"Andre Norton - WW - The Turning 03 - On Wings of Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

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On Wings of Magic by Andre
Norton, Sasha Miller and
Patricia Mathews
Acknowledgments

A very big acknowledgment is due to a very great lady, Andre Norton.
Not only did she create this world and allow me to live in it for a while, but
she also handed me Alizon as my own little piece of it to develop.
Therefore, thank you, Andre. Thank you for everything.
--Sasha Miller

My thanks to Dr. Suzette Haden Elgin, inventor of Laadan, a language
created by and for women, for her permission to use this language in "We,
the Women."

Thanks also to Linda Piper for the tale told by Arona to the travelers in
Chapter 13, Toads.
--Patricia Mathews


The Chronicler

THERE are places in this ancient land of ours which are pleasant to the
eye and yet are meant for traps for the unwary. Though Lormt (which I
have come to see as my Great Hall, I, Duratan, who am kinless) is filled
with knowledge gathered from years untold, still we who delve there also
realize that there are secrets so well lost in the ages that they may never be
made plain. Even if reference to them is found, it will not be well enough
understood that its message can be clear to those for whom it might have
the strongest meaning.

We live now in a time of ceaseless change, never knowing what the next
day will bring. Once I was a righting man who needed to come instantly
alert to the blast of the war horn. Now I am again engaged in battles, but
mostly far more subtle ones. Some are fought in a lamp-lighted room,
upon a time-ridged table, my weapons not word nor dart-gun, but
crumbling rolls of parchment and books so pressed by years their thick
wooden or metal covers have glued their fragile pages together and it
takes the lightest and most careful of handling to free them. Then, far too
often, the near invisible lines on those pages are in some tongue foreign to
that we know in this day, and so provide puzzles for even the scholars
among us who have been the longest in the pursuit of such.