"Van Lustbader, Eric - Pearl 01 The Ring of Five Dragons(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

You have shown me what is most precious to you.
"Routine, Kinnnus," he said, mounting his hoverpod. "I can't imagine why I was Summoned."
Kinnnus Morcha grunted. "Typical." He started up his vehicle. "What's that saying about Gyrgon logic? It takes three lifetimes to discover there isn't any!"
Oculus
Why did you do it?" Annon asked. "This display of your sorcery could get you into trouble with my father's enemies."
"I care not for myself. I did it to protect Eleusis," she said. "So his enemies would think twice about moving against him."
"Can you see what they are up to?" he said eagerly.
"Not unless they use Kundalan sorcery against him." She laughed. "Don't you want to know how I did it?"
"Oh, I think I can guess that part."
Giyan seemed pleased. "Can you now?"
It was just past dusk. They were walking through streets packed with V'ornn and Kundalan on their way from hingatta lьina do mori to the regent's palace. It was a short walk, but the scrutiny they were given by passersby made it seem longer than it was. Tuskugggun shopkeepers suspended their haggling, customers ceased their bargain-hunting. Burly Mesagggun, their sweat-streaked, muscled arms still smeared with grease and lubricating oil, coming off shift from tending the huge, complex V'ornn generators, poked each other and leered. Bashkir hurrying to or from business appointments, slowed and stared. Kundalan drovers, leading small herds of cthauros, the handsome, six-legged animals the V'ornn—especially the Khagggun—loved to ride, rose in their saddles, pausing long enough to comment to each other on the regent's mistress and son.
"You see?" Annon said under his breath. "Word has already spread about how you bested Kurgan in the contest."
"Word could not have spread about how I won," she said with the faint smile he had come to know better even than his father's perpetually furrowed brow. She threw a slim arm across his shoulders. "Only you and I know that secret, eh?"
Annon, imagining all those tiny, pale cilia brushing his hairless skin, shuddered beneath the slight weight. He looked away, to keep his mind occupied. Of course, there were those who paid them no mind: lines of Kundalan slaves, grimy, backs bent from their long stint working the mines in the foothills of the Djenn Marre. Periodically, the V'ornn paraded them through the streets of the city both to reinforce their superiority and to further demoralize the Kundalan. It was a dirty job extracting minerals from rock, so he had heard. These rail-thin Kundalan were aware of nothing save their own exhaustion. They deserved their fate: most of them had been in the Kundalan resistance, had been captured attempting acts of murder, arson, sabotage. And yet, oddly, when he saw them, saw the expression of pain on Giyan's face, he understood, and felt something, too, stir inside him. The same sense of shame he had experienced when Kurgan had grabbed the Kundalan girl.
"But why did you challenge Kurgan to the contest?" he said suddenly, wanting to tear his mind away from such thoughts. "And outside, as well, where so many people could see?"
"Was that wrong? Will your father punish me?"
"Of course it was wrong! Of course he will punish youl" Annon hissed. "Isn't it bad enough that you won't wear the sifeyn? Now you insist on displaying Kundalan sorcery in public! You could have caused a riot! You could have been hurt!"
"I'm touched by your concern," she said, as they continued along the street. "Perhaps I allowed my emotions to get the better of me."
"Kurgan won't forget it, that I can tell you. He ran out of the hingatta as if he had a N'Luuura-hound nipping at his tender parts."
They were about to turn a corner when Giyan put an arm out, held Annon back. A caravan of crimson-and-black Genomatekk hoverpods. The were heading south, flying very low to the ground. Khagggun hoverpods bracketed the caravan in front and behind.
"What's going on?" Annon asked her. He saw that her face had gone pale.
She had pulled him back into the shadows of a silk merchant's doorway. Lengths of finely spun colored cloth fluttered like flags in the skylit interior. Pedestrians, V'ornn and Kundalan alike, had moved to the side to make way for the caravan.
"The babies have been rounded up again." A terrible sadness tinged Giyan's voice.
"What babies?" Annon watched the sleek vehicles moving away, the surf of the crowd closing in around its wake, going about its business.
Giyan signed to him, and they continued on their way toward the regent's palace.
"The babies of violence," she said when he prompted her again. "The consequence of the Kundalan females who have been raped by Kha-gggun." They went past a Kundalan female, spinning wrygrass into baskets. They smelled sweet and fermented. There were only a few coins in her pay cup. "Some get pregnant. Each Khagggun pack keeps track of their conquests; it seems to be a matter of no little pride. But there is another reason for the strict accounting. Periodically, they return, make note of the females on their lists who are pregnant. They return again at the proper time to take their babies. The Khagggun ship them back here, where they are held in the Gyrgon Temple of Mnemonics until they are six months old. Then the Genomatekks are summoned and the children are taken to Receiving Spirit, the hospice near Har-borside."
"What happens to them there?"
"No one knows," she said softly, sorrowfully. "Not even the resistance."
"Why do you care about them? They are freaks."
"I care about all life, Annon."
But he could tell that she had not told him what was in her heart.
He was about to order her to tell him when his attention was abruptly diverted.
"There is a shadow about you, young sir," a thin, reedy voice cried.
An old Kundalan seer had set himself up on the next corner. Across the top of his makeshift stall was a colorful banner that read: THE THIRD EYE SEES ALL. These self-proclaimed seers lately flourished inside the city's walls. Their so-called abilities came from their affinity with the potent and mysterious psychotropic drug, salamuuun. Though he was with a customer, the seer's head turned at the couple's approach. His night-black eyes had homed in on Annon.
He called out the same phrase again, and Giyan answered back sharply, "Keep your tongue in your head if you know what is good for you, old one. This is the regent's firstborn."
"I have seen you," the seer said. It appeared as if he had slipped into a trance. "You have been marked by the Ancient One. The scar runs right through you."
"I told you to keep still!" Giyan's fingers gripped Annon's shoulders, propelling him around the seer, toward the slender towers of the palace, their tops caught in the lingering rays of the dying sun.
"I see death, death and more death!" the seer cried after them. "Only the equilateral of truth can save you!"
"Ignore him," Giyan said.
"But what did he mean?" Annon asked.
"It is nonsense." Giyan picked up the pace in order to put as much space as possible between them and the old Kundalan. "Only fools concern themselves with nonsense."
They reached the regent's palace, at last. Just within the cyclopean jasper-and-bronze outer gates, they were halted by the outer ring of Haaar-kyut. They wore purple uniforms made of a nonreflective silicon polymer, a typical V'ornn material that was as practical as it was es-thetically dead. Platinum markings of rank were affixed to sleeve and collar. In a society where caste was worshiped, the prominent display of rank among the Khagggun was everything, a sure sign that Order was being maintained.
Security was so tight Giyan had to submit her okuuut, even though she was in and out of the palace several times a day and was with the regent's son and heir. An oblong screen glowed pale blue as a Haaar-kyut named Frawn pressed the palm of Giyan's left hand to a tertium-copper alloy plate. She could feel a slight tingling. A row of red characters—a mathematical formula unique to her and unduplicatable, she had learned—appeared on the screen, running in a spiral inside out. Another Gyrgon attempt at reducing life into an understandable, and therefore easily manipulated, pattern.
"Cleared," Frawn said, freeing her.
"Tell me something," Giyan said. "What do you expect to see when I am screened?"
"I am trained not to expect anything, to anticipate everything."
"How horrid!" she cried.
Annon grinned behind the back of his hand.
"Do you not know me by now?" she pressed.
"You are Kundalan," he said in all seriousness. "How could I be expected to know you?" His gaze slid away from her, and he nodded formally to Annon. "You may continue."