"Eric Van Lustbader - The Pearl Saga 2 - The Veil of a Thousand Tears" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lustbader Eric van)

beneath the abbey, where the power bourns wove themselves like strands of the Great Goddess Miina's
ruddy hair.
The Library, columned, marble-clad, lay dreaming like a castle keep in the fastness of the fortresslike
complex. The Ramahan abbey had been abandoned for many years before Riane and her friends—the
Kun-dalan sorceress Giyan, the V'ornn Rhynnnon Rekkk Hacilar, the Kun-dalan Resistance leader
Eleana, the Rappa named Thigpen—had made it their sanctuary some weeks before. Khagggun packs
roamed the countryside searching for them. Once, they had swept through the abbey, and it was only
Giyan's sorcery that had saved them. She had roused them from sleep and, gathering up all evidence of
their stay, they had fled into the nearby forest, there to wait in stony silence for the enemy to depart.
The abbey itself, sacked decades before by the V'ornn invaders, was half-burned and crumbling when
they had first come upon it. Gimnopedes nested in untidy eaves. Spiders turned shadowy corners into
delicately veined cities. A beautiful sysal tree had, for decades, grown up through thick plaza paving to
split the lintel of the east-facing temple. The hoary knuckles of its basal roots displaced the artful pattern
of the stone, an ironic comment on how life reclaims the void and transforms it. The Library, alone,
remained intact, having been protected by a powerful spell that Giyan had counteracted in order to gain
entry.
Riane looked at Giyan, tall, slim, beautiful, golden, radiant, save for the blackened crusts of the sorcerous
chrysalides that covered her hands and forearms. Even now, she could scarcely believe that they had
been reunited. Giyan's presence gave her a sense of profound dislocation. She was not simply Riane, a
sixteen-year-old orphaned Kundalan girl who could not remember her parents or where she came from.
She was also the V'ornn Annon Ashera, eldest son of Eleusis Ashera. Eleusis had been regent of
Kundala until a ruthless coup by his archenemy, Prime Factor Wennn Stogggul, and the head of Eleusis'
own elite bodyguard, Kinnnus Morcha.
Riane's searching gaze caught Giyan's whistleflower-blue eyes. "Every time you look at me I see surprise
on your face."
Giyan's heart ached, for she heard the sentiment behind the formal words, the fragile sentence Riane
could not bear to speak: Do you still love me? "It is a marvelous moment, to be here with you, alone, in
private. To be able to call you Teyjattt." Teyj were the beautiful multicolored four-winged birds the
Gyrgon—the V'ornn technomage caste—bred and took with them wherever they went.
"Little Teyj. You loved calling me that when Annon was a child."
A sudden fear, a stab in Giyan's heart. "And Annon did not?"
A moment's pause. "Annon did not, I think, appreciate your love. He did not know what to do with it."
"It is odd the way you phrase it."
"I am no longer Annon." Riane spread her hands. "Annon is dead. All Kundala knows it."
"And we? What do we know?"
Riane looked up at the magnificent dome of the Library, encrusted with a mosaic of Kundala and the
sinuous star constellations surrounding it. Composed of millions of tiny colored glass tiles, fitted cunningly
together as only the Kundalan artisans could, the dome produced an ethereal glow like a perpetual
sunrise or sunset. Beneath this sheltering sky she felt safe from both Annon's enemies and those of the
Dar Sala-at. For Annon was not simply the heir to the Ashera Consortium. He and the former Riane
together—this unique fused entity—were the Dar Sala-at, the chosen one of Miina, prophesied to find
The Pearl, the most powerful, mysterious, and ancient artifact of Kundala, to lead the Kundalan out of
their one-hundred-and-one-year enslavement to the technologically superior V'ornn.
"Here, alone, together," she said at length, "we can share a dead past. Like ghosts conjuring the root
stew of life."
"Stirring the cauldron."
"Yes." Riane smiled a painful smile. "Making something special of it."
She saw movement out of the corner of her eye. The vigilant figure of Rekkk Hacilar passed before the
high, leaded window to the east. His long, tapering, hairless skull was cloaked in a battle helm fashioned,
it was said, from the skull of a fallen Krael, and he held his shock-sword at the ready. His purple armor