"Ursula K. LeGuin - Earthsea 5 - The Other Wind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

Alder was mute.
"Not many of us know who or what we are," said the Doorkeeper. "A glimpse is all we
get."
"Tell us how you first went to the wall of stones," the Summoner said.
And Alder told them.
The mages listened in silence and said nothing for a while after he was done. Then the
Summoner asked, "Have you thought what it means to cross that wall?"
"I know I could not come back."
"Only mages can cross the wall living, and only at utmost need. The Herbal may go
with a sufferer all the way to that wall, but if the sick man crosses it, he does not
follow."
The Summoner was so tall and broad-bodied and dark that, looking at him, Alder
thought of a bear.
"My art of Summoning empowers us to call the dead back across the wall for a brief
time, a moment, if there is need to do so. I myself question if any need could justify so
great a breach in the law and balance of the world. I have never made that spell. Nor
have I crossed the wall. The Archmage did, and the King with him, to heal the wound
in the world the wizard called Cob made."
"And when the Archmage did not return, Thorion, who was our Summoner then, went
down into the dry land to seek him," the Herbal said. "He came back, but changed."
"There is no need to speak of that," the big man said.
"Maybe there is," said the Herbal. "Maybe Alder needs to know it. Thorion trusted his
strength too far, I think. He stayed there too long. He thought he could summon
himself back into life, but what came back was only his skill, his power, his
ambition—the will to live that gives no life. Yet we trusted him, because we had loved
him. So he devoured us. Until Irian destroyed him."
Far from Roke, on the Isle of Gont, Alder's listener interrupted him—"What name was
that?" Sparrowhawk asked.
"Irian, he said."
"Do you know that name?"
"No, my lord."
"Nor I." After a pause Sparrowhawk went on softly, as if unwillingly. "But I saw
Thorion, there. In the dry land, where he had risked going to seek me. It grieved me to
see him there. I said to him he might go back across the wall." His face went dark and
grim. "That was ill spoken. All is spoken ill between the living and the dead. But I had
loved him too."

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Le Guin, Ursula - [Earthsea 05] The Other Wind


They sat in silence. Sparrowhawk got up abruptly to stretch his arms and rub his
thighs. They both moved about a bit. Alder got a drink of water from the well.
Sparrowhawk fetched out a garden spade and the new handle to fit to it, and set to
work smoothing the oaken shaft and tapering the end that would go in the socket.
He said, "Go on, Alder," and Alder went on with his story.
The two masters had been silent for a while after the Herbal spoke about Thorion.
Alder got up the courage to ask them about a matter that had been much on his mind:
how those who died came to the wall, and how the mages came there.
The Summoner answered promptly: "It is a spirit journey."