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

The arrow, having reached the apogee of its arc, now headed back downward. It struck her as odd—almost comical—the V'ornn's long, shining, hairless skulls moving in concert as they monitored its descent. With a soft, musical thwang! the arrow buried itself at the foot of the tree bole.
"Aha! Not much more could be expected from a feeble Kundalan attempt," Kurgan cried, already beginning his victory march to the sysal tree. He was brought up short by Giyan's voice. "Do not touch the arrow," she warned. But Kurgan, emboldened by the crowd and his triumph, ignored her. Reaching the foot of the tree, he grabbed the arrow to pull it from the ground, but immediately let out with such a cry that the spectators expelled a collective gasp.
"Yowl It's hot!" Kurgan waved his reddened hand aloft. "The thing is burning up!"
Indeed, there appeared to be movement at the arrow's feathered end. A haze had appeared—the kind that made the air dense and crazed with heat ripples. Were the feathers melting away? No, as they craned their necks the spellbound spectators saw that the feathers had been transformed into a vine of a green so deep it bordered on black. This vine very rapidly grew runners that sought out the bole of the sysal tree and wrapped around it. As they climbed, they grew notched leaves of a shape no one—neither Kundalan nor V'ornn—had ever seen before. In no time at all, the runners reached the cut Giyan had made in the bark. As if with a mind of their own, they twined around the V'ornn bolt. In a trice, it was completely engulfed.
"What is this?" Kurgan stood with hands on hips. "What is going on here?"
Giyan, enwreathed in a small smile, pulled at the runners. Even as they wrapped themselves around her slender wrist they began to crumble to a silvery powder until, quite as rapidly as they had appeared, they had vanished. The stunned throng crept forward, the murmuring among them rising to an incredulous babble. For there was no sign of the bolt Kurgan had shot into the tree.
Giyan plucked the arrow from the ground, but before she could replace it in her quiver Kurgan had snatched it from her. His fingers traced the arc of the feathers, the long, straight wooden shaft, the metal point which, now that he looked at it closely, had the exact shape of the vine leaves.
"What manner of magic is this?" he muttered.
"Sorcery, yes." Giyan took possession of the arrow. "Kundalan sorcery." Her piercing blue eyes were firmly fixed on Kurgan. "Dark sorcery… Powerful sorcery. The contest is over. I have won."
"Won? Won?" Kurgan howled. "How could you win? My bolt struck the tree at its heart. Your arrow never—"
"Here is my arrow." Giyan raised it over her head for all to see. "Where is your bolt, Kurgan?"
"You know where my bolt is!" He leapt to the tree. "If you require proof, I will show you! Here is where the bolt I shot—" He was brought up short as he ran his hands down the bark in an increasing frenzy. "Where is it?" he cried. "Where is the cut?"
"What cut?" Giyan asked in a silky voice, for there was no sign of the bite the bolt had made in the tree. Save for the vertical line Giyan had scored in the bark, the tree appeared exactly as it had before the contest was called.
I ortents Secrets, ana Lies
Enter, Morcha," the regent Eleusis Ashera said effusively. "Today we have much to celebrate!"
"Regent?" Kinnnus Morcha was a huge, hulking V'ornn with a deep scarred crease along the left side of his shining skull. The four gold suns on his purple silicon polymer uniform marked him as the commandant of the Haaar-kyut, Khagggun handpicked by Eleusis and trained by Morcha himself, loyal and answerable only to the regent.
The day's business at an end, the two V'ornn found themselves alone in the Great Listening Hall of the regent's palace. It was an asymmetrical space—roughly oval in shape—that the V'ornn found unsettling. A gallery ran around the perimeter one story up. This gallery was capped by a plaster ceiling held aloft by alabaster columns set on black-granite plinths. However, the entire center of the hall was open to the elements. Now, late-afternoon lights bathed the three highly polished heartwood posts set in a perfect equilateral triangle that spanned three meters on a side.
