"Daniel Keys Moran - Lord November" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

life; but he knew that he looked upon a lord of the House of November, a telepath like himself.
 She sat on a roof, with two men, in the last light of day. Tyrel did not know the name of the city that
surrounded them, stretching away in one direction as far as the eye could see; in another direction was a
great ocean. She seemed young, Tyrel thought perhaps fifteen or sixteen; wearing a pair of white shorts
and a thin white blouse, tinged orange by the setting sun.
The men with her were not much older, by appearance eighteen or twenty. Both were fit, one blond
and the other dark; but Tyrel did not much notice them, for the girl was speaking; had been speaking.
"...it's why God put us here. To make things better, so that the people who come after us have a
better life than the people who came before." The girl sat up slowly; her eyes, unfocused and remote, met
Tyrel's. She spoke in a voice distant and gentle:
"They come down out of the mountains, to where the circle of his fire is burning against the night. And
you see the young man he speaks to them then, at the foot of the mountains while the living diamonds
hunt them in the darkness, and tells them that the old promises will be fulfilled, the old dreams realized,
the old wrongs made right. And then, together," the girl said, looking away from Tyrel and abruptly fixing
one of her companions with a fierce gaze, "together they march back through the Traveling Waters, and
go back together to the city on the hill and drive out the enemy."
The rooftop faded and vanished; and one of the girl's companions, the dark-haired man, vanished
with it. Tyrel found himself on a mountainside at night, near what he recognized as the north end of the
Dragonback; the vast bulk of Prometheus, November's primary, blotted out the stars above them.
The girl stood facing him, with the young blonde man at her side, and Tyrel knew who they had to be:
Denice Castanaveras, dead near four centuries; and Trent the Uncatchable, who had vanished from the
Continuing Time longer ago than that. Blue fire flickered across the girl's skin, pulsed around her skull.
Trent the Uncatchable spoke. "Where are we?"
"Watching," said Denice Castanaveras. "Watching the fire burning out. They forgot to bank Tyrel's fire
when they all left together. It flickers and then the cold kills it, and all that's left is the--darkness."

In the first light, on the morning of the seventh day, the searchers came.
At first Tyrel was not certain they were not a hallucination. They moved slowly, covering roughly the
centerline of the heading Tyrel had left on file at College: five cars, with the blue on black mandala of
United Earth Intelligence emblazoned on them. He watched them coming, bringing his breathing and
heartbeat back to normal, increasing the flow of blood to his extremities, and prepared to move.
Tyrel scaled the rifle down to its lowest setting, and when the nearest car was within range, pinged a
shot off its side.
The reaction was what he had expected; the car veered off wildly, and the four flanking it dropped
out of the sky like stones, down beneath the cover of the trees.

Tyrel waited patiently; if he had learned nothing else at College, he had learned patience. It is the first
axiom of nightways that there are only necessary actions, and mistakes. By the reactions of those in the
search vehicles he knew them for shivatad, night faces, and they would know his shot for what it had
been, a warning of danger and not any serious attack.
He heard the first screams of approaching spacecraft only a few minutes after his warning shot. He let
his skin go black, highlighting himself against the pale bluff; and then for much of the morning watched the
spacecraft track back and forth across the sky above him. Finally, just before noon, one of the cars Tyrel
had seen earlier made its way up the river, floating only a few meters above the surface of the running
water, and came to a halt on the near bank. A night face Tyrel did not know got out of the car, looked
up to where Tyrel lay on the bluff, and called up, "You can come down now."

The night faces searched with no success. Who or whatever had followed Tyrel was not to be found.
Tyrel consulted the Source. High on the plateau which also holds the centuries-old ruins of Mexico
City, sits the College of United Earth Intelligence. Tyrel went to the Source's Place during late afternoon