Название: Peril’s Gate
Автор: Janny Wurts
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика
Серия: The Wars of Light and Shadow
isbn: 9780007318087
isbn:
Nor was her judgment of character inaccurate. Lirenda bent her head, unable to shoulder the shame of her outright failure. She could not follow through as Elaira had and stake the irrevocable loss of her awareness for the sake of compassionate principle.
Selidie’s vile nature could not be exposed against the ruthless strength of a matriarch’s hold on prime power.
Left no choice but to curtsey to the floor before her tormentor’s false youth, Lirenda arose in smoldering capitulation and swept from the darkened chamber. Candles flickered and streamed acrid smoke in her wake. Their reflections flagged fire across the sere winter hills pictured over and over in the activated quartz spheres; and in the equally stony eyes of the impostor who wore the Prime’s mantle on the dais.
The page boy flung open the paneled door to the corridor. Lirenda brushed past, well aware she had provoked a subtle and dangerous enemy. The cruel irony cut deepest: if not for the infamous Prince of Rathain, the Matriarch’s chair would never have been tainted by the dark secret of immoral practice. Once, as entitled First Senior, Lirenda could have earned a legitimate succession from Morriel Prime without obstacle. But for Arithon’s damning intervention and rogue cleverness, the wielded might of the Koriani Order should have rightfully fallen to her. With each step she took, Lirenda vowed Rathain’s prince would be made to pay.
Given Elaira’s permission to intervene, the geas driving Jaelot’s captain could end in another failure. Arithon might survive his passage over Baiyen Gap. Lirenda ground her teeth, no less determined. Though ensuring his ruin demanded a persistence that lasted the rest of her lifetime, she would bide. The Master of Shadow would suffer the sting of her vengeance as long as he lived.
Winter 5670
Proving
Outside the barred door to the Prime’s private residence, Elaira braced her back to the courtyard wall. She sucked in steady breaths of chill air to slow the raced beat of her heart. Around her, the sounds of routine industry filed an edge on her acid-stripped nerves. She could not shake her looming sense of disaster. The facts all converged, unremitting: in the white wilds of Daon Ramon Barrens, five cities dispatched armed companies on forced march to take down Arithon s’Ffalenn. Yet no pending sense of the world’s smashed equilibrium ruffled the winterbound city of Highscarp. A silvery trill of horsebells jingled down the lane beyond the gate. A servant banged open a second-story shutter and slapped the dust out of a bolster. Overhead, an ice crystal scumbling of cloud diffused the pyrite gleam of noon sunlight. The gusts turned northeast and smelled of the sea, sure signs that a gale would rage in before nightfall. The high mountain passes would lie sifted in snow, while the ridges shed their cover of drifts like fumaroles of blown smoke.
Storm and heartache came in lockstep with her mind-linked awareness: Arithon s’Ffalenn was still crossing the Baiyen, the conditions he suffered soon to become an onslaught of unalloyed misery.
As cuttingly cold, to Elaira’s bare hand, was the quartz sphere Prime Selidie had given her. The binding directive attached to its custody offered no chink for compromise. The new Matriarch had matched her most desperate move, and her wits still recoiled on the outcome.
‘The bitterest enemy is myself, then,’ Arithon had once flung back when the Fellowship Sorcerer, Asandir, had pinned him on a fine point of principle.
For Elaira, who loved him, flesh as one flesh, understanding of his anguish bore down without mercy, the razor edge of her predicament resharpened by Sethvir’s past assurance that she would be party to the Prince of Rathain’s final salvation or downfall.
‘Was this what you meant?’ Her appeal to the Warden’s earth-sensed awareness went unanswered, while the unkind wind off the bay tore her voiceless, and her knees refused to stop shaking.
‘Oathsworn?’ a boy’s timid voice addressed, breathless. ‘Initiate, do you wish a horse saddled for riding?’
Elaira stirred and regarded the young groom, her slate eyes still deadpan with shock.
The boy chewed his lip, then plowed ahead, gallant. ‘The mare that brought you needs rest and feed. Should the house loan you a fresh mount?’
‘Thank you, no.’ Elaira pushed away from the wall, resolute as the first, unwanted decision snapped scattered thoughts back to focus. ‘I won’t be going anywhere I can’t walk, but thanks for your gentleman’s kindness.’
The quandary posed by her changed obligations presented a future fraught with bloodletting thorns. Where Arithon was concerned, she knew better than to trust Selidie’s oath on the Great Waystone. Lirenda’s warning concerning the new Prime had not been mentioned lightly. Wary of every unseen subtlety that might lurk to entrap her, Elaira chose to make her way without help. She dared not accept either post mounts or shelter from the too-open hand of the sisterhood.
‘You have a mother? A family?’ she asked of the horseboy.
His grin showed missing gaps where his lost molars grew in.
‘Take this for their comfort.’ She pressed a worn copper into the child’s palm, offering the courtesy due from a guest stranger, and not an initiate sister whose order demanded unstinting service. ‘Off you go,’ she added, before he could shout his effusive gratitude. ‘Fetch me the pack off my saddle, and see that the mare gets the rest she deserves.’
The delay to reclaim her belongings chafed at her ripe sense of urgency. Elaira gauged the entangling pressures that might offer pitfalls and setbacks. If she wished to forestall the obligations her low rank would allow the sisterhouse peeress, she must act now, before Highscarp’s seniors discovered the Prime’s grant of autonomy, or caught wind of her unorthodox assignment.
She descended the high road from the bluff on foot. Whipped by rising wind, she threaded between a cake seller’s cart and two wagons and sheltered behind a smokehouse’s woodpile. There, in brisk care, she bundled the burdensome scrying sphere into a silk scarf from her pack. Next, she counted her handful of coins, earned in the honest practice of dispensing simples and cough remedies in the wayside taverns. Two silvers, eight copper were scarcely enough to meet her critical needs. She would have to drive desperate, hard bargains to test the scope of the Prime’s two-edged promise of independence.
As her first defined act to invoke that autonomy, Elaira tore off the bronze buttons she kept for luck, then gave her thick, purple cloak to the first beggar she found whining for alms in the street. ‘Just turn the damned thing inside out,’ she insisted, as the shivering creature fingered the distinctive color in apprehensive distrust of its Koriani origins. ‘You’ll stay just as warm, the lining’s bleached wool, and no one will pay much attention.’
She asked for directions, found the common market, and spent her store of silver on a sturdy, used cloak of good weave that would be respectable once it was cleaned. From the smith’s, for a half cent, she acquired a tarred leather bucket with a broken strap. The winds СКАЧАТЬ