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

Despite instinct urging her nerve endings to move, Bartta took time to breathe deeply. For the moment, the earth had grown still, but cocking an ear she heard not a single birdsong, and this she interpreted as warning that there was more seismic activity to come. Living all her life in the embrace of the Djenn Marre, she was no stranger to quakes. They were lightest in the lower foothills, increasing in intensity the farther one penetrated the high crags. Once, when she was on her way to deliver the monthly ration of supplies to the Ice Caves, she had been unlucky enough to be caught in a quake that had sheared off a section of cliff face not seven meters from where she had crouched in terror. The Ice Caves were infrequently visited and only by Ramahan acolytes. They were carved out of the granite Djenn Marre like the eyrie of a fantastic mythic raptor five kilometers from the abbey and a kilometer above the waterfalls of Heavenly Rushing, at the headwaters of the Chuun. How the Tchakira lived up there was anyone's guess. But what more did they deserve, these dregs and outcasts—criminals, misfits, madmen who had been expunged from society? Still, they were Kun-dalan. The Ramahan felt it the sacred duty of Mьna to ensure that these poor wretches would not perish in the wind- and ice-swept peaks of the Djenn Marre. Not that any civilized Kundalan had ever seen a Tchakira. But they existed, all right, for when the Ramahan acolyte arrived at the Ice Caves, as Bartta had, the previous month's rations were gone. She, like all the acolytes before her, had paused only long enough to lay down the small, dense packages of food and herb con­centrates, consume a gulp or two of cloudy rakkis, and head back down the ice-encrusted, nearly vertical trail.
Now another nearly vertical trail loomed above her. Despite her elevation, the evening sky seemed farther away than ever, a mocking shell, blackened like a burnt offering. A star emerged from the enveloping darkness, crackling blue-white fire, and just to its right one moon, then another poured their reflected light into the fissure. Bartta felt it first in the soles of her feet, and she braced herself, praying furiously for Mьna to extend Her protective hand. A clap like thunder broke the low rumbling, echoed painfully in her ears. As the earth lurched, she slipped, desperately hanging on. The fissure all around her seemed to be breaking apart, and she was certain that she was about to breathe her last.
Stillness so absolute it was unnerving enveloped everything. Looking up, she saw that the wall itself had split so that the upper tier now stepped back in a kind of ragged staircase. Instinct drove her upward. In an instant, she had reached the natural steps and, scrambling as quickly as she was able under the circumstances, made her way out of the fissure.
Gaining the floor of the gully, she did not pause even to catch her breath, but half ran with the insensate girl still over her shoulder. Not until she found herself safely on the path that wound through the kuello-firs down to Stone Border did she even dare look back over her shoulder. What she expected to see she could not say, but in the wan moonslight spilling down like milk from a she-goat's udders she saw nothing out of the ordinary. With a grunt, she shifted her burden to a less painful position, then hurried down the path toward home.
The Vine
A heartbeat after Annon loosed his arrow and Kurgan fired his bolt, the gimnopede dropped from its descending flight path over the thorny crown of the sysal tree. The bolt pierced its plump blue-and-yellow breast; the arrow had missed it by a hairbreadth.
Annon pumped a triumphant fist over his head. But Kurgan, hurling a rude gesture in his friend's direction, lunged forward, running headlong through the copse of sysal trees they had made their early-morning lair, for it was well-known among the V'ornn that the luscious gimnopedes made their nests in the highest branches of the great, gnarled, ancient trees.
"Ah, yes, the kill is mine!" Kurgan breathed. He plucked the bloody, encoded metal-alloy bolt from the dead bird's breast, pressed it back into the tertium link on the outside of his left forearm. "You see the superiority of V'ornn technology?" He shook the ash longbow Annon carried. "Why you insist on fooling around with these pathetic, backward Kundalan weapons is a mystery."
"It was an experiment," Annon said.
"A failed experiment, I warrant. You've only to use your eyes to see it."
Kurgan skewered the dead gimnopede with the slender triangular blade of the knife he always kept with him. It was his most treasured possession, the one weapon of his he allowed no one to touch, not even Annon. Not that Annon cared overmuch; he had no great love for V'ornn weaponry.
Kurgan grunted. "But the Ashera are known for their love of the Kundalan, eh?"
"Why do you keep bringing that up?" Annon said stiffly.
"You are being raised by a Kundalan. It is not natural. Whatever she teaches you is as defective as that bow she gave you. At the very least, it will come back to bite you on your tender parts."
