"Jude Fisher - Fool's Gold 01 - Sorcery Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fisher Jude)

there would be awkward questions to answer if she came back covered with cuts and
scrapes.
The sheer pleasure of the climb soon erased any sense of worry: past the halfway
mark it started to rain; but the angle of the rock eased so that she was able to stand in
balance and look around, taking in the brightly-colored tents of the other Fairgoers, their
wax-treated surfaces repelling the drops of water that pattered down upon them. She
had never before seen such vibrant shades: in the islands the only eye-catching dye you
could produce was a rather putrid yellow that appeared to have been obtained by soaking
your clothes in pig's urine but actually derived from an innocuous-looking lichen, scraped
painstakingly and in vast quantity from the granite cliffs that formed the bones of her
homeland. (Though it had to be said that even then, you did actually need a bit of urine to
fix the color so that it didn't bleed down your leg in the first storm. It didn't smell for too
long. Only a week or so.)
It was among these granite cliffs where Katla had first learned the magic that lay in the
veins of the rock. It was there she had started to clamber around in such a casual fashion,
barely conscious of the yawning gulf beneath her feet, the sucking maw of the ocean; the
bone-shattering consequences of a fall. There, she'd collected gulls' eggs in late spring;
samphire in the summer. She'd fished from precipitous ledges and pulled line after line of
iridescent mackerel out of secret zawns. And sometimes she'd just scaled the cliffs for the
sheer pleasure of being somewhere no other person had set foot.
Two more moves and she had her hands on the flat summit. Using a sharp incut for
her right foot to gain more height, she pushed down hard till her arms could take her
whole weight, skipped her feet up the remaining stretch of rock, and suddenly she was on
top of Sur's Castle, on top of the world.
Sitting there, with her feet dangling over the edge, with the Moonfell Plain stretching
away below, a glorious sense of well-being descended upon Katla.
So she was surprised and not a little dismayed when someone started shouting,
apparently at her.
"Oi, you there!" The second shout was in the Old Tongue.
She looked around.
At the far western edge of the rock, a couple of elderly gentlemen were climbing,
haltingly and with great puffs of effort, a line of carefully-chiseled steps. Someone had
thoughtfully arranged a pair of taut hemp handrails on either side of the stairs, and the
gray-hairs were hanging onto these even as they bellowed at her. They both wore long
dark red robes with elaborately-worked brocade facings; even from her perch seventy
yards away, Katla could see the silver thread glinting in the weak light. Rich men, then,
she thought. Not Eyrans; at least like none she'd ever seen. The northerners could never
afford clothes like that—they'd be worth a ship's cargo apiece—and even if they could,
they'd never climb a rock in them. . . .
"Get down from there at once!"
The first of the old men had reached the top step and, lifting his voluminous skirts, was
picking up speed.
She cupped her hand to her ear and shrugged: the universal gesture for "can't hear a
word you're saying."
Infuriated, the gray-hair waved his stick.
"The Council and the Allfair Guard—"
"Of which we are on the ruling committee—"
"Indeed, brother. Of which we are on the ruling committee, have declared Falla's Rock
as sacred ground!"
Falla's Rock?