"Van Lustbader, Eric - Pearl 02 The Veil Of A Thousand Tears(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

"But surely if he is here someone would have seen this . . . archdaemon by now."
"On the contrary. Archdaemons cannot appear for long in their own form until all the seven Portals are open. They must take hosts-possess them, work through them. Their infiltration is more difficult to detect and therefore more insidious. Legend tells us that their control of their hosts is imprecise. The hosts' actions may, from time to time, appear out of character because the archdaemon does not have immediate access to all their knowledge. However, that can change over time."
"We must either destroy them both or return them to the Abyss," Riane said. "Otherwise, I will never be able to open the Storehouse Door. I will never find The Pearl."
Giyan, flexing her fingers inside their eerie shells, smiled grimly. "We must speed up your sorcerous training. Thigpen and I can only do so much. Miina's Sacred Texts, Utmost Source and The Book of Recantation, both of which you have read, require interpretation so that you may understand the inner workings of language as science, science as sorcery. The interpretations require the precise mixtures, constructs of phrases, incantations, theories, ideas, whispers, shadows, and light. Once you have absorbed these lessons, you must practice those interpretations over and over until they are ingrained in you, until they become part of you."
A shadow passed across Riane's face. "Mother could have taught me," she whispered. "But Mother is dead." She was wearing turquoise silk robes made from Mother's garments after a terrible Kyofu spell had caused Riane mistakenly to kill her. The murder had been foretold in Prophesy, but that did not make it any easier to live with.
Giyan stirred. When she gazed at her child, transformed, she saw great promise, but never without the pain of regret. Regret that she could never tell Annon that he was her son, regret that she had been forced to hide him inside Riane, to leave Riane with Bartta, who had abused Riane terribly. Claws in the lining of her stomach.
"Mother would have been the first to tell you that no one teacher will suffice." She vibrated with her child's sorrow, wished she could take it all upon herself. "Your journey is long, Dar Sala-at, arduous and complex. There is someone who I must get you to as quickly as possible. She will commence your studies. Her name is Jonnqa. She is an imari at Nimbus, a kashiggen in the Northern Quarter of Axis Tyr."
"What could a mistress of pleasure at a salamuuun palace have to teach me?"
A small smile played across Giyan's lips. "Again you sound like a V'ornn. I know you are impatient, Teyjattt, but you must get it through your head that you have much to learn. There are no shortcuts, sorcerous or otherwise. As I said, the Dar Sala-at's path is a most difficult one. Up to now your life has been as a male V'ornn of high privilege or as a Ramahan cloistered in the Abbey of Floating White. In both instances you were protected from the everyday world. Both these lives are now at an end."
"I do not understand."
Giyan turned around the book she had been reading so Riane could see the Old Tongue text. "You see here, in the days before the V'ornn, when lightning played across the sky, when all of Miina's magical beasts-the Rappa, the narbuck, the perwillon, even the Ja-Gaar and the Five Sacred Dragons-roamed the land and the skies, all Kundalan were in harmony." She turned the page. "Females and males alike shared everything, including power. The Ramahan, too, included priests and priestesses."
"But then a cabal of male Ramahan wrested control from Mother," Riane said. "They held her captive for more than a century."
"Until you found her and freed her." Giyan, sensing Riane's disquiet, continued. "But here is the important thing. Nowadays, male Kundalan treat our females as inferiors, just as the male V'ornn do their own females. This is what you will be up against when you venture out into the world." She closed the book with a snap. "It makes my blood run cold. It is a manifestation of the worst thing the V'ornn have done to us. Do you know what that is, Riane?"
"That they have taken away our freedom."
"That is evil, but it is not the worst."
"That they have killed and tortured tens of thousands of us."
"Terrible, yes." She shook her head. "But the worst is being done now, systematically. The V'ornn use time, ideas, the masses against us. Why do you think the youngest Kundalan males treat their female counterparts with contempt? Because it is all they know. Each day brings new converts to the new Goddessless religion of Kara. Where did Kara begin, do you think? With the V'ornn, of course."
Riane was startled. "Are you certain? Annon did not know this."
"I daresay most V'ornn do not. It is a device of Gyrgon origin. And yet it continues to win converts. With every generation the great Kundalan narrative that Miina labored so hard and long to teach Her children is being eaten away by V'ornn acid. You saw as much when you were at the Abbey of Floating White. Osoru is no longer taught, Sacred Scripture has been distorted beyond recognition. And the worst part is that those distortions are being accepted by the acolytes. They cannot see the truth because the morality inside the abbey has been murdered, and without morality truth has no dominion."
Tears stood in the corners of Giyan's eyes. Riane felt her pain as if it were her own. The V'ornn-ness inside her recoiled at the words, at the emotions, at the implication of what the V'ornn had perpetrated. This disconnect made her feel weak and dizzy, so that she was obliged to grab the table edge lest she pitch over onto the gleaming floor.
"Understand this, Riane," Giyan whispered. "Time is the great ally of the liar because when lies are repeated long enough, the truth fades and is forgotten. Then the lies become the truth. History is remade, and all is lost."
