"C. S. Friedman - Coldfire 1 - Black Sun Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friedman C. S)

“Hey.” She prodded him. “Ease up. You’re not at work.”
“Sorry.” He caught up half his packages under his right arm, carried the rest
with that hand. So that he might walk with her close to his other side, her body
heat tangible through the coarse wool of his shirt. His hand brushing hers, in
time to their walking.
“Your Patriarch doesn’t approve of this, does he?”
“What? Shopping?”
“Our being together.”
He chuckled. “Did you think he would?”
“I thought you might have charmed him into it.”
“The Patriarch is immune to charm. And most other human pleasantries, I
suspect. As for us . . . suffice it to say that battle lines have been drawn, and we
both are poised behind our armaments. He with his moral obsessions, and I with
my fixation on rights to an independent private life. It’ll be quite a skirmish, once
it starts.”
“You sound like you’re looking forward to it.”
He shrugged. “Open conflict is infinitely more attractive to me than fencing
with hints and insinuations. I’m a lousy diplomat, Cee.”
“But a good teacher?”
“Trying to be.”
“Can I ask how that’s going? Or is it . . . classified?”
“Hardly.” He grimaced, and shifted his packages “I have twelve young
fledglings, ranging in age eleven to fifteen. With marginal potential at best. I
culled out two of the younger ones, who seemed to be in the worst throes of
puberty. Damned rotten time to be teaching anyone to Work . . . and I think His
Holiness knows it, too.” He remembered his own adolescence, and some very
nasty things he had unconsciously created. His master had made him hunt them
down and dispatch them, each and every one; it wasn’t one of his more pleasant
memories. “Hard to say whether they’re more terrified of me or of the fae. Not a
good way to start out. Still, they’re all positives on one scale or another, so
there’s hope, right? As of yesterday-”
He saw her stiffen suddenly. “Ciani? What is it?”
“Current’s shifted,” she whispered. Her face was pale. “Can’t you see?”
Rather than state the obvious - that only an adept could see such things
without conscious effort - he worked a quick Seeing and observed the earth-fae
himself. But if there was any change in the leisurely flow of that force about their
feet, it was far too subtle for his conjured vision to make out. “I can’t-”
She gripped his arm with fingers that were suddenly cold. “We need to warn-
”
An alarm siren pierced the dusk. A horrendous screeching noise that wailed
like a banshee down the narrow stone streets, and echoed from the brickwork
and plaster that surrounded them until the very air was vibrating shrilly. Damien
covered an ear with one hand, tried to reach the other without dropping all his
purchases. The sound was a physical assault - and a painfully effective one.
Whoever designed that siren, he thought, must have served his
apprenticeship in hell.
Then, just as quickly, the sound was gone. He took his hand down
nervously, ready to hold it to his head again if anything even remotely similar
started up. But she took his hand in hers and squeezed it. “Come on,” she
whispered. He could barely hear over the ringing in his ears, but a gesture made