"Holly Lisle - Secret Texts 4 - Vincalis the Agitator" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

with thanks
 Book One



Wraith the Challenger
We were friends in a place that had no friendship, in a hell
born of forced mindlessness and subterranean despair; and
because we found our impossible friendship in the Warrens,
we brought forth revolution. Thus a world died, and its
death bore a new world.



VINCALIS THE AGITATOR

THE SECRET TEXTS—OF THE FALCONS



1
Chapter


Down below, in the cages where they’d been born, Wraith’s only two friends
in the world starved and waited. So the boy crouched in the shadows, heart racing in
his throat. Without food, he couldn’t go home. Without food soon, he would have no
reason to go home. The strangeness of this place frightened him, and he yearned for
the familiar back ways he’d left behind. But some instinct had drawn him to this rich
and impossible place, and he promised himself he would not leave empty-handed.

This city in the sky terrified him, though. To his right, a fountain erupted from
nothing, spraying streams of crystalline liquid and gemlike shards of red and blue and
green into the air. No solid structure supported this delicate miracle, but the many
people who strolled past seemed not to even notice it. All around Wraith, buildings
spun of smoke and light rose from foundations equally ephemeral, yet within them
people moved easily from floor to floor, visible through lovely archways and on broad
balconies. Below his feet, through roads like ribbons of stained glass, lay the other,
lesser city—his city—so far away that streets looked like silken threads and buildings
like beads sewn on fine cloth.

Wraith did not belong in these fine streets, in this city above the city, in this realm
of men who would be gods. But because he could come here—because the city itself
let him enter—no one looked at him with suspicion or with doubt. No one questioned
the shabby nature of his clothes, the rough cut of his hair, his shoeless feet, or his
gaunt child’s body. If he was here, they seemed to think, then it could only be because
he belonged here—for magic barred those who did not belong from the secrets of Oel
Artis Travia—the Aboves.

And here, where he knew he had no business, he found the thing he had so