Annon chose not to keep this topic alive, touched his own link, instead. "You rely too much on the okummmon."
"And why should I not? It sighted for me, calculated the vector of the bird's flight, the wind speed, the time of flight to a nanosecond. It loosed the bolt at just the right moment. What did this Kundalan joke do for you? The okummmon gave the kill to me, not to you."
"Without effort. The very same way it teaches us when we are Summoned to plug in."
"Just so, empty-head." Kurgan grinned as he rubbed the bolt's stubby shaft. The okummmon had already "metabolized" the gimnopede's blood, breaking it down into nutrients easily absorbed by his bloodstream. He clapped his friend on the back. "The okummmon is a privilege not to be underestimated. We Bashkir are the only Great Caste to be linked. Be proud of it, and pity the Genomatekks, a Great Caste in name only. Pity the Khagggun, the warriors; the Mesagggun, the engineers; the Tuskugggun, the females—the Lesser Castes. They are all soto—those who cannot be Summoned. It is proof that we are superior."
"To me the Summoning feels like a tether."
Kurgan nodded. "To bind us most closely to the Gyrgon."
"I want to be bound to no one."
"You are Ashera—the dynasty ordained and anointed by the Gyrgon—Those That Summon. Your father is the second of the Ashera Dynasty and you will succeed him and your son will succeed you and on and on."
Annon thought of the three sisters he hadn't seen since their births They lived in a different hingatta of their mother's affiliation—hi: mother, too, whom he had not seen since just before her death seven years ago. At that time, she had been unable to speak. In her final delirium, she had not recognized him. "I don't want that."
Kurgan laughed. "Then give it to me!"
"If I could, I would."
Kurgan's expression changed to that of someone who is deeply con cerned. "You have such strange notions, Annon Ashera. I warrant the come from that Kundalan sorceress who takes care of you. Why, she' even taught you to speak and read Kundalan."
"That's a secret between you and me, Kurgan."
Kurgan snorted. "If your father knew what nonsense she was feeding you, he would throw her out on her tenderest part."
"My father seems content with the manner in which she is raisin me." He grinned. "But she has shown me some of the secret Kundala passageways that honeycomb the palace and has told me of her village of Stone Border high up in the Djenn Marre."
"Ah, yes, the Kundalan. Keeping secrets seems to be among their most annoying traits. But who cares if they have secrets, I say? What have we to learn from inferior cultures?" He put his hand on his friend's shoulder. "I know it's hard for you. A slave rearing you! What is the regent thinking? He is besotted with her, say the people who wag their lips and cluck their tongues. Behind your back, of course."
Annon's face grew dark with blood. "I have dealt with those skcett-tas."
"And made a potful of enemies along the way. Just like your father."
"My father is afraid of no enemy."
"True enough. But the way he flies in the face of tradition… That Kundalan female of his is but one example."
"If my mother hadn't Broken Faith—"
"If your mother hadn't Broken Faith you would never have come to hingatta lьina do mori. You would have been raised by her, like your sisters, in hingatta falla do mori." Hingatta were communes of eight V'ornn females of childbearing age. These communes were where children of the Great Castes were born and raised until one year after the Channeling, when they were permanently joined to the Modality via their okummmon. "We would never have met, never have become friends. And I never would have had the opportunity to beat your oh so tender parts at hunting!"
"My father disapproves of our friendship."
"It drives mine mad!"
"He thinks your father put you up to trying to find out the secret to salamuuun."
"Our fathers hate one another, and that drug is the root of it, that is true enough," Kurgan said. "But to think that I would ever take orders from him!" He laughed. "Wennn Stogggul can rot in N'Luuura for all I care of him!"
He strung up the gimnopede by its neck, hoisting the bird where it joined the others. "Regard, my friend!" His grin was wide and mocking. "Four gimnopedes and not a single, solitary, stinking one for you!"
Annon indicated two small quadrupeds hanging from a branch. "A brace of ice-hares is good enough for me."
"Ice-hares, hah! Precious little flesh on those long bones, and what there is of it tastes like a mouth full of silicon."
"And you would know well the bitter taste of silicon, wouldn't you, my friend?"
"I? Let us wager on who has tasted more silicon!"
"We've only to set the stakes." Annon laughed.
"Three rounds of fire-grade numaaadis."
"Make it cloudy rakkis."
"That Kundalan swill? It smells like rotten clemetts."
"Too strong for the likes of you, eh?"