"Holly Lisle - World Gates 01 - Memory of Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

Molly’s gut twisted. One side of her raged with her own fear and fury, but on the other side lay the
knowledge that this was what she did, that this was who she was.

She held out her hand, and the man passed the unmoving child to her. Molly touched the dry skin of
Ewilla’s face and felt terrible fever and an unyielding tightness of flesh over bone that felt already dead.
What she did not feel—what she had always felt before in the presence of the sick, the dying, the tortured
—was the pain of the sufferer. She felt only her own cheek pressed close to the child’s nose and mouth,

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Lisle,%20Holly%20-%20[Wo...0[World%20Gates%2001]%20-%20Memory%20of%20Fire.htm (7 of 276)23-7-2007 19:26:12
 file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Lisle,%20Holly%20-%20[World%20Gates%...0Holly%20-%20[World%20Gates%2001]%20-%20Memory%20of%20Fire.htm

and the rapid hot breaths that blew against her skin that convinced her Ewilla still lived.

“I can’t feel her sickness,” Molly said.

“She is sick. She is very near death.”

“You don’t understand. I can’t feel her pain. If I can’t feel what she feels, I don’t know that I can help
her.”

“Please. Oh, please. She’s all that her mother and I have left.”

Molly closed her eyes, and her fingers, still pressed to Ewilla’s cheek, trembled. Since childhood, Molly
had helped the sick by taking the razor blades and jagged glass of their sickness and pending death into
her own body, and feeling their terror as it flowed through her. Now she felt nothing; some empathy for
the father, yes. Some fury at her own situation, yes. But no pain. No fear. No…no poison.

“Be well,” she whispered, without any real hope, any real expectation that what she did would do any
good; with only a vague determination that if she could help, she would. She touched the child’s face.

At the point where her fingers touched Ewilla’s skin, green-white fire glowed in a tiny point that quickly
spread. It was the fire of the tunnel that had carried her to this place, and it both shocked and scared her.
Molly yanked her hand back, but the connection remained; she could feel the cool, energizing rush of a
current powerful as a river at flood pouring through both her and the child, washing around them, and
then driving into the child and changing her. Changing Ewilla, cell by cell, molecule by molecule,
replacing sick with well, weak with strong, dying with healthy; rinsing her free of death as if death were
nothing more than a loosely attached surface stain, and filling the child with life as pure and vibrant and
electric as the moment of creation. Molly, riveted by this impossible power, this insane magic, couldn’t
catch her breath. She felt that out of thin air she had summoned a whirlwind, had called forth both gods
and devils and told them to dance, and had seen them obey her. Intoxicated, she basked in the power that
embraced and caressed her. And then she looked, truly looked, at the child who lay in her arms, bathed
in green fire, illuminated like the heart of an alien sun.

And all her fears were made reality by the sight of that face.

It wasn’t just sickness, and it wasn’t deformity; Molly could not look at the little creature and think that
she had been twisted in the womb. She was a beautiful creature. But she was not, and had never been,
human. Her eyes, slanted like a Siamese cat’s and large as lemons, were emerald-green from corner to
corner, without sclerae, without pupils, without irises. They were two cabochon gems set into a high-