Eleusis roamed within the precincts of this imaginary triangle as his Haaar-kyut commander watched silently. He often did this, in a vain attempt to fathom its meaning. Was it religious, spiritual, practical? Even the Ramahan he had consulted, even the ones who had been interrogated by Kinnnus Morcha in the bowels of the palace, had no explanation. How old were these posts? Could they have predated even the palace?
"Line-General, do you have any idea what the Kundalan used these posts for?"
Kinnnus Morcha shrugged. "My suspicion is that they were part of a weapon."
"Spoken like a true Khagggun." Eleusis pursed his lips. "If so, then why was it never used against us?" He shook his head. "No, the Gyrgon assure me that the posts were never used as a weapon. What, then? Are they decoration? Part of a temple to Mьna? We have been on
Kundala one hundred and one years and we still do not know." He cocked his head to one side. "Does that not strike you as odd?"
"To be honest, regent, I give the Kundalan thought only when I have to kill one."
Eleusis nodded, as if he fully expected that answer. "Still, it makes its point."
The Line-General waited several moments before he said: "What point, regent?"
"That no matter how much we know, there is always more to learn." Eleusis strode swiftly out of the triangle, raising an arm for Morcha to follow him. They passed through an open doorway into the regent's private anteroom.
Eleusis could no longer keep the smile of satisfaction off his face. "Today's case in point. I have just received a communique from the site of Za Hara-at. They have signed the last contract!"
"Contracts," Kinnnus Morcha scoffed. "You should have let me take my wing of Khagggun and dealt with the Korrush tribes the way we have dealt with the local Kundalan." The Korrush was the local name of the Great Northern Plains, 250 kilometers northeast of Axis Tyr. To its north was the Great Rift in the Djenn Marre, to its east was the beginning of the Great Voorg, the vast, trackless desert.
"And have the added expense of stationing a permanent pack of Khagggun at the site to ensure against vandalism and random attacks?" The regent shook his head. "Dealing with them this way makes far more sense, Line-General. Now they will join our work crews. At Za Hara-at goodwill is everything."
"Pardon my bluntness, regent, but what is goodwill to a Khagggun?"
Eleusis laughed good-naturedly as he slapped the Line-General on his broad back. "Imagine it. V'ornn and Kundalan working side by side to create what is sure to become the greatest trading city on the planet. So much for Prime Factor Stogggul and his reactionary cabal." He was grinning from ear to ear. "It seems as if allowing Kundalan businesses to flourish in the same garden as V'ornn trading houses will be a most lucrative endeavor."
Eleusis, tall and slender as a milkweed, filled two shanstone goblets made at lьina do mori, thrust one at the Line-General. "Join me, Kinnnus!" He laughed. "What makes you so glum?"
"I am not—pardon me for saying this, regent. But I am unused to hearing myself called by my given name alone. It is not the V'ornn way."
"No. It is a Kundalan custom, Kinnnus, and a fine one at that. It tends to engender a feeling of trust."
"Trust never comes easily to a Khagggun, regent."
"Neither does change, Kinnnus."
The two men were standing in the center of the alien octagonal room, an antechamber off the Great Listening Hall of the regent's palace—what the Kundalan had called Middle Palace. The floor was pure white marble over which smooth rugs of V'ornn manufacture had been set in a precise mathematical pattern that complemented the geometric pattern in the rugs themselves. Light came not from the traditional Kundalan filigreed lanterns, but from eye-shaped fusion lamps manufactured in V'ornn power plants established decades ago. This cold, revealing light illuminated the vaulted ceiling in a manner inconceivable to the Kundalan. It was dark blue, decorated with gold stars and streaking comets. At its zenith, intricately carved, were the five moons of Kundala, each with the face of a beautiful woman—all aspects of the Goddess Mьna. Trios of white-marble pilasters, delicately veined with vitreous obsidian, rose up each wall like vines in a garden, their apexes carved into the shape of stylized fronds. The tall triple-arched Kundalan windows had been something of a problem. The commandant had suggested mortaring them up for security reasons, but Eleusis had come up with a more elegant solution. He had had tapestries woven by the finest Tuskugggun artisans hung over the windows, thereby placating Kinnnus Morcha and pleasing himself, for it was told and retold by the Khagggun of the Haaar-kyut that the regent could be seen from time to time peeling back the tapestries to peer out the windows. What he was observing was a source of constant comment.
