"Gray, Julia - Guardian 01 - The Dark Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gray Julia)

They were standing in the Head Warden's spacious office, which Terrel had just entered. The boy was so nervous he was shaking. Ziolka, his deference to the visitor obvious, hurried from the room, and this raised even more questions in Terrel's mind. On the way there he had been in a daze, his thoughts full of ever more outrageous ideas. Could this stranger be a member of his lost family - perhaps even his father, come to reclaim him? Would they recognize each other? In the end he had simply followed Ingo, his heart filled with a mixture of hope and foreboding.
When he'd been ushered into Ziolka's inner sanctum, and seen the visitor for the first time, Terrel had been shocked. He had never seen anyone who looked so ancient. Not even Old Timi was as venerable and worn as this grey-haired man, whose straggly beard partially hid a wrinkled, angular face with a great hooked beak of a nose and pale grey eyes. He looked far too old to be Terrel's father.
'Your name is Terrel, is it not?'
The boy nodded, then - surprising himself - he found his voice.
'Who are you?' he blurted out.
'I am called Shahan.'
That told Terrel nothing, but the old man's intimidating presence and intense stare prevented him from speaking again.
'We should sit.' Shahan waved the boy to a chair, and took another for himself. 'I am tired from my journeying.'
Where had he come from? Terrel wondered as he did as he was told, his legs practically giving way beneath him. He seemed to have lost the use of his tongue again, and could only wait to see what would happen next.
'Have you heard of the Tindaya Code?' The question came out of the blue, adding a further layer of confusion to the boy's already disordered thoughts. After a long pause, Terrel nodded briefly.
'And do you know anything about it?'
Again the boy hesitated, but then his memories provided him with something solid to grasp - even if he couldn't yet see what possible relevance it might have - and he was able to speak again.
'It was written on stones that were found in the ruins of a great temple in the Central Mountains,' he said. 'It's supposed to be a prophecy.'
Shahan nodded, a look of surprise on his previously impassive face.
'Where did you learn this?'
'From books,' Terrel replied without thinking, then fell silent, afraid that he might be forced to reveal his secret library.
'So you can read?' Shahan queried, wondering how the boy had found such books in this out-of-the-way place.
'Yes,' Terrel replied quietly.
It was the seer's turn to fall silent, considering. He could not help comparing Terrel to the prince, the twin brother whose existence was presumably unknown to this boy. There was a certain similarity between the facial features of the two, but otherwise they could hardly have been more different.
'Do you believe in prophecy, Terrel?' the old man asked eventually.
'I don't know,' he replied warily.
'I wondered, because you said the Code was supposed to be a prophecy.'
'If we knew what was going to happen all the time,' Terrel responded, 'what would be the point of doing anything?'
Good question, Shahan thought. What indeed?
'It's rarely as simple as that,' he said aloud. 'Augury is not an exact science, especially when you are working with information that's incomplete.'
'The missing stones, you mean?'
The seer nodded.
'Yes, plus the ones that are broken or eroded, not to mention the parts that are in a language no one understands.'
Some of Terrel's earlier qualms were beginning to fade. He had not known what to expect of the meeting - but it had certainly not been this. Although he did not know what to make of Shahan, he was intrigued. He'd never been able to discuss such things with anyone before.
'It's very old too, isn't it?' he said.
'It certainly is. The Code was discovered a little over five hundred years ago, but no one knows how long it had been up there on the mountain. Some people say it could even have been there for thousands of years.' Shahan expected the boy to be amazed by such a notion, but Terrel only nodded solemnly. The seer wished he could know what was going on behind those strange eyes.
'So is the Guardian coming soon?' Terrel asked, surprising Shahan again.
'He's already here.'
That silenced the boy for a while, and Shahan was content to wait for the next question.
'Do you think he'll save us?' Terrel asked eventually, remembering a line from Muzeni's journal: 'It is hard to imagine destruction on such a scale.'
'Let's hope so,' the seer replied, smiling. 'We'd better give him all the help we can, eh?'
If Terrel paid any attention to the choice of pronoun, he gave no sign of it. He was deep in thought again.
'Does all this have anything to do with the Dark Moon?'
This time Shahan could not hide his astonishment at the boy's perspicacity, and felt a bubble of elation.
'Yes, it does.'
'Tell me,' Terrel demanded, eager now.
'All right.' Shahan leant forward in his chair and began ticking points off on his fingers. 'As you know, the Code describes a great hero, who we've chosen to call "the Guardian". Although it also tells us a great deal about his life and work, a lot of this is very vague, and there are all sorts of possible interpretations. But one thing is clear. Unless he fulfils his destiny, there will be a worldwide disaster of unimaginable proportions. There's also mention of another character, the Mentor, who is variously described as a teacher, a go-between and an interpreter, and who is supposed to guide the Guardian throughout his life. No one knows who that is yet, but his main task seems to be to help the Guardian choose between good and evil.'
'Why would a hero choose evil?' Terrel asked.
'I'm not sure,' the seer replied, 'but we all have the capacity for both, don't you think?'
'I suppose so.'
'The important thing at the moment is that, according to all the interpretations, the Guardian is born at the time of one lunar conjunction, and will become our saviour by the time of the next.'
'Seventy-five years later.'
'That's right. Or at least that's what it should have been.'
'What do you mean?'
'No one is sure now when the next conjunction will be.'