"Ann Maxwell - Timeshadow Rider" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maxwell Ann)

dragged out the gem he had kept concealed from everyone, a treasure to warm the coldest nights of
exile. He yanked, but the silver chain did not give way even to his strength. Cloth ripped, though. The
pale, transparent crystal spilled out, blazing with colors—and riddled with terrible shards of darkness.
“Lias’tri!” hissed Jode. Relief glowed in his voice like sunrise until he saw the blackness laced through
the stone. “Oh my cruel gods—she’s dying.” Compassion transformed Jode’s harsh face, softening bleak
lines and planes with an emotion he had never before revealed. “No,” he said gently, trying to hold Kane
down. “Don’t get up. The pain will get worse before she—before it’s over.”
“What are you babbling about?” asked Kane harshly, evading Jode’s sinewy grasp with the easy
power that only a mature Za’arain knew,
“Your lias’tri.”
“Lias’tri,” snapped Kane impatiently, “is a word without meaning. What is lias’tri?”
For the first time in their four years together, Kane saw that the pilot’s quick mind was truly stunned.
“You don’t know?” asked Jode. “How in the name of sanity can you wear that crystal and not
know?”
“Not know what?” snarled Kane, pacing the control room like a caged predator. Urgency was riding
him—again, razor claws unsheathed, ripping through him. He had to be—somewhere. He had to be
there now. Yet the nearest reasonably safe za’replacement point to anywhere was hours away.
Too long. Too far. Urgency raking through the currents of time. Timeshadows twisting, knotting.
Kane turned, prowling the deck with savage grace. At each step the crystal burned and coruscated
across his chest. Jode watched, compelled by the incredible colors pouring through the lias’tri gem. And
then he realized that the black shards were thinning, fading, gone.
Jode made a sound of pure disbelief. “That. Can’t. Be.”
“What?”
“The blackness. It’s gone from the crystal!”
Kane looked down at the blazing gem. Colors seethed and flashed back at him. “Black? It’s never
black.”
“But it was. When you ripped it out of your tunic, there were fragments of black. That’s why you
were in pain. Your lias’tri was dying.”
The last of Jode’s words were lost in Kane’s low cry of agony. His hand had clenched around the
crystal. He swayed, fighting to shed pain the way a timeshadow shed the infinite now. He was partially
successful, driven no further than his knees by the hammer blows of agony. When his sweat-slippery
fingers parted, the crystal swung free.
“Look,” said Jode, pointing at the crystal.
Shards of black lanced through the colors once again.
Fear crawled over Kane, as cold as the sweat dripping from his body. He moved with the speed of
death itself. A hard bronzed hand wrapped around Jode’s wiry arm.
“Tell me,” snarled Kane.
“She’s dying,” said Jode simply.
“Who’s dying?”
“The woman who sent you that crystal.”
“Sharia?” demanded Kane, his long fingers closing with crushing force on Jode’s arm. “Are you
trying to tell me that Sharia is dying?”
“If Sharia gave you the crystal, yes.”
“How do you know?”
The psi-master’s black eyes closed, unable to bear any longer the sight of Kane’s dawning
comprehension. Feeling the death of a lias’tri was a terrible thing. Watching a friend writhe with a lias’tri’s
death throes was little better.
“The black within the crystal,” said Jode, his voice hoarse. “First shards, then gaps, and finally a veil
of ... absence ... dimming the colors of her life.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Kane flatly, abandoning the inter-culture courtesy of the Joining that had