"Brooks, Terry - First King of Shannara" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brooks Terry)

move on. "Did you see his face?"

The old man smiled. "He has no face or body left, Kinson. He
is a presence wrapped in a hooded cloak. Like myself, I some-
times think, for I am little more these days."

"That isn't so," Kinson said at once.

"No," the other quickly agreed, "it isn't. I keep some sense of
right and wrong about me, and I am not yet a slave to the magic.
Though that is what you fear I will become, isn't it?"

Kinson did not answer. "Tell me how you managed to get so
close. How was it that you were not discovered?"

Bremen's eyes looked away, focusing on some distant place
and time. "It was not easy," he replied softly. "The cost was high."

He reached again for the aleskin and drank deeply, the weari-
ness mirrored in his face so heavy it might have been formed of
iron links dragging against his skin. "I was forced to make myself
appear one of them," he said after a moment. "I was required to
shroud myself in their thoughts and impulses, in the evil rooted
within their souls. I was cloaked in invisibility, so that my physical
presence did not register, and I was left only with my spirit
self. That I cloaked in the darkness that marks their own spirits,
reaching deep within myself for the blackest part of who I am. Oh,
I see you question that this was possible. Believe me, Kinson, the
potential for evil lodges deep in every man, myself included. We
restrain it better, keep it buried deeper, but it lives within us. I was
forced to bring it out of concealment in order to protect myself.
The feel of it, the rub of it against me, so close, so eager, was ter-
rible. But it served its purpose. It kept the Warlock Lord and his
minions from discovering me."

Kinson frowned. "But you were damaged."

"For a time. The walk back gafre me a chance to heal." The old
man smiled anew, a brief twist of his thin lips. "The trouble is that
once brought so far out of its cage, a man's evil is reluctant there-
after to be contained. It presses against the bars. It is more anxious
to escape. More prepared. And having lived in such close prox-
imity to it, I am more vulnerable to the possibility of that escape."

He shook his head. "We are always being tested in life, aren't
we? This is just one more instance."

2 0 Fi'rs^ KOT^ of Shannara

There was a long moment of silence as the two men stared at