"Stephen Goldin - Storyteller" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldin Stephen)

quietly from the room and returned to her own chambers. There she spent an hour composing two long,
detailed letters on the thinnest rice paper from Sinjin. When they were done she sealed them and,
donning her long black burga and thawb, she slipped silently down the deserted halls and through the
secret door out of the palace.
 Under the darkness of night she moved like a cat's shadow through the streets of Marakh to the home of
a certain rug merchant. He answered the door after a few minutes of her soft but insistent knocking, and
she gave him the letters along with her instructions. The merchant nodded and Rabah returned to the
palace without ever having been seen by unintended eyes.

Taking the letters, the merchant climbed the stairs to his roof where, in a secret compartment, he kept
some specially trained pigeons. Folding the missives compactly, he tied each inside a special pouch
attached to a different bird's leg. In the first light of morning he lifted the birds into the air and let them go.
The birds flew high above the roof, circled a few times to get their bearings, and then flew off for their
true homes more than a hundred parasangs away—one to a cave in the Tirghiz Mountains and the other
to a coop atop the north tower of the palace of Ravan.

CHAPTER 3

The Wizard's Wrath


At the northeast rim of the world stretch the Himali Mountains, considered by knowledgeable
geographers to be the most forbidding peaks in all Parsina. Unscalable cliffs tower over the clouds that
float between them, and few are the human eyes that have seen more than a fraction of this inhospitable
range. This is one of the places where Rimahn's handiwork is most apparent, ripping apart the peaceful
fabric of Oromasd's perfect creation and replacing it with jagged, naked rocks. It is not uncommon for
the highest summits to have snow on them for ten or eleven months out of the year, and no animals, not
even birds, live naturally in the harsh climate except in the summer when the warmth of the sun softens
even this monument to the chaos of Rimahn.

Perched atop the highest peak of the world's foremost mountain chain like a lone sentinel against the
infinite was Shahdur Castle, home of the sightless wizard Akar. Carved from the living stone, the castle
was an integral part of the very mountain that held it up to the sky. Towers rose at strange angles, defying
both gravity and common sense, and the very walls of the castle reeked of magic. Such an aura was
inevitable, for the castle had been carved by supernatural means. Working one of his strongest spells, the
wizard Akar had summoned an army of Marids from their shadowy realm, bound them to his indomitable
will, and forced them to labor for a year, a month, a week, and a day to carve the castle from the
mountain's stone. Only when he was satisfied that the work had been done perfectly to his specifications
did he release them from his spell and send them fleeing back to their homes in terror and anger at his
power over them.

Though Shahdur Castle was the highest point in the world, it could not be said to overlook its
surroundings because, like its master, the castle had no eyes. No windows were cut in its rocky walls,
because its sole human inhabitant had no need to look out upon the landscape. Akar the wizard had
traded his eyes many years ago for the power to read the hidden names of people and things, and the
world was all equally dark to him. For all that, however, he saw into the arcane mysteries of Parsina
better than most sighted people ever could.

On this particular day, the day when Aeshma was released from his golden urn to work his wickedness
upon the world, Akar stood upon the roof of his castle raging into the gathering darkness of night. For all