"L. E. Modesitt - Recluce 06 - The White Order" - читать интересную книгу автора (Modesitt L E)

thickening into nearly a misty white. A faint smile crossed his lips, vanishing as he tightened
them, concentrating on the irregular mirror.
"Cerryl! Stay away from that glass!" A heavyset woman, broom in hand, appeared on the clay-and-
rock stoop of the house behind the boy.
Cerryl did not move, intent as he was on the image forming in the glass. His mouth formed a
silent O, and his eyes widened at the sparkling white tower looming over a green park.
Abruptly, at the sound of heavy steps crunching across the ground, he looked up, his eyes
flicking to the squat figure in clean but mottled gray trousers and tunic.
"How you found that... suppose it doesn't matter." The woman's big hand seized his shoulder,
and she lifted him to his feet and twisted him away from the shard of mirror. Her booted right
foot came down on the glass with a crunch. All that remained of the window that had shown Cerryl
an impossibly beautiful white stone tower was a heap of sparkling dust. His eyes burned with
unshed tears.
"Glasses, mirrors, they be tools of chaos and evil! Have I not told you that, boy?" Nail's free


file:///F|/rah/L.%20E.%20Modesitt/Modesitt,%20...-%20Recluse%2006%20-%20The%20White%20Order.txt (1 of 197) [5/22/03 12:33:48 AM]
 file:///F|/rah/L.%20E.%20Modesitt/Modesitt,%20L%20E%20-%20Recluse%2006%20-%20The%20White%20Order.txt

hand brushed a wisp of iron gray hair off her forehead, but her gaze remained fixed on him.
Cerryl's thin shoulders drooped, but his gray eyes met hers, looking up to a woman more than
half-again as tall as he was, and far burlier than even most of the sheepmen and peasants around
Hrisbarg. "It was only a little shard, Aunt Nail."
"A little shard. Like saying a little night lizard-one bite, one shard-that's enough to kill
you, boy." Nail took a deep breath, then another. "How many times been that I told you to stay
away from mirrors and shiny things?"
"Enough," Cerryl admitted in a low voice, his eyes still meeting his aunt's.
"You be the death of us yet."
"I wanted to help," Cerryl said. "They find things with the shimmer glasses. You told me that
Da said so."
"Always yer da." Nail shook her head. "Poor I may be, child, but poor be not evil, and evil be
the shimmer glasses. Even you know where that took yer da." She glanced toward the door of the
house, swinging half-open in the light wind. "You come with me 'fore the soup boils over."
"Yes, Aunt Nail." Cerryl's voice was polite, level, neither apologetic nor begging.
"Child ..." Nail sighed again. "Back to the house."
Cerryl walked across the dry and dusty ground, a pace to her left and a pace back. He glanced
toward another tailing pile, farther eastward. If there had been a mirror in one pile, what about
the others?
"No lagging, child."
Cerryl followed Nail to the stoop, where she reclaimed the broom. She gestured with it, as if
to sweep him into the house. Cerryl stepped inside. At the end of the main room of the two-room
house was the hearth, with the cook table to the right, the narrow trestle table with its two
short benches before the hearth, and a weathered gold oak cabinet with cracked drawer fronts to
the left.
"Not even enough sense to fool around where no one could see you," snapped the woman, closing
the door behind the boy. "Your poor mother, no wonder she died young. Not a scrap of sense in you
or in your worthless father. A white mage, he was going to be." Nail shook her head sadly. "Poor
fool... thinking he was that them mighty types in Fairhaven would welcome him. Him a peasant boy
from Hewlett..."
Cerryl lowered his eyes to the spotless stone floor.