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

within the crystal, her eyes consuming the living colors with a hunger that had never been appeased since
the day she had awakened and found two necklaces beside her pillow. Both necklaces had been rare,
extraordinary, complementing each other. One light, one dark, each with a wealth of colors turning in its
still center. She had kept both crystals for a time, worn both. Then she had sent the light one out to the
stars.
She turned the clear, black crystal slowly, cherishing its endless colors, calling to Kane yet again,
wanting to sense his presence just once before she died. She wondered if somewhere far, far away Kane
held the transparent brilliance of a crystal in his palm and thought of the Darien cousin he had taught to
smile. She would never know, now. She did not even know if Kane had received the crystal that she had
sent, a condensation of all colors from a timeshadow rider, a silent thank-you for the laughter that he
alone had brought to a childhood all but strangled by tabu.
Kane. Come to me. Come to me!
The sounds of Sharia’s savage cousins drifted through translucent walls. Soon they would see her, a
shadow within the wall. Soon she could die. Or she could heal herself and live for a few more hours,
watch again the infinite fascination of colors turning within a crystal as black and transparent as space.
For an instant longer Sharia dreamed within the crystal, then she hid its blazing facets within bloody
folds of cloth. She tried to gather herself, but her mind still reached for Kane.
You can’t call him if you’re dead. Heal yourself. Fight. Live!
Sharia rode her own timeshadow with an ease that would have astonished her aunt, the dead Kiriy.
Throughout all of Za’arain’s long history, there had been very few Kiris who could ride even the wakes
of former timeshadows, much less ride the torrential living shadow itself. There had been no one to teach
Sharia how to use her mind. No one had dared. Except Kane. He, too, was Darien and five. He
understood the patterns of nonliving wakes as deeply as she understood the living time-shadows
themselves.
He had brought her plants and pets to heal, urged her to control the multi-edged gift of a timeshadow
rider’s mind. He had known that some day she would be given to the Eyes of Za’ar. He had hoped that
learning to control her own mind would increase her chances of surviving the instant when the Eyes
sucked her into an infinity of seething, overlapping timeshadows.
He had cared, and now she would never touch him again.
The thought shocked her. After all the years of tabu and isolation, she thought that she had accepted
Kane’s irrevocable absence in time/now. She had not. She had merely tolerated it. She hungered for
Kane in a way that transcended everything that she was—Kiri, Darien and five—and she knew she
would die without him.
She could not heal herself endlessly. Her strength was not that of the sacred fountain, rooted in
millions of years of linear time. She could, however, take down into darkness with her some of her
savage Kiri kin. Perhaps, just perhaps, the death of those cousins who had most easily embraced atavism
would ease Kane’s job when he returned and took up the Eyes in hope of dragging Za’arain back out of
the muck it had fallen into. She owed Kane that much and would have gladly given him more.
And she owed it to psi-hunters to teach them that timeshadow riders could kill as thoroughly as they
healed. Even a five. Especially a five.
The smile that Sharia wore was as much a warning as the hammered silver of her eyes. With every
heartbeat, years of civilization slipped away from her, years and then more years, an endless cultural
timeshadow reaching back down linear time into savagery ... freeing it.
Black flames licked upward through Sharia’s core, freezing flames which burned through inhibitions.
For the first time in her life her inner eyelid flickered down, transforming the landscape with atavistic light.
Violet eyes looked out on a world where living timeshadows burned like jeweled flames. Atavistic eyes.
Psi-hunter eyes.
She pushed away from the fractured glass wall and ran into the sacred courtyard again. Acres of
satin stone swept in all directions, stone as white as her robe once had been. The single huge artesian
fountain leaped. The sound was that of an immense river falling over the chasm between time/then and