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

the ice of its home, and the seabirds shrieked their derision. Virelai put his head in his
hands. He was a fool, a fool, a fool: he could not even sail a tiny boat. Idiot, his inner voice
chided him. Use the magic! A wind spell: it was a simple thing, but even so, his memory
had deserted him. Digging in his bag he pulled out a small notebook and riffled through its
pages. Then he unbound the cat's head from the swaddling, and made a short incantation.
Bëte fixed him with an unforgiving eye, then made a choking cough. The sail went slack,
then swelled on its opposite side. The terns, caught unawares by the sudden change in
wind direction, banked to correct their coverts. The sloop sailed smoothly out into the
ocean.
Virelai shaded his vision against the rising sun and watched as it delineated the
deceptive curves and rises of the place he had regarded all his life as his home. To the
untutored eye, it might have been no more than the usual vast jumble of ice you would
expect to find in such an arctic region: great blocks and floes that had been piled one atop
the other by a thousand ocean storms, ice that had been carved into bizarre and unlikely
shapes by wicked sea winds; all bleak and wild and uninhabitable by any except the
seabirds and narwhal. But to the mage's apprentice Sanctuary revealed itself in all its
sorcerous glory. Where a shady cornice met a cliff of ice, Virelai, narrowing his eyes, saw
how the curving wall of the great hall met the stern face of the eastern tower; where
higgledy-piggeldy blocks lay as if scattered by the hand of a god, he noted how elegant
stairways twined up from the statuettes and balustrades of formal gardens that to
another might offer nothing but the unrelieved whiteness of an untouched snowfield.
Spires and pillars, columns and masonry, all perfectly proportioned and crafted; cold
white surfaces now limned in dawn-golds and pinks by the romantic sun.
The Master had brought his exacting eye to bear on every detail of his ice realm.
Nothing here was natural: nothing occurred by chance. Virelai wondered if he had viewed
it from this very point, perhaps even from this very boat, when he had conceived
Sanctuary's form.
 How it or he had come to be here, and for what purpose, Virelai had no idea: but he
meant to find out. Turning away from the island of ice, he set a course south, to where the
world began.



Part One
Chapter 1: Sacrilege
KATLA Aransen stared out across the prow of the Fulmar's Gift as it ploughed
through the gray waves, the foam from the ship's passage spraying back into her face and
wetting her long red hair, but Katla did not care. It was her first long voyage and they had
been at sea these past two weeks, but she was nineteen years old and hungry for the
world; she could not bear to miss a moment of it.
Behind her, she could hear the great greased-wool sail cracking and roaring in the stiff
wind, the wind that carried away her father's voice as he shouted orders to the crew.
Many of them, she knew, would be hunkered down amidships amongst the cargo and sea
chests, trying to stay warm around the tub fire. A sudden hissing signaled the start of
preparations for the evening meal: they stored their meat in leather buckets full of
seawater till it tasted more of brine than anything else, and cooking it by putting it
directly onto the embers was the only way to make it palatable.
A warm hand on her shoulder. She spun around, to find her twin brother, Fent, beside
her. His long red fringe was plastered to his face; the rest he had bound up with thongs to
stop it whipping into his eyes.