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

Giving Ras Shamra one last look of longing, she abandoned Otherwhere, only to hear Thigpen's sorrowful cry:
"Gone."
Eleana and Rekkk turned at the hollow sound emanating from deep inside Thigpen.
The Rappa was weeping, crystalline tears rolling freely down her furred cheeks, dripping off her muzzle. "She's gone."
And they saw she was right. The daemon Tzelos had vanished into the night sky and, with her, their beloved Giyan.
2
Rescendance

The V'ornn regent's palace in Axis Tyr, once the Ramahan Middle Palace, was a seething hive of activity. Lines of functionaries, ministers, petitioners from all castes snaked through the long, columned, light-strewn antechambers, overflowed the vast and magnificent public rooms like surf at high tide. All were clamoring for a fragment of the new regent's attention.
Kurgan, ignoring them, ignoring the duties of his office, went up a staircase where he was sure to avoid being seen and walked quickly and silently through his quarters. These private chambers were much changed. In the days when Eleusis Ashera had ruled the space they exhibited the sober orderliness of the career diplomat. Intimate groupings of chairs where Eleusis met with ministers and brokered deals were surrounded by mementos of a career built upon judicious compromise. It was, at bedrock, a working residence. After Kurgan's father, Wennn Stogggul, had Eleusis Ashera assassinated and briefly attained the office of regent, he had employed a host of Mesagggun and Tuskugggun to transform the residence. The result was a kind of opulence rarely seen save among an elite cadre of Bashkir lords. Over his family's protestations, Kurgan had immediately auctioned off his father's vast collection of artwork, a deliberate act of cruelty and disrespect that had pleased him immensely. Nowadays, the chambers had about them the spare, masculine functionality of a Khagggun Line-General's quarters. Racks of war trophies-weapons stripped from the alien dead on far-flung battlefields light-years distant-hung upon the walls in precisely aligned rows, gleaming with oil and wax, cataloged, arrayed in alphabetical order.
But he often felt stifled here. Worse, bored and disgusted, surrounded as he was by ministers, court Bashkir, aides, flunkies, and the like. Having mastered the art of appearing busy while doing nothing at all, they were worse than contemptible; they were deadly dull. He discovered that they expended astonishing effort defending their tiny slice of the fiefdom, to the ruination of those around them. They were like wyr-hounds, sun-dazed by the dazzle of the regent's court. They barked and bit each other mercilessly. These efforts had with an alarming swiftness begun to emit the foul odor of inertia. And yet, as Star-Admiral Olnnn Rydddlin had pointed out, he was powerless to dismiss them because of their intimate knowledge of the day-to-day functioning of the regent's office, whose complexities were staggering. As far as he could see, the weight of protocol kept the functioning to the bare minimum. Quite un-V'ornnlike, in his opinion, and it made him wonder whether this situation had been created by the Gyrgon to keep the regent from making any changes at all. This stasis he meant to crack wide open, whether or not the Gyrgon approved.
Axis Tyr was the center of life on Kundala. But in a way only he could comprehend this was beside the point. Axis Tyr was a city tainted by ignominious defeat, a place that in Kundalan lore had been holy and now was desecrated by the V'ornn occupation. In fact, the V'ornn were headquartered in the city's two most sacred structures. As regent, he lived and worked here, the former Middle Palace, while the Gyrgon had transformed the Abbey of Listening Bone into their Temple of Mnemonics.
Truth to tell, what he liked best was to see for himself these humiliations, to see these open wounds in the hollow-eyed stares of the Kundalan who were allowed into the city. Their diminished status enlarged him all the more. Due to V'ornn innovation and technology, Axis Tyr was a humming metropolis beneath the sadness and despair. Kundalan plots were everywhere-in fact, to Olnnn's dismay Kurgan encouraged them. He could sense the desperation that accompanied the formation of ragged cadres, misaligned alliances, jury-rigged governments-in-exile. Snatches of seemingly innocent conversations overheard down this alley or along the edge of that plaza harbored secrets that made the air tremble like the rising of heat currents. It was a game-ferreting out the collusion, identifying the conspirators, apprehending them just when it appeared to them that they were on the verge of success. Then he had the pleasure of meting out the punishment for their transgressions.
Beyond the regent's quarters lay a vast labyrinth of rooms, corridors, loggias largely unexplored since the time the Ramahan who had ruled from this place were slaughtered. He walked through the chambers, ornate in the fevered Kundalan style, whose purposes were long forgotten. Now they were littered with goblets and plates, furry with cobwebs and dust. Vestiges of unknown celebrations or rites. Through skylights, oculi, open loggias were patinaed by the melancholy autumnal light. Frescoes frowned down at him. Sculptures were rendered irrelevant by the long occupation. Fueled by his hatred for his father, he had spent a great deal of time and effort in the meticulous planning of his ascension to the regency but none at all in the contemplation of the office itself.
How hollow rang the silence in the aftermath of his victory! He had burned to become regent. Aided by Olnnn Rydddlin, he had concocted an intricate scheme whereby his father and his mentor, once allies, had destroyed each other. But now that he had achieved his dream the seemingly self-reproducing minutiae of running a planet were plowing him under. How had Eleusis Ashera had the patience to deal with this host of jabbering sycophants? No wonder his own father had been a failure at it. He hated Eleusis all the more for excelling at something for which he himself clearly lacked all aptitude.
