Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts
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Название: Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light
Автор: Janny Wurts
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Книги о войне
isbn: 9780007346929
isbn:
On the eve of summer solstice, while the Fellowship Sorcerers worked in concert to complete an arduous conjury that had immersed them for over a year, the Warden of Althain would be least inclined to take meddling notice of accidents. The Koriani Prime snatched her-moment.
The bar of warm sunlight slanted through the casement and cooled to a soft flush of red. Morriel soon heard the rustle of silk she anticipated in the stairwell. Her chosen First Senior arrived on the moment appointed. Such precise obedience was not petty. For a candidate to show less than perfection in all things carried the risk of ill consequence. One woman alone could wield the full might of the Koriani Order. A small lapse of discipline on that scale of power could deflect the course of history, even harrow and scorch the green earth.
The latch grated, gave, and the door swung open. A gush of sea air displaced the miasma of dank stone. Then the shuffled step of the deaf steward who had replaced witless Quen, but who admitted the arrival with the same simpleminded devotion.
First Senior Lirenda presented a regal figure, slender, tall, and purposeful. Groomed and graceful as a panther, she wore hair like dark satin sleeked into a single, coiled braid. Her feet kept a dancer’s light tread on stone floors. The fine, sculptured bones of her wrists were set off by the gold-banded sleeves denoting her high office, and her violet silk mantle flowed off her lithe form like water poured from a vase.
She bowed before her Matriarch. Even in obeisance, her manner maintained innate breeding.
Morriel recalled the same trait in the child. Lirenda had always owned an elegant self-possession, that bone-deep assurance lent by wealth and background that touched servants to instinctive deference. This morning, the drifting perfume of the rose petals she used to sweeten her clothes chests came tanged with a trace scent of brimstone. Apparently the crates which sealed the new fiend banes had been troublesome to pack off to market.
Yet if the oversight arose from the duty novice’s instructions, or a boy ward had shirked his assigned labor, Lirenda showed no irritation. Her oval features stayed smooth as a cameo as she murmured the ritual greeting. “Your will, matriarch.”
That metallic, alto voice betrayed no curiosity, which was well. Morriel prolonged her survey of the prime candidate, her eyes like probing black quartz. Power forgave no shortcoming. Distrust of arcane practice within the walled towns had redoubled since Lysaer’s charge of dark sorcery against the Master of Shadow. The Koriani Order could ill afford to risk becoming mired in the backlash of frightened reaction.
“Sit,” Morriel commanded in a brevity that stabbed.
Lirenda settled to a rustle of skirts on the bare stone ledge of the window seat. Against failing light, her body affected a cat’s aloof . poise; her expression settled to waiting. But beneath that unapproachable, aristocratic polish, her mind seethed with ambition. The predatory spark in those pale almond eyes never slept.
Morriel opened at due length, “The time has come for the first trial to prepare you for mastery of our Great Waystone.”
Watchful eyes smoldered into full flame. “At last,” Lirenda murmured.
“You’ll use every minute before nightfall to prepare,” said the Prime, and waved her peremptory dismissal.
The massive, polished sphere of the Koriani Waystone stood unveiled under starlight, planed filaments of captured reflection spiked deep in its shadowy heart. Even seated, eyes shut, a full span away, First Senior Lirenda felt the amethyst’s aura soak into her stilled senses. With her mind diamond clear from an exhaustive course of ritual, the dark crystal’s presence chilled like the breath of a predator: lethal, unforgiving, and charged in pitiless peril. The stone was as ancient as the order itself. Over a thousand prime matriarchs had wielded its dire focus since the cataclysm and war which had cast an uprooted humanity from its homeworlds. The jewel’s deep lattice was said to encompass them all; their unquiet memories; the imprint of each departed prime’s experience mazed like etched knotwork beneath its stilled facets.
At times in past history such knowledge meant survival. The records in the crystal could not be replaced. Nor could they be transferred. Stones mined in Athera fell under the Fellowship’s compact with the Paravians. The knowledge from outside worlds was proscribed. Limited to those crystals brought in by the order, every Matriarch since had no choice but to adopt the fixed practice, that its original set of jewel matrixes must be maintained without cleansing.
No stranger to the contrary properties of first focus stones, Lirenda required firm discipline to stamp down her apprehension. Her gnawing unease was no phantom. The Great Waystone’s secrets were held at perilous cost. Twined through the stored experience of the former matriarchs’ collective memories ran vicious, ingrained crosscurrents: the coiling, sullen residue left layered by centuries of arcane bindings, crammed together and entangled into dissonant, unquiet knots.
One day, these must become the prime candidate’s trial to master.
The protections Morriel laid down for this first exposure were forbidding enough to intimidate. Lirenda resisted the urge to break discipline and steal a glance through cracked eyelids. Against the mild fabric of summer night, she felt the formed lattice of wards stab her flesh like the prick of a thousand fine needles. The passes the Prime completed to frame each new sigil raised dire cold, and the salty damp that freshened the sea breeze came whetted by a bitter taint of ozone.
Minutes passed. Through the still blaze of stars and the tidal draw of the moon on the western horizon, Lirenda followed the pained shuffle of the Prime’s steps, circling, tirelessly circling. The low, flinty whisper as the Matriarch chanted in rhythm to align each intricate, chained set of runes. Perception itself drowned. Sensed impressions strung out to elastic proportions, as if moving time and the rustle of dune grass had slowed to congealment in amber.
Elsewhere, the world turned untouched. From the tide pools beyond Thirdmark’s harbor, a curlew called. A kicked cur yelped in the fish market alley, and the martial jink of steel as the wall watch changed guard reechoed off the city’s gabled roofs. Sounds reached Lirenda as if muffled through gauze, and then not at all, as her awareness submersed, ringed about by ambient power.
When Lirenda’s consciousness became a joined circle, sealed into relentless isolation, the Prime Enchantress said, “We are ready to begin.”
Instructions followed, the husk of each syllable sandpaper sharp amid that enforced web of stillness. “Do not look upon the Waystone as I raise its grand focus. To try is to beg for destruction. My set protections cannot shield you from direct interaction with the event unless you maintain perfect balance. No matter what happens, through temptation or disaster, remember you follow as observer. Stay passive. On pain of annihilation, however much you feel traumatized, do not exert your conscious will outside the bounds of my ward ring.”
One second passed in unbearable suspension. Lirenda fought down the dizzy pound of her pulse. Then in shared resonance, the plunge snatched her up in a rocketing, exhilarated rush, as Morriel Prime bent her will and invoked the Great Waystone’s focus.
Stark silence descended. Wide as old darkness, deep as the floor of Ath’s oceans, the stillness reigned absolute. Lirenda felt walled in unbreakable black glass, reduced to a dust speck captured and prisoned in jet. Of her СКАЧАТЬ