"Cook, Glen - Darkwar 02 - Warlock" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cook Glen)

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means that one young silth, no matter how strong, is not going to use her talent to see what a cloister full of more practiced silth are doing if they do not want her to see."

Marika was about to admit that that might be possible when someone scratched at the door. She gestured. "It is not time to eat. The drought must be over."

Barlog opened the door.

There stood a silth older than any Marika had encountered before. She hobbled in, leaning on a cane of some gnarled dark wood. She halted in the center of the room, surveyed the three of them with rheumy cataracted eyes. Her half-blind gaze came to rest upon Marika. "I am Moragan. I have been assigned as your teacher and as your guide upon the Reugge Path." She spoke the Reugge low speech with an intriguing, elusive accent. Or was it a natural lisp? "You are the Marika who stirred so much controversy and chaos at our northern fastness." Not a question. A statement.

"Yes." Marika had a feeling this was no time to quibble about her role at Akard.

"You may go," Moragan told Grauel and Barlog.

The huntresses did not move. They did not look to Marika for her opinion. Already they had positioned themselves so that Moragan stood at the heart of a perilous triangle.

"You are safe here," Moragan told Marika when no one moved.

"Indeed? I have your sworn word?"

"You do."

"And the word of a silth sister is worth the metal on which it is graven." She had been studying the apparel of the old sister and could not make out the significance of its decorations. "As we who were under the sworn guardianship of the Reugge discovered. Our packsteads were overrun without aid coming. And when we fled to the Akard packfast for safety, that too was allowed to be destroyed."

"You question decisions of policy about which you know nothing, pup."

"Not at all, mistress. I simply refuse to allow policy to snare and crush me in coils of deceit and broken oaths."

"They said you were a bold one. I see they spoke the truth. Very well. We will do it your way. For now." Moragan hobbled to a wooden chair, settled slowly, slapped her cane down atop a table nearby. She seemed to go to sleep.

"Who are you besides Moragan?" Marika asked. "I cannot read your decorations."

"Just a worn-out old silth so far gone she is past being what you would call Wise. We are not here to discuss me, though. Tell me your story. I have heard and read a few things. Now I will assess your version of events."

Marika talked, but to no point. A few minutes later Moragan's head dropped to her chest and she began to snore.

And so it went, day after day, with Moragan doing more asking and snoring than teaching. That day of her first appearance, she had been in one of her more lucid periods. Sometimes she could not recall the date or even Marika's name. Most of the time she was of little value except as a reference guide to the cloister's more arcane customs. Always she asked more questions than she answered, many of them irritatingly personal.

Her role, though, provided Marika with a role of her own. As a student she occupied a recognized place in cloister society and was answerable principally to Moragan for her conduct. Safely knit into the cultural fabric, Marika felt more comfortable teaching herself by exploring and observing.

Marika liked little of what she did learn.

Within the cloister the least of workers lived well. Outside, in the city, meth lived in abject want, suffering through brief lives of hunger, disease, and backbreaking labor. Everyone and everything in Maksche belonged to the Reugge silth Community, to the tradermale brotherhood calling itself the Brown Paw Bond, or to the two in concert. The Brown Paw Bond maintained its holdings by Reugge license, under complicated and extended lease arrangements. Residents of Maksche who were neither tradermale nor silth were bound to their professions or land for life.

Marika was bewildered. The Reugge possessed meth as though they were domestic animals? She interrogated Moragan. The teacher just looked at her strangely, evidently unable to comprehend the point of her questions.

"Grauel," Marika said one evening, "have you figured this place out? Do you understand it at all? That old carque Moragan cannot or will not explain anything so it makes any sense."

"Take care with her, Marika. She is more than she seems."