"Laurie Marks - Elemental Logic 01 - Fire Logic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marks Laurie)

—MEDRIC’S History of My Father’s People



Chapter One
In the border regions of northern Shaftal, the peaks of the mountains loom over hardscrabble farmholds.
The farmers there build with stone and grow in stone, and they might even be made of stone themselves,
they are so sturdy in the face of the long, bitter winter that comes howling down at them from the
mountains.

The stone town of Kisha would have been as insignificant as all the northern towns, if not for the fact that
Makapee, the first G’deon, had lived and died there. His successor, Lilter, had discovered the
manuscript of the book in which were laid out the principles that were to shape Shaftal. During the next
two hundred years, the library built to house the Makapee manuscript had transformed the humble town
into an important place, a town of scholars and librarians who gathered there to study and care for the
largest collection of books in the country. The library had in turn spawned a university, and the scholars,
forced to live in the bitter northern climate, tried to make their months of shivering indoors by a smoky
peat fire into an intellectual virtue.

Emil Paladin considered frostbite a small price to pay for the privilege of being a student in the university
at Kisha. He was older than some of the masters, and his long-time teacher, Parel Truthken, had warned
him that he might be more learned, as well. For ten years, since his first piercing, Emil had accompanied
Parel on the rounds of his territory, capturing fleeing wrongdoers and occasionally executing them when it
was necessary. It was Parel who had finally arranged Emil’s admission and who would be paying his
fees. So now Emil had arrived for the spring term, with a letter of introduction that was about to bring him
into the presence of the Makapee manuscript itself.

Despite expensive carpets, rooms crammed with books, and fires that burned year round to prevent the
damp, the library was a chilly and echoing place where men and women in scholar’s robes tiptoed about.
Being admitted to the Makapee manuscript, which set forth the principles that now unified Shaftal, was
like being admitted into a temple. As he put on the silken gloves that he was required to wear, it occurred
to Emil that Makapee himself would have found this ritual tremendously peculiar. The first G’deon had
been an obscure potato farmer, who sat by a peat fire all winter long, writing of mysteries in a crabbed,
nearly unreadable handwriting. The paper, Emil had been told, still smelled of peat. He doubted that the
frowning librarian would let his nose come close enough to the paper for him to sniff it, but still, Emil felt
almost giddy with anticipation.

A door opened, and the sound of an urgently ringing bell intruded on the silence. The librarian turned her
head, frowning. “What!” she breathed at the man who hurried towards her.

The man whispered in her ear. Paling, she turned aside and hurried away. Emil was left with the gloves on
his hands and the door to the Makapee vault still bolted shut. He felt a tearing, a sense of loss so
profound he could not believe it had anything at all to do with the manuscript. Something momentous had
happened. Dazed, he went through the halls, following the sound of the bell out into the square that
fronted on the library.

As the bell continued to ring, the square became crowded with scholars carrying pens with the ink still
wet on the nibs, librarians carrying books, townsfolk wearing work aprons, with babies in their arms and
tools in their hands, and farmers from the countryside in heavy, muddy boots, with satchels on their