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

was conscious in his bones of the portcullis sliding shut behind them. A quick look
around showed him that escape from the compound would be difficult; no building
was close enough to the curtain wall to allow a jump from roof to battlement, and in
any case the drop on the other side was far enough to make breaking a leg a virtual
certainty. The air here felt hot and still between high walls of parched gray stone, a
bleak and cheerless place in contrast to the hills beyond. The sasenna moved about
with somber faces, like most Church sasenna only one step from becoming monks. It
was not the Way of the Sasenna to feel pity, but Caris felt it now for anyone who
would be held prisoner here for the rest of his life.
At a sign from the Bishop, the captain of the Tower unlocked the massive iron
fastenings of the Tower door. It swung open to reveal a dense mouth of shadow, cold
even in summer. On the door's inner side, just above the lock, Caris could see an iron
plate fastened. Affixed to it was a round plaque of lead, about the size of an Imperial
eagle coin and incised and inlaid in some design that lifted the hair from his neck. In
spite of himself, he turned his head away, abhorrence clutching at his belly, as if a rat
had crawled over his flesh. As his head turned, he saw his grandfather flinch from it
also, averting his eyes. The two Church wizards did not even come near.
He did not need to be told what it was. It was the Sigil of Darkness of which his
grandfather had spoken, the Seal of the Dead God, which bound a wizard's power like
a chain of despair. As the guard carried it away from the door to allow the Archmage
to enter, Caris felt for the first time the true power that lay in the walls of the Silent
Tower. He knew in himself that not all the harsh discipline of the sasenna could have
induced him to touch that Sigil or any door that it sealed, no matter what was at stake.
His own powers of magic were small and, he suspected miserably, failing; but
through them he felt its influence as they entered those cold blue shadows, with an
oppressive sense of horror lurking in the smoke-stained, windowless stone walls.
What they must be to his grandfather's greater powers he loathed to think. He
understood then why his grandfather had said that he hoped that, after seven years of
it, Antryg would still be sane.
At the end of a cold, bare passage was a large guardroom, smoky, dark, and
close-feeling in the smoldering glare of torches. The tower was windowless, the air
freshened by some hidden system of ventilation that did not work particularly
efficiently. They ascended an enclosed stone stair, the treads worn into a long hollow
runnel in their center, slippery and treacherous. The two Church sasenna who
followed them bore torches. Looking up, his hands pressed to the walls for support on
the age-slicked stone steps, Caris could see the low roof entirely crusted with soot.
Owing to the tapering of the Tower, the room above was smaller; but though
cluttered and untidy, it was clean, lacking even the stench of the guardroom. All
around the walls, boxes had been piled to form crude shelves for the books that filled
the place; more books were heaped on the floor in the corners and along the back of
the small table that stood against the wall. The tops of these barely cleared the
disordered piles of papers burying most of the table's surface; among them Caris
could see a pot of ink and a vast number of broken quills, magnifying glasses, yellow-
ing scientific journals, an armillary sphere, two astrolabes and the pieces of three
more mingled with the component parts of elaborate mechanical toys. About a dozen
cups, scattered through the colossal litter, contained the moldering remains of cold
tea. Among the papers, he saw scribbled mathematical formulae and the complicated
patterns of the Magic Circles, drawn as if the artist had been memorizing them by
rote, although he could use none of them; with them were sketches—a leaf, a bone,
the Bishop, the stars at certain times of winter nights, or simply the single