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

shingle beach, pursuing a small brown dog; women hung washing out on long lines across
an enclosure. Boats bobbed in a sheltered harbor.
"And this is the southern continent, wherein lies the Empire of Istria and the great
wastes—"
Now there was a city of towering stone and hundreds of people in bright clothing
milling about its streets; then the light became harsh and bright and a broad sandy vista
stretched across the bowl, its braided pattern of dunes undisturbed except for a single
line of dark figures trekking across the sands. Another twitch of the levers, and Virelai
was stunned to be confronted by an old woman with a white topknot of hair adorned with
shells and feathers and a dozen or more silver chains around her thin brown neck. She
stared right at him and opened her mouth to say something he could not hear, and then
he was whirled away, up into the clouds and over a range of magnificent snowcapped
mountains.
"It's beautiful," he whispered, awed. "But I don't understand."
"Virelai—Virr—eh—lai. Think, boy, think. It's Elda."
The mage pulled back the focus so that the view became once more a sketch for a
world, all abstract shapes and blurred color.
Elda.
Virelai thought suddenly of the maps he had pored over in the study—ancient, curled
things all brown with age on which had been scrawled ideograms of mountains, crude
triangles repeated over and again, little wiggly lines to denote the ocean's waves, abstract
patches of brown amid the blue to represent land, the word "Elda" emblazoned in a rayed
sun at the top or the center or off to one side—and something clicked in his head. How
stupid never to have understood that those flat marks represented anything more than
themselves. To think that Sanctuary was all there was.
"Can I go there?" He gazed back at the mage, his face rapt.
The Master laughed, not kindly. "Oh, no. I think not. You wouldn't last a minute.
Look—"
The crystals realigned themselves and there followed another vertiginous descent. At
a market, a woman wrung a chicken's neck and reached for the next bird while the first
lay flapping disjointedly. In a dark chamber a man lay upon a flaming rack and another
applied vile instruments to his flesh. Somewhere else—it was impossible to tell the
location, the images changed so swiftly—men fought each other on a blood-soaked field.
Virelai watched in horror as a man's arm was sheared off. Another pull of the levers, and
now he saw two men hold down a slight figure in a full black robe while a third rent the
fabric to reveal pale flesh and a fourth man pushed the writhing figure's legs apart and
inserted himself with a grunt. Under a pitiless sun, chained men hacked stone and metal
from a gaping hillside, watched over by mounted guards with whips and goads.
Virelai stared and stared. He saw a mountain village overrun by soldiers, women and
children pierced by spears; a man hanged from a tree; people and animals with their
throats cut and shrouded women catching the spurting blood in great dishes; he saw a
group of folk adorned like the old women with shells and feathers and silver chains being
stoned to death by an angry mob; he saw women burned on pyres and men pinned to
masts of wood in the baking heat; then the view changed and he was on a ship far out at
sea, watching as a speared whale was hauled in close to the waiting boats and men made
the water run red as they hacked it to death.
"No more!" he cried and tried to move away.
"Why do you think I came here, boy?"
Another twitch of the levers, and there was a tiny island, serene and white against
dark gray seas ringed about with drifting ice and veiled by swirling mists.