"Roger Taylor - Hawklan 1 - Call of the sword" - читать интересную книгу автора (Taylor Roger)

In that timeless moment, His protection fell from Him, and His breast was pierced by a true
Fyordyn arrow forged with Ethriss’s skill. Then another and another and another, thick through
the death-stained air like a cleaning summer storm. And with a great cry His mortal body fell, and
turmoil reigned as His Uhriel, bereft of His will, fell before the Guardians, and the earth and sky
and sea were torn from their grasp. So too were scattered His mortal armies.

But in His falling, two things He did. His mortal hand loosed the spear that struck down Ethriss,
and His spirit shrank and vowed and learned and hid in the hearts of His most faithful until some
future time would come. For He knew that His ways lay now deep in the hearts of all men, and
that as surely as He now fell, so He must rise again in the fullness of time.

****

Even the gentle land of Orthlund cowered under that winter. The like had never been known in living
memory. It seemed that almost every day there were dark clouds gathering in the north, like armies
awaiting reinforcements. And when the howling winds brought them and their bloated burdens of snow
relentlessly southward, the Orthlundyn were more than content to surrender their villages to the assault.

Content as they sat and talked and carved in the warmth of their homes, and were grateful for thick walls
and stout roofs, and for the past summer that had given them a fine harvest and locked more than enough
warm days into their flickering radiant stones to warm them through a dozen such winters.

Inevitably though, all things were dominated by this untypical manifestation. No conversation ended
without some allusion to it, and virtually no carving was made during those months that did not enshrine
some aspect of it. In most villages, the Carvers’ Guilds held equally untypical formal meetings. Some to
discuss the new devices that were being discovered to capture the subtleties and richness of their new
land. Some to discuss not only that but, horror of horrors, a rationing of stone, for there was no way into
the mountains to replenish stocks, and even communication between villages had become difficult and
dangerous. It became a time of the miniature.

On the days when it was bright and sunny, the Orthlundyn donned their warmest clothes and wandered
through the snow-filled streets of their villages, revelling in the sight of the white, new-shaped fields, and
their houses, now strangely decorated with bellying white eaves and wind-blown buttresses. And they
would stand in open admiration of the splendour of the mountains – sharp, stern and forbidding in the
tingling air.

The children learned new games and devilments and accidentally stored up bright white memories for
future, balmier times. The wits founded the Snow Carvers’ Guild and filled the streets with strange
creatures and carved likenesses of their neighbours, to the amusement of some and the considerable
indignation of others.

Only at the very heart of the winter did a little concern creep darkly into the lives of these civilized
people. A blizzard blew for seven consecutive days, howling and screaming and so hiding the world that
it was folly to take but three steps from a threshold. Then, as the land was shaped and reshaped unseen,
conversations faded, chisels were laid aside, and eyes turned pensively to hearths to seek stillness and
reassurance in the flickering, summer-stored glow of the radiant stones.

At the height of this storm, high in the mountains where all was impassable, a figure appeared: a man.
Wrapped in a long enveloping cloak with a deep hood pulled well forward, bowing against the pitiless,
biting wind, he moved slowly through the grey swirling gloom.