"Mercedes Lackey & Larry Dixon - Mage Wars 03 - The Silver Gryphon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

of control and dexterity, and Kylleen cooed aloud and smiled in his direction.
Yes! That worked out just the way I wanted. Tadrith stood rock steady and struck a momentary
pose, wings folded crisply, crest up and gently ruffled by the breeze. Just right. That will show them
what I'm made of. Father never flew like that! He'd have powered straight in and knocked them
half off their feet with the backwash of his wingbeats. I have finesse and style!
Tadrith's self-congratulatory reverie was shattered a moment later when one mother said to another,
"Did you see that? Why, he's the very image of his father, with aerobatics like that."
Crushed, Tadrith drooped his head and crest and stepped off the platform.
I'm doomed.
At least the younger ladies seemed oblivious to the effect that the casual remark had on him. They
continued to bestow coy and admiring glances on him as he made as unhurried and graceful an exit as he
could manage under the circumstances.
The platform jutted out over the cove below, and led directly to one of the balustraded "streets" that
ran along the edge of the terrace. The Kaled'a'in who comprised the greater part of the population of
White Gryphon were accustomed to being surrounded by greenery, and even in a city carved and built
completely of cliff-stone had managed to bring that greenery here. Built into the balustrades were stone
boxes filled with earth brought down a sackful at a time from the fields above; those boxes now held
luxuriant vines that trailed down to the next terraced level. More stone boxes each held a single tree or
bush, with flowering herbs planted at its base. There was water enough coming down from above to
allow for the occasional tiny waterfall to trail artfully from terrace to terrace and end in a long fall to the
sea. The greenery had been planned so that it actually formed feather-patterns, adding texture to the pure
white of the stone gryphon. Part of the philosophy of White Gryphon, when the city was planned, had
been "recovery with dignity." The leaders of the people—Skandranon included—used the survivors'
artistry and style as a point of pride and unification. If a simple box would do, an ornamented box was
better. This strategy of increased self-esteem, guided by the kestra'chern, worked in making the people
feel less like beaten refugees and more like proud homesteaders.
The philosophy was simple. If an object could be made beautiful—whether it was a street,
doorway, or garden—it was.
Homes were carved directly into the cliff behind the avenue, some going twenty or thirty
gryphon-lengths back into the stone. The size of a family home or a gryphon aerie was limited only to the
willingness of family members to dig (or pay for someone else to dig)—and to live in the windowless
spaces beyond the main rooms. Gryphons tended to find such spaces disturbing and confining and
preferred not to carve more than two rooms'-worth deep, but hertasi and kyree and even some humans
actually liked the idea of such burrows, and sent their dwellings quite far back indeed. There were entire
complexes of man-made caverns back in those cliffs, and Tadrith had to admit that the one advantage
they had was that weather made little or no difference to the folk living in those rooms.
Amberdrake was one such. He and Winterhart had buried their personal chambers so far back into
the living stone that no natural light ever reached there to disturb late sleepers. Tadrith shuddered at the
very thought of so much rock on every side, cutting him off from the air and light. He had no idea how his
partner Blade ever tolerated it, for she was another such as her parents.
Not that a gryphon ever needs to worry about being forced to live in such a place. Not while
there are hertasi and kyree vying for such mausoleums and eager to give up cliff-side residences to
have one. In the early days, when simply getting a dwelling carved out quickly had been of paramount
importance, it had been faster and easier just to sculpt rooms side-by-side, often simply enlarging and
improving existing caves. Mage-lights to aid in working deeper into the stone had been at a premium, and
there were long stretches of time when magic could not be used to help work the stone at all, so that it all
had to be done by hand. Workers tended to carve to a standard that happened to be preferred by most
humans and all gryphons and tervardi. The dyheli, of course, needed the barest of shelters to be
contented and all lived above, among the farms, but the hertasi and kyree who really were not
comfortable with views of endless sky and long drops were forced to make do until there was time and