Riane thought of how Bartta, who had run the abbey, had murdered her friend Asta and pretended it was an accident. She recalled how Bartta had tortured her and almost killed her. Bartta was wicked, but Bartta had come to believe the distortions and lies she herself had made up. She was perpetrator and victim rolled into one.
"And yet..."
Giyan's whistleflower-blue eyes regarded her levelly, and a kind of current passed between them, a language of their own design begun with Annon's first memory. What a powerful thing such a language can be, for it flows in the blood, informs the bone with unshakable knowledge.
"And yet, what mystery beats within the V'ornn heart," Giyan whispered. "There was Eleusis, brave, compassionate Eleusis; there is Rekkk, brave, compassionate Rekkk. And most mysterious of all, perhaps, there was the Gyrgon Nith Sahor, who gave his life for us."
"And yet, what mystery beats within the Kundalan heart," Riane answered her, "for you to raise Annon and not hate him as a mortal enemy, for you to love him as if he were your own flesh and blood, for you to save him from the enemies of the Ashera at risk to your own life."
"The enemies of the Ashera are my enemies," Giyan said simply.
When she spoke thus her power was undeniable, defeating even that last bastion of V'ornn maleness that still beat within Riane's soul.
"I love you, Giyan," Riane said. "I find it miraculous that you of all Kundalan are the Lady destined to guide the Dar Sala-at."
"I love you more than life itself, Teyjattt." A tear slid down Giyan's cheeks. She reached out for her child, but could feel nothing through the inconstant electrical jolts delivered by the chrysalides.
"Together we will labor to bring back Miina's sacred narrative in all its glory," Riane said with a resolved heart.
"I fear we will labor greatly."
Riane felt something inside her quail. She knew from experience that there was something oracular about Giyan. Then Annon's V'ornn-ness took over, and she said: "If this is our destiny, then so be it."
Giyan smiled through her tears. "When you speak thus I am reminded of Nith Sahor. I miss him. His death was a terrible loss to our cause."
"I only met the Gyrgon once." Riane said. "But without his help I would not have reached the Storehouse Door in time to stop the Tym-nos device from destroying Kundala."
"You would have appreciated his wisdom, might very well have come to like him. It is a great pity he was an anomaly among Gyrgon."
For the first time, Riane saw the title of the book Giyan had been reading: Darkness and Its Constituents. She gestured with a sun-bronzed hand. "Is the Tzelos described in there?"
Giyan smiled grimly and reopened the book. Riane saw a line drawing, filling up an entire page, precise as an architectural blueprint, of the horrific beast she had seen in Otherwhere. The drawing was fascinating and repellent at the same time.
"A profane experiment of Pyphoros' gone terribly wrong," Giyan said. "Like all his experiments."
"What was he trying to do?"
"Create life, something only the Maker can do."
"The Great Goddess Miina?"
"Can give life, so it is written. But that is not the same. Even Miina is not the Maker. She cannot create a new life out of the elemental components of the Cosmos."
"But She created Kundala."
"Ah, no. She bade the Sacred Dragons to create Kundala, and they did so with the help of The Pearl. They caused matter to cleave to matter. They brought fire and air, water and earth. Metal from dark distant stars. When Kundala was born, in the Time before the Imagining, the hand of the Maker moved and the Kundalan appeared."
Riane stood for a time absorbing her words. The weight of history lay upon the shelves ringing the Library, voices of Kundalan ancestors disturbed from their long slumber by the discussion of Creation. The faintest stirring seemed to play against her cheek, a liquification of the light reflected off the mosaic sky, the exhalations of generations past. Hopes, fears, dreams alive here in the twinkling mosaic stars, the burnished continents, the rakkis-dark seas. She felt all over again her deep and abiding love for this woman who had raised Annon, who had saved him from certain death, who had been willing to sacrifice everything, including her life, to save the V'ornn child she had raised. Part of her would never understand that miracle; another part felt only gratitude.
Typical. The V'ornn searched for answers to everything-this is, doubtless, what led the species to continue its long lonely quest through the Cosmos. This is doubtless what drove the Gyrgon to continue their mysterious experiments. Looking for the answers: who are we, where did we come from, where are we going. It was said that the Gyrgon lusted after immortality, that they wished for nothing less grand than to be like the god, Enlil, they had rejected. Was it the truth? No one knew. The Gyrgon were masters of secrecy, subterfuge, misdirection. They were already demigods in their way, powerful, manipulative, remote. Except for Nith Sahor.
"And where was Miina?" Riane asked with a teenager's directness. "Did She see the Maker?"
"She slept," Giyan said with the simple power of faith. "And when She woke, we were here, Her name already on our lips."
She would have continued. Her mouth was partly open, the next words about to be released, when she felt a dreadful hammerblow of pain. With a moan, she slid to her knees, hugging her arms close to her slender waist. Riane knelt beside her, held her as tenderly as once Giyan had held Annon when his young body had trembled with ague.