A sickly-sweet odor was everywhere absorbed into the furniture, the carpets, even, he was convinced, the marble-clad walls which, when he came near, seemed to exude the must of death. Unable to bear the weight of melancholy a moment longer, he stepped out onto an unfamiliar balcony with braided porphyry columns and darkly gleaming tile-work balustrade. Leaning over the edge, he looked out over the city, the bright splashes of color, the insectlike droning from crisscrossing hover-pods, the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot, the skein of clogged streets rippling away in all directions, the bobbing heads of passersby, the V'ornn gleaming bald and coppery, the Kundalan with their hair, thick and loose, the babble of voices, the smells of spices and oils and broiling meat and burning metal. A young Kundalan female, laden with packages, passed below him. Her long, lustrous hair hung down to her buttocks. She paused long enough to switch her burden from one shoulder to the next. In the process, her hip canted out, her hair swung from one shoulder blade to the other and back. He felt a stirring in his tender parts. He had a definite thing for Kundalan females of a certain type, the single trait he had inherited from his father. V'ornn, who were utterly hairless, often found the luxuriant growth on Kundalan females an exotic and powerful aphrodisiac. Her face moved from shadow to light and unbidden a memory surfaced of spying on just such a female when he and Annon had been out hunting, the female he had taken by force, the female he and Annon had almost come to blows over.
He and Annon had been best friends, sharing everything despite the rivalry between their families. Or perhaps they had bonded so closely because of that rivalry, because defiance ran strong in both their bloodstreams. Up until that moment, he had considered Annon to be more or less mild-mannered. The wild look in his eye that day was something to behold. If was as if he had let his guard down and showed a side of himself that Kurgan had never seen before. He sighed, leaning on the balustrade, watching the Kundalan female vanish in the current of the thronged street. Thinking of the female and of Annon he was reminded of the life he had left behind and, again, the melancholy welled up inside him. Times like these he missed Annon with a fierceness he could not have imagined when Annon had been alive. To be best friends with an Ashera was ironic in the extreme. That friendship had vexed his father no end. He began to smile, his melancholy lifting somewhat. Only he of all the Stogggul siblings had provoked in his father that certain choleric look. And Marethyn, of course, but that was different. She was Tuskugggun, a female.
He heard his name being called, but he neither moved nor responded. He waited for the Gyrgon Nith Batoxxx to approach him through the dimly lighted rooms. Even with his back turned, he could feel the Gyrgon's presence, the slow atomic crawl along the skin of his arms that would have stirred his hair had he any to stir. He could see what the two of them had in common. Besides their ambition and the agendas they kept hidden from one another, they were conquerors in the center of things living off the fruit of their conquest. All about them were the remains of the Kundalan beasts who had fallen beneath the ion sizzle of their shock-swords, and with the merest flick of their hands they could cause this wounded mass to move this way or that, to do or say anything that on a whim they might think of.
Having a Gyrgon around the palace had its benefits. For one thing, it made those around him anxious; he fed off the slow shredding of their nerves. For another, Gyrgon had about them the distinct aroma of power, of secrets being carried just beneath the glittering alloy skin of their exomatrices.
It was a great pity that he could not abide this particular Gyrgon, who, in his disguise as the Old V'ornn, had been his teacher and mentor. He had been forced to pledge himself to Nith Batoxxx, a noxious state of affairs he detested and would not long tolerate. Now that he had become regent his goal was to find the weakness in the Gyrgon Comradeship and exploit it to gain access to the treasure trove of new technology they created and zealously kept under lock and key. They were all-V'ornn and Kundalan alike-under the Gyrgon's ion-mailed thumb, and this hegemony he fervently wished to overthrow.
Not that it would be easy. Not with this particular Gyrgon riding such close herd on him. Nith Batoxxx in his guise as the Old V'ornn had trained Kurgan to become regent. Why? And what else did this Gyrgon want from him? It irked him to think that without the Gyrgon's help and guidance he would be just another sixteen-year-old Bashkir scion, learning how to run his family's Consortium.
"You cannot hide from me," Nith Batoxxx said from the edge of the shadowed interior. "You know this very well." Light spun off the black alloy of his exomatrix. Protected within it, he looked vaguely insectoid. "And yet here you are, alone." His mailed hand moved along the wall, a constant threat. "Shirking your office."
He was unlike any other Gyrgon in the Comradeship, Kurgan at least knew that much. Though what precisely made him different was a perplexing mystery.
His long gaunt face was a pale amber. A complex spiderweb of ter-tium and germanium circuitry ran across the taut skin starting from the crown of his skull down the back and along the sides of his neck. Ruby pupils studded obsidian-black eyes. At the point of each cheekbone was implanted a tertium neural-net stud that pulsed to the beating of his hearts.
"What is it you want of me?" Kurgan said curtly.
In two long strides, the Gyrgon closed the space between them. With a lazy, almost contemptuous gesture, the tip of his mailed forefinger touched Kurgan on his breastbone. Kurgan fell to his knees, his legs turned to water. But even in his pain he would not cry out; the Old V'ornn had trained him better than that.
"It is not for you, not for any V'ornn, to ask questions of me, Stogggul Kurgan."
Nith Batoxxx towered over him. Kurgan had the good sense not to move, not even to look up. A crackling of hyperexcited ions had commenced, bringing with it the unmistakable whiff of death. Nith Batoxxx held his hand just above Kurgan's bent