Dragonspell. Katharine Kerr

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СКАЧАТЬ the hill country of southern Surtinna, the biggest island of the Bardekian archipelago, was at that time sparsely populated, a vast sweep of rolling downs descending from the knife-edge of a young mountain range. Nominally the downs came under the jurisdiction of the archons of Pastedion and Vardeth, who parcelled out land-grants to their supporters at whim, since the hawks and field-mice who lived there never bothered to argue about it. The land-owners in turn rented out parcels for farms or cattle ranches or even, in a few rare cases, for summer homes and country retreats for the rich. Although the income from the grants was sparse, the prestige was enormous. As a further benefit, the archons and the laws were far, far away, so that a grant holder could live as he pleased, rather like a Deverry lord.

      Up in the heart of the hill country, right under the looming, pine-black mountains, lay one particular estate that had been bought and built some seventy years earlier by a retired civil servant named Tondalo. Although it received rents from some free-born cattle ranchers, its own slaves raised enough food and linen and so on for it to be fairly self-sufficient. Only rarely did any of its slaves turn up at the market down in Ganjalo, the local town; even more rarely did visitors come to its gates. Since the few neighbours were too busy working their own land to pry into its affairs, everyone assumed that the third generation of Tondalo’s heirs were running the estate. They would have been shocked to learn that the old man himself was still alive, though by no means in good health.

      In truth, of course, Tondalo could have no heirs, because he was a eunuch, castrated as a boy to deny him a family and thus limit his interests to Vardeth’s civil service. Since he had a brilliant mind for detail, he’d risen high and taken an active hand in the politics of his town, becoming rich enough to buy first his freedom, then an impressive house in the city, and finally this lonely estate. Now, at a hundred and sixty-odd years old (he really couldn’t remember just when he’d been born) he lived in necessary seclusion. Not only had he grown so grossly fat (a hated legacy of his castration rather than any natural result of a love for pleasure and good eating) that travel was nearly impossible for him, but he needed privacy for his work. He had immersed himself so long and so thoroughly in the craft of the dark dweomer that he was as much of a leader as their chaos-sworn brotherhood could have. To his fellow practitioners of the dark arts he no longer had any name at all. He was simply the Old One.

      Of course, most times he had no need to travel. Scrying in a basin of black ink kept him in touch with the other members of the Dark Council and also brought him direct visions of the doings of his various allies and minions throughout Surtinna. Every now and then a messenger arrived, bearing books and the necessary supplies for his various workings. (The messengers never left again, of course, at least not alive.) When the full Council met, it did so in an image-temple out on the astral plane, not somewhere in the hills or cities of Bardek. Yet on occasion he sincerely wished that he could travel on important errands instead of having to trust the younger students of the dark arts to run them for him. By its very nature, studying dark dweomer tends to make a man untrustworthy in the extreme.

      Such a case was this matter of Rhodry Maelwaedd. If he’d been capable of it, the Old One would have gone to Deverry himself to supervise this crucial kidnapping and the disposition of its victim. As it was, since he’d had to entrust the job to a disciple on the one hand and hired assassins on the other, now he fretted constantly, wondering if the job had been done right. He couldn’t simply scry them out to see because all the important actions had happened either in Deverry itself or on another island, and not even the greatest dweomer minds in the world could scry across large bodies of open water. The exhalations of elemental force, particularly over the ocean proper, quite simply obscured the images like a fog. If he had tried to travel across them in the body of light, the waves and poundings of this same force would have broken up his astral form and led to his death.

      So he could only sit in his villa and wait and brood. What particularly worried him was the complexity of the plan. If nothing else, he’d learned from his days in government that the more complex any project was, the more likely it was to fail, and this one had as many twists and turns as a bit of Deverry interlace. If he’d had a couple of years to spend, he would have thought and meditated until he’d honed some scheme as sharp and simple as a sword-blade, but time had been short and the threat too present to allow such a luxury. Over the past decades various followers of the dark path had worked hard to establish a secure foothold in Deverry, particularly in the court of the High King himself. Just when their plans were maturing, Nevyn ferreted them out and in one ugly summer destroyed much of their work. In many other ways the old man was a threat to the very existence of the dark dweomer as well as a hated personal enemy of Tondalo’s. As he considered all these things, the Old One had resolved, the winter before, that Nevyn should die.

      An easy thing to resolve, of course; not so easy to execute. First of all, the Old One would have to act mostly alone, because he quite simply couldn’t trust anyone to help him. Those members of the Dark Brotherhood who coveted his place and prestige were more than capable of betraying him to Nevyn at the last moment simply to get rid of him. If he wanted reliable allies, he would have to pay for them in cold cash and keep his real intent secret as well. There were highly skilled assassins available for hire in the islands – at least to a man who knew where to find them. The summer before, the Old One had hired a guild of these Hawks of the Brotherhood, as they were called, to carry out part – but only part – of his plans.

      Since sending a simple killer against a man of Nevyn’s power would have been laughable, the Old One had figured out a way to lure him to the islands, where his powers, drawn as they were from the Deverry soul and the Deverry earth, would be greatly lessened, and he would be far from the secular aid of such as Gwerbret Blaen. By all the laws of magic, in Bardek the Old One should be striking from the position of strength, the mental high ground, as it were, especially since Nevyn always seemed to work alone and thus would most likely come alone. When he looked around for bait for his trap, he fixed upon Rhodry, who was important to the barbarian kingdom’s future as well as one of Nevyn’s personal friends. Although his first thought was to merely kill the lad after using him to lay a false trail, he knew that Nevyn might be able to scry on the highest mental plane and discover that Rhodry was dead. It was most improbable that the Master of the Aethyr would come barrelling across the seas just to give the boy a decent burial or suchlike. On the other hand, keeping him prisoner in his villa would have been dangerous, too, once Nevyn came ferreting around on the track of the bait. The Old One had no desire to go running – or waddling, as he wryly told himself – for his life like a badger flushed out of his hole.

      No, it had seemed best to bring Rhodry to Bardek, wipe his memory clean so that he couldn’t simply go to one of the law-abiding archons and announce his true identity, then turn him loose, hidden in plain sight as an ordinary slave, drifting wherever his fate or his luck took him. Sooner or later, Nevyn would follow. And when he did, the Old One would be waiting for him.

PART ONE

       Bardek Autumn, 1063

      Gorddyar adar; gwlyb traeth;

      Eglur nwyfre; ehalaeth

      Ton. Gwyw calon rhag hiraeth.

      A bright sky, seabirds mewling;

      A wide wave, soaking the shore;

      A heart, withering from hiraedd.

       Llwyarch the Ancestor

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