"Julia Gray - Guardian 04 - The Red Glacier" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gray Julia)

people's minds. However, he had rarely had any need to become familiar with
the written word.
'Then you've travelled far,' Kjolur concluded.
'I have, but I don't come across books very often. May I take a look?'
'Of course.' The islander passed the slim volume over and Terrel flicked
through a few pages of the precise calligraphy. This was enough to tell him
that it was quite indecipherable.
'It's beautiful,' he said, handing it back, and remembering a time at the
haven when he'd had access to a whole library of books. For the first years of
his life, those books had been the source of everything he'd known about the
outside world. The reality — especially after he'd left Vadanis — had proved
rather different.
'The tale I've just been reading says that Myvatan once floated free in the
ocean, like a gigantic ship. Can you believe that?'
'Perhaps,' Terrel replied, amazed at the apparent link to his dream — and to
his own homeland.
'My people apparently ruled all of Nydus from their mobile fortress,' Kjolur
went on, 'but then one of our enemies put a curse on the island and froze it
in place, isolated from all the other countries. That must have been
some sorcery.' He was grinning to show he regarded the story as no more than
an imaginative myth, but Terrel wasn't ready to dismiss it so lightly.
'I come from an empire that's made up entirely of floating islands,' he said.
'Really?' It was the merchant's turn to be amazed.
'The main one is called Vadanis.'
Kjolur's expression made it clear that he had never heard of it, something
that did not surprise Terrel at all. His homeland no longer seemed real, even
to him.
Chapter Three
By his own reckoning, Terrel was now twenty-one years old, and he was a very
different person to the terrified boy who had been cast adrift from Vadanis.
It was incredible to think that his exile had already lasted more than seven
years, and that there was no immediate end in sight. During all that time he
had been almost constantly on the move, and he'd experienced more than he
could ever have imagined when he was growing up in the confines of the remote
madhouse. His bargain with the elementals, the strange creatures who had no
substance or shape and yet who wielded immense power, had become the core of
his existence - and it drove him onward still. However, he had begun to feel
that the circle was closing at last, that he had passed the furthest point in
his long journey. He had come to believe that each step along the unknown road
now took him closer to home.
That feeling had been reinforced by his most recent meeting with his ghostly
allies. Their latest theory was that his trip to Myvatan might be the end of
the road, the point at which he could finally fulfil his bargain, and thus set
himself free to return to Vadanis - and to Alyssa. The hope that this might be
true had given Terrel the strength to carry on, after a long period in which
he had not seemed to be achieving anything.
Three and a half years - an eternity in his young life -
had passed since he'd left the deserts of Misrah, and since his last encounter
with one of the elementals. When he'd crossed the northern borders of that
territory he had been full of expectation, sure that he would soon find out