been, one of them, could only stare with her joints
locked immobile. She alone did not flee in blind concern toward the beach path to
stave off the threat to the boats.
Had she gone, it would not have mattered; the chair seat offered an
untrammeled view as the horses thundered in from the sea.
They came on in a vast, white herd, manes tossing, and forehooves carving up
arcs of flying spray. The water swirled under their bellies and legs, and rushed in
black torrents behind uncountable upflung tails. Wave after wave, they surged in,
plowing up weeds and fish and muddy gouts of sea bottom, and milling the shells of
galleys and sloops into shreds and splinters as they passed. Spars of fishing smacks
entangled with snapped-off oars and the dragon-horned timbers of Karbaschi