"Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time 06 - Lord of Chaos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jordan Robert)

Demandred hesitated. A bead of sweat slid half an inch on his cheek; it seemed to take an hour. For a year during
the War of Power, both sides had used balefire. Until they learned the consequences. Without agreement, or truce—
there had never been a truce any more than there had been quarter— each side simply stopped. Entire cities died in
balefire that year, hundreds of thousands of threads burned from the Pattern; reality itself almost unraveled, world
and universe evaporating like mist. If balefire was unleashed once more, there might be no world to rule.
Another point pricked him. The Great Lord already knew how Rahvin had died. And seemed to know more of
Asmodean than he. "As you command, Great Lord, so shall I obey." His muscles might be jerking, but his voice
was rock steady. His knees began to blister from the hot stone, yet the flesh might as well have been someone
else's.
SO YOU SHALL.
"Great Lord, the Dragon can be destroyed." A dead man could not wield balefire again, and perhaps then the Great
Lord would see no need for it. "He is ignorant and weak, scattering his attentions in a dozen directions. Rahvin was
a vain fool. I— "
WOULD YOU BE NAE'BLIS?
Demandred's tongue froze. Nae'blis. The one who would stand only a step below the Great Lord, commanding all
others. "I wish only to serve you, Great Lord, however I may." Nae'blis.
THEN LISTEN, AND SERVE. HEAR WHO WILL DIE AND WHO LIVE.
Demandred screamed as the voice crashed home. Tears of joy rolled down his face.
Unmoving, the Myrddraal watched him.

"Stop fidgeting." Nynaeve testily flipped her long braid over her shoulder. "This won't work if you twitch around
like children with an itch."
Neither of the women across the rickety table appeared any older than she, though they were by twenty years or
more, and neither was really fidgeting, but the heat had Nynaeve on edge. The small windowless room seemed
airless. She dripped sweat; they appeared cool and dry. Leane, in a Domani dress of too-thin blue silk, merely
shrugged; the tall coppery-skinned woman possessed an apparently infinite store of patience. Usually. Siuan, fair
and sturdy, seldom had any.
Now Siuan grunted and resettled her skirts irritably; she used to wear fairly plain clothes, but this morning she was
in fine yellow linen embroidered with a Tairen maze around a neckline that barely missed being too low. Her blue
eyes were cold as deep well water. As cold as deep well water would have been if the weather had not gone mad.
Her dresses might have changed, but not her eyes. "It won't work in any case," she snapped. Her manner of
speaking was the same, too. "You can't patch a hull when the whole boat's burned. Well, it's a waste of time, but I
promised, so get on with it. Leane and I have work to do." The pair of them ran the networks of eyes-and-ears for
the Aes Sedai here in Salidar, the agents who sent in reports and rumors of what was going on in the world.
Nynaeve smoothed her own skirts to soothe herself. Her dress was plain white wool, with seven bands of color at
the hem, one for each Ajah. An Accepted's dress. It annoyed her more than she could ever have imagined. She
would much rather have been in the green silk she had packed away. She was willing to admit her acquired taste for
fine clothes, privately at least, but her choice of that particular dress was only for comfort— it was thin, light— not
because green seemed one of Lan's favorite colors. Not at all. Idle dreaming of the worst sort. An Accepted who put
on anything except the banded white would soon learn she was a long step below Aes Sedai. Firmly she put all that
out of her head. She was not here to fret over fripperies. He liked blue, too. No!
Delicately she probed with the One Power, first at Siuan, then Leane. In a manner of speaking, she was not
channeling at all. She could not channel a scrap unless angry, could not even sense the True Source. Yet it came to
the same thing. Fine filaments of saidar, the female half of the True Source, sifted through the two women at her
weaving. They just did not originate with her.
On her left wrist Nynaeve wore a slender bracelet, a simple segmented silver band. Mainly silver, anyway, and
from a special source, though that made no difference. It was the only piece of jewelry she wore aside from the
Great Serpent ring; Accepted were firmly discouraged from wearing much jewelry. A matching necklace snugged
around the neck of the fourth woman, on a stool against the rough-plastered wall with her hands folded in her lap.
Clad in a farmer's rough brown wool, with a farmer's worn sturdy face, she did not sweat a drop. She did not move