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

Prologue
Throughout the history of the Fourth Evolution, azirs sometimes appeared to men and women. The
people so blessed usually go mad and die, for condensations of the other are inimical to lives rooted in
linear time as our lives are.
Yet there are legends of two people who did not die when azirs condensed to walk by their side.
Kane and Sharia were from the near-mythical planet Za’arain. They were of the race of Kiri, the clan of
Darien, and the family known only as “five.”
They were also lias’tri, all their lives and times bound together in a unique whole.
Legends, you say. Myths.
Perhaps. Yet azirs are condensing again, even as we breathe, and they are neither legend nor myth. If
you hear the azir’s unspeakably beautiful song shiver through your timeshadow, you will seek out those
legends and myths. You will gather them to you like a lover.
And you will dream.
If you awaken in another place, another aspect of time, you have dreamed the dream of Kiri, Darien
and five. If you don’t awaken ....
Ah, well, that is always the risk, isn’t it?

One
Za’arain was dying.
A million years of serenity and power. A million years of science and art. A million years of
intelligence and ambition, pragmatism and compassion. An achievement forged by billions of individual
lives, individual dreams. Disintegrating. It was in the very air. Za’arain’s silver skies were thick with
imminence, seething with despair.
Sharia ZaDarien/Kiri did not notice the people who shrank away from her as she hurried through the
glass-walled maze of the Kiriy compound. Her white robe and clearly displayed hands marked her as a
five, tabu. By all custom she should have been in her suite, dreaming deeply, waiting for the moment
when she would either live as Kiriy or die among all the cascading timeshadows of the then and the now.
But custom, too, was disintegrating. The dying Kiriy had spoken in Sharia’s mind, summoning her
with neither ritual nor courtesy. The Kiriy’s need had overwhelmed everything except the pain of the
disease consuming her body, the same disease that had struck the capital city without warning, the same
disease that was destroying Za’arain.
The Kiriy’s glass-walled audience room was empty of all but a handful of Sharia’s Darien cousins,
men and women almost as sick as the Kiriy herself. Sharia froze in the doorway, shocked by the change
in the ruler of Za’arain. It was something more than the wasted body or the mahogany skin bleached to
pale red. The Kiriy’s eyes were open—
Her eyes. Open. Silver. Human. For the first time in Sharia’s memory, the Kiriy’s eyes were not
covered by the Eyes of Za’ar. The large, twin crystals were on her forehead, their violet fire reduced to a
pale lavender reflection of former glory. The Kiriy’s emaciated five-fingered hand came up and pulled the
silver band holding the Eyes back over her own. Instantly the color of the Eyes deepened.
CHILD OF MY SISTER. COME TO ME.
The Kiriy’s body had been claimed by sickness, but her mind-speech was like freshly cut glass,
slicing through Sharia’s emotions to the core of Darien strength beneath. She walked forward carefully,
stepping around the Kiriy’s attendants. Sharia yearned to ride their living timeshadows, to comb the
spreading darkness of disease from their time/then and heal their time/now; but some of the attendants
were mature fives and so was she. They were forbidden to touch one another. The punishment for
transgression was Za’ar death, the last death, death in the then and the now and the always.
“All that I am is yours,” said Sharia clearly. “How may I serve the Kiriy of Za’arain?”
SHOW ME YOUR NECKLACE.
Sharia blinked, surprise clear in her translucent silver eyes. She reached inside her white robe and