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

out, seeking and finding the troubled currents of life. The instant of contact was excruciating. Sharia
screamed but did not hear her own cry. She was riding a wild Darien timeshadow, combing its colors
until there was no darkness, unknotting tangled lines of energy. She released the vibrant timeshadow and
flowed into another, riding it down to the beginning of disease, combing, healing, releasing.
The cycle repeated itself endlessly as her own life-force ebbed; and even then she continued to heal.
Time did not exist. Za’arain did not exist. Only a Darien compulsion existed, draining Sharia of life as
surely as disease had drained the Kiriy.
Colors shattered around her, cutting her until she screamed. Pain tore her from the healing trance,
hurling her back into time/now. Blood ran down her back from a fresh wound. She opened her eyes and
she saw healed Kiris watching her. Some of them had violet eyes. Others blinked, and then their eyes,
too, were violet. The violet-eyed Kiris flowed soundlessly toward each other. And then they turned
toward her, a five, a powerful mind that the psi-pack must either kill or rule.
Instinct older than the Eyes of Za’ar rose in Sharia. As the pack closed in to claim or kill her, she
fought in a way and with a ferocity that took her Kiri cousins off guard. Her long hair swept out, hurting
instead of healing, disrupting rather than combing. Then she fled through the fountain’s mists, coming out
at an unfamiliar point in the huge, circular courtyard. She ran through the first open door she saw, seeking
the safety of her own room.
But she had been raised a five, in isolation, and soon she was lost in the ancient circular maze of
rooms surrounding the courtyard. She ran until she reached a dead end. There she turned at bay, her
back to a glass wall scaled by time. She looked at the sky through a ruined ceiling. Beyond the clamoring
of her own survival instincts she sensed death with every too-rapid beating of her heart, every silent slide
of blood from her fingertips onto surfaces smoothed by the passage of her Za’arain ancestors.
Sharia tried to still the frantic demands of her body for air, tried to hold her breath in order to catch
the sound of death coming toward her, tried to listen for the mindless growl of her Kiri cousins hunting
her. Pack hunters, prowling and snarling, dripping blood and death.
With a low sound Sharia looked at her hands and felt savagery in her own mind, a hot seeking for a
breach in the cage of her will. The blood she wore was her own. She had not killed. Yet. She could feel
it coming, though. She could feel the grief and the rage uncoiling in her, black flames burning toward a
feral freedom. The unique culmination of a million years of linear time was sliding through her fingers, a
brilliant culture was bleeding through cracks in the now as surely as blood sinking into pavement stones.
Yet she must survive to find her way out of this maze and take up the Eyes, giving Za’arain a chance
to live again. She was the last five alive on Za’arain. She knew that as surely as she knew the feel of her
own blood dripping from her five-fingered hands. She had heard Kiri whispers, Kiri revelations, mad Kiri
laughter in her mind as fives had died one by one in their private rooms across the face of the planet.
There had been no real reason to blame fives for the catastrophic plague that had brought down
Za’arain, no reason to kill them rather than fours or sixes. But the Kiri’s believed that something had to
be responsible, that a great culture did not fall without blame being assessed among the ruins. Next to the
Eyes of Za’ar, fives were the central mystery of Za’arain, forbidden to touch on pain of unknowable
catastrophe. Since catastrophe had come, it must have come from a breach of the Great Tabu. Therefore
all fives had to die.
A low, feral sound vibrated through the cool wall at Sharia’s back. Her cousins were coming, burning
their way through a million years of civilization seeking the Kiri passageways impregnated in the
compound like time itself. She could heal herself again as she already had. She could survive to hide for
yet a few more twists and turns, a few more hours. But why bother? Why not just slide softly, hotly into
the rage that was uncurling in her mind and testing the bars of her discipline? Why not turn and confront
her tormentors? Why not die rending their timeshadows, tearing a hole in time/now and letting their lives
leak through?
Sharia pulled on the fine black links that hung around her neck. Delicate, unbreakable, the jewel’s
chain emerged from the concealing folds of the once-white robe she wore. The crystal’s colors called to
her at a level deeper than atavism. Her silver eyes focused on the gem, reflecting the silent, sleeting hues