"Терри Гудкайн. Восьмое правило волшебника, или Обнаженная Империя(engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

territory.
In addition to only just finding out that he had a half brother, they
had also learned that Richard had a half sister: Jennsen. From what they had
gathered since they'd met her the day before, she, too, had grown up in the
woods. It was heartwarming to see her simple and sincere joy at having
discovered a close relation with whom she had much in common. Only her
fascination with her new big brother exceeded Jennsen's wide-eyed curiosity
about Kahlan and her mysterious upbringing in the Confessors' Palace in the
far-off city of Aydindril.
Jennsen had had a different mother than Richard, but the same brutal
tyrant, Darken Rahl, had fathered them both. Jennsen was younger, just past
twenty, with sky blue eyes and ringlets of red hair down onto her shoulders.
She had inherited some of Darken Rahl's cruelly perfect features, but her
maternal heritage and guileless nature altered them into bewitching
femininity. While Richard's raptor gaze attested to his Rahl paternity, his
countenance, and his bearing, so manifest in his gray eyes, were uniquely
his own.
"I've seen falcons rip apart small animals," Jennsen said. "I don't
believe I much like thinking about a falcon that big, much less five of them
together."
Her goat, Betty, looked to share the sentiment.
"We take turns standing watch at night," Kahlan said, answering
Jennsen's unspoken fear. While that was hardly the only reason, it was
enough.
In the eerie silence, withering waves of heat rose from the lifeless
rock all around. It had been an arduous day's journey out from the center of
the valley wasteland and across the surrounding flat plain, but none of them
complained about the brutal pace. The torturous heat, though, had left
Kahlan with a pounding headache. While she was dead tired, she knew that in
recent days Richard had gotten far less sleep than any of the rest of them.
She could read that exhaustion in his eyes, if not in his stride.
Kahlan realized, then, what it was that had her nerves so on edge: it
was the silence. There were no yips of coyotes, no howls of distant wolves,
no flutter of bats, no rustle of a raccoon, no soft scramble of a vole--not
even the buzz and chirp of insects. In the past, when all those things went
silent it had meant potential danger. Here, it was dead silent because
nothing lived in this place, no coyotes or wolves or bats or mice or even
bugs. Few living things ever trespassed this barren land. Here, the night
was as soundless as the stars.
Despite the heat, the oppressive silence ran a chill shiver up through
Kahlan's shoulders.
She peered off once more at the races barely still visible against the
violet blush of the western sky. They, too, would not stay long in this
wasteland where they did not belong.
"Kind of unnerving to encounter such a menacing creature when you never
even knew such a thing existed," Jennsen said. She used her sleeve to wipe
sweat from her brow as she changed the subject. "I've heard it said that a
bird of prey wheeling over you at the beginning of a journey is a warning."
Cara, until then content to remain silent, leaned in past Kahlan. "Just
let me get close enough and I'll pluck their wretched feathers." Long blond