"Greg Keyes - Chosen of the Changeling 2 - Blackgod" - читать интересную книгу автора (Keyes J Gregory)

Abruptly his memory offered mirror-sharp images, a scene from his past—how long ago? But though
his mind’s sight was keen, the voices floated to him as if from far away, and though he saw through his
own eyes, it was as if he watched strangers dance a dance to which he knew only a few steps.

He was in the Great Water Temple, in the interior chamber. Plastered white, the immense corbeled vault
above him seemed to drink up the pale lamplight in the center of the room. More real, somehow, was the
illumination washing down from the four corridors that met in the chamber, though it was dimmer still
than the flame. He knew it for daylight, rippling through sheets of falling water that cascaded down the
four sides of the ancient ziggurat in whose heart they stood, curtains of thunder concealing the doorways
of the temple. In that coruscating aquamarine and the flickering of the lamp, the priest before him
seemed less real than his many shadows, for they constantly moved as he stood still.

On his knees, Ghe yet remembered thinking of the priest standing over him, You shall bow to me one
day.

“There are things you must know now,” the priest told him, in his soft, little-boy voice; like ail full
priests, he had been castrated young.

“I listen for the fall of water,” Ghe acknowledged.

“You know that our emperor and his family are descended from the River.”

Ghe suppressed an urge to rise up and strike the fool down. They think because I am from Southtown I
know nothing, not even that. They think I am no more than a throat-slitter from the gutter, with the
brains of a knife! But he held that inside. To betray his feeling was to betray himself, and betraying
himself would betray Li—Ghe-in-the-water wondered who Li was.

“Know,” the priest went on, “that because they carry his water in their veins, the River is a part of them.
He can live through them, if he chooses. The power of the Waterborn has but one source, and that is the
River.”

Then why do you hate them so? Ghe wondered. Because they are part of the River, as you will never

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 THE BLACKGOD

be ? Because they need not have their balls cut off to serve him?

The priest wandered over to a bench and sat down, taking his quivering shadows with him. He did not
sign for Ghe to arise, and so he remained there, prostrate, listening.

“Some of the Waterborn are blessed with more,” the man went on. “They are born with rather more of
the River in them than others. Unfortunately, the Human body can contain only a certain amount of
power. After that…”

The priest’s voice dropped to a whisper, and Ghe suddenly realized that this was no mere rote litany any
longer. This was something real to the priest, something that frightened him.

“After that,” he went on, sounding like nothing so much as an eight-year-old boy confiding some terrible