"Barbara Hambly - Windrose 1 - The Silent Tower" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

They passed the night in the House of the Mages, a big, rambling structure in
the heart of Kymil down near the river. Like most buildings in Kymil, it was built of
wood; unlike most, it was fancifully decorated, with odd carvings and archways,
small turrets and little stairways leading nowhere, balconies whose railings were
carved into intricate openwork filigrees of flowers and leaves overlooking miniature
gardens no larger than a single flowerbed, but so thick with vines that their small
central fountains could scarcely be seen. Most of the buildings in Kymil, Caris
noticed, were rather plainly built, and often garishly painted, pink or daffodil or a
hard phthalo blue. One, near the gates as they entered the town, was illustrated in a
wealth of architectural detail that the building itself did not possess—colonnades,
friezes, facades, balconies, and marble statuary in niches, all painted in careful detail
upon its flat wood sides. None of them appeared to be much more than twenty years
old.
"That wasn't Suraklin's doing, was it?" he asked later that night of Le,
second-in-command of the small troop of sasenna attached to the House of the Mages.
The dark, blade-slim woman nodded. "There was a deal of destruction wreaked
in the town when the mages broke his power," she said. "Other houses were destroyed
later and were found to have the Dark Mage's mark in them, drawn on a wall or a
doorpost." She glanced across at him out of jet-bead eyes under her short crop of dark
hair, then up at the head of the hall, where the mages of the house were talking quietly
over their after-dinner wine. The four or five sasenna who had table service that night
were moving quietly about in the dim candlelight, clearing up. There was rumored to
be a poker game starting up in the barrack-quarters, but, like those they had sworn to
serve, Caris and Le had lingered over a last cup of wine to talk before going to
investigate.
"But what would it matter, after Suraklin was dead?" Caris was familiar with
the principle of wizards' marks, though to make one was far beyond his rudimentary
powers.
Le shook her head. "They say they weren't only to guide him there and let him
enter where he'd been before. They say that, through the marks, he could influence the
minds of those who were much near them; sway them to his thoughts from afar; sense
things through them, even, in his dreams. It might be only stories, for folk feared him
enough to believe anything of him, but then again
"Did you ever see him?"
The full mouth curved, but the expression could hardly be termed a smile. They
were sitting at one of the long refectory tables in the lower part of the hall, the last of
the sasenna to leave; at the other low table, parallel to theirs like the arms of a U
below the main board where the wages sat, and nearer the vast, empty darkness of the
fireplace, a couple of novices discussed spells with the earnestness of new explorers
in some strange and wonderful world. The novices' table would be the more com-
fortable in the winter, but in the summer, with the diamond-paned casements that
punctuated the length of the room thrown open to let in the milky warmth of the
hay-smelling night, there was no comparison.
"I only saw him the once," Le said. "I was eight. I saw him die and saw what
was left of his body strung up and burned. The Church's Witch finders wanted to have
him burned alive, but your friend the Archmage . . ."She nodded towards the head
table, where Salteris sat, slender hands folded, fingers extended against his lips,
nodding gravely to something the big, stout, graying wage Nandiharrow was saying.
". . . wouldn't have it. The Church has no jurisdiction over those that have sworn their
vows to the Council and, though they needed the Church's might to subdue him, the