In any event, these remarkable tapestries depicted, in one manner or another, the endless saga of V'ornn wandering. For the V'ornn were a nomadic people, their homeworld an uninhabitable blackened cinder ever since the binary star that had been their sun, their light, their warmth had gone nova. That was many eons past. Now they wandered the stars to conquer, to live for as long a time as the Gyrgon required to ask their mysterious questions of whatever alien place they were in, and then they were gone, never to return. For the V'ornn there was no possibility of going back; they pressed forward into uncharted space. When a group of them found a world rich in natural resources like Kundala, members of the leading Bashkir Consortia were dispatched from the main fleet moving in eternal convoy on the ion currents of deep space to stake their claim, to reap the rewards of costly space travel.
Such was the artistry of these tapestries that all the pathos and yearning and mystery inherent in V'ornn culture were interwoven into the scenes as carefully as were the jewel-tone fabrics. Utilitarian V'ornn furnishings made of metal alloys—lightweight but strong—had replaced the ornate, curlicued wooden pieces of the Kundalan. As Kinnnus Morcha had said when he had first seen the lounges and chairs, they looked as if they would splinter the moment a V'ornn sat in them. But then Kinnnus Morcha, like most V'ornn, found nothing esthetically pleasing in the alien architecture. Why, even here in the central palace of the city, none of the rooms seemed large enough for a V'ornn's sensibility. And there was so much wasted space! Colonnaded terraces, sweeping agate staircases, filigreed cornices, plinths and friezes, ornate statues and strange carvings, lush gardens that mirrored the mazelike interior—and everywhere shrines and symbols to the accursed Goddess, Mьna.
Unusually, the thick heartwood doors to the regent's private quarters stood slightly ajar. Kinnnus Morcha took a discreet look at an area of the palace that even he, as commandant of the Haaar-kyut, had never seen. Some privileges were forever beyond almost all of the Lesser Castes.
Eleusis turned and shut the doors firmly. The regent was dressed formally in white and gold: low boots, tight trousers, metallic-mesh blouse beneath his waist-length, braided, high-collared jacket, the sleeves cut short enough to expose his okummmon. He glanced at Kinnnus Morcha's goblet. "Come, come. You haven't touched your drink. We must remedy that." He lifted his goblet high. "To Za Hara-at! My noble experiment!"
"To our enemies!" Kinnnus Morcha said in the traditional Khagggun salute as his free hand cupped the pommel of the double-bladed shock-sword that hung through a titanium clip at his left hip. Though the Khagggun used many highly sophisticated instruments of attack, the shock-sword remained their weapon of choice when it came to hand-to-hand combat. "May destruction possess their houses!" His wide face, the color of curdled cream, contracted as he quaffed his drink. "Ah! A Kundalan cloudy rakkis! No V'ornn fire-grade numaaadis for the regent!"
Eleusis laughed. "You know me too well, I'm afraid."
"Ah, no chance of that, regent. What Khagggun knows the mind of a member of the Great Castes?"
Eleusis nodded as he refilled their goblets. "I grant you there is a cultural gulf between us, but I value you nonetheless for your keen insight."
Kinnnus Morcha fairly bowed. "The regent is generous with his praise."
The regent, eyeing him judiciously, returned the goblet to him. "You have served me well, Kinnnus. I know that your personal feelings for the Za Hara-at experiment are mixed."
"I am Khagggun, regent. I have no use for inferior life-forms."
"Nevertheless you carried out my orders to be even-handed with the Kundalan, to keep the Khagggun raids to a minimum, and ban altogether the hunting parties that killed Kundalan for the sheer sport of it."
"I live to serve my regent."