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

"Yes, Aunt Nail." He slipped the ancient tome inside his ragged tunic and forced his face into
composure before standing and turning.
"And a cheerful face would be good. Days been hard for Syodor lately," she added. "Specially
after he found that cursed white bronze..." The after-statement was whispered to herself, but
Cerryl heard it as clearly as though she had spoken loudly.
He only nodded, knowing she would not want him to know what she had said, and walked quickly
across the threshold, stopping by his pallet and slipping the book inside it before continuing and
picking the ironbound wooden pail off the long peg set into the cross-timber behind the door. His
bare feet carried him out the door and off the stoop and toward the path leading to the stream
uphill and in back of the house.
He wished they could use the stream where it wound in front of the old house, but there it had
turned orangish from the tailings. And it smelled like brimstone, sometimes rusty like iron as
well. Cerryl's nose twitched at the thought of the odor as he trudged up the path toward the
spring from which the smaller stream flowed.
A sharp terwhit slashed through the early dusk-a bird hidden somewhere in the scrub junipers
that sprouted willy-nilly in the areas untouched by tailings or the orange teachings. Cerryl
glanced to his right, in the direction of the stone arched tunnel with a foreboding name carved in
the rock over the beams. While he couldn't read the name, he could sense that something left
better alone lay deep in the tunnel. Still, the dusk that strained Nail's eyes, or his uncle's,
was as bright as dawn just before the sun rose-something he'd tried not to let them know.
The bird did not call again, and the chirping of insects rose in the dusk. Cerryl wondered if
they were crickets or something else. He shrugged. Insects had never been that interesting. He
turned westward, heading up the foot-packed clay toward the spring.
The faint gurgling of the brook did not rise over the insects' chirping until he reached the
end of the spring itself, dark silver waters nearly still, except where they flowed over the rock
dam created years back and covered in thick green moss.
Cerryl edged along the south side of the spring until he reached the rock embankment from which
the waters flowed. There, in the long shadows and the gathering dusk, he looked at the dark waters
bubbling over the rock ledge and into the narrow basin, then at the mockgrape vines clinging to
the reddish rocks above the ledge.
Where did the water come from?
He frowned and looked at the ledge, then at the dark-silvered and rippled surface of the pond,
so much like a mirror, and so unlike it. Could he make the mirror trick show him where the water
started?
He squinted at the twilight-dark springwater, imagining ... what? Was there a hole in the red
sandstone that led to the depths of the earth? Cerryl took a deep breath, his lips pressed tightly
together, the empty bucket at his feet forgotten for the moment.
Silver mists swirled across the pond, silver mists, Cerryl realized, that only he could see.
"Nail and Syodor couldn't, anyway," he murmured under his breath, puzzled over why he had even to
say that, but knowing that he did, knowing that his whispered words were a sort of defiance that
were somehow important, if only to him.
The gray-haired image of Nail flitted through the mists, and Cerryl pushed it away, seeking the
source of the waters. Darkness spilled across the water, only darkness.
After a time, as his head began to ache, he finally took another deep breath, a gasping one,
before bending down to pick up the bucket and dip it into the spring. Water splashed across the
ragged bottoms of his trousers, across his bare feet, and onto the dry clay of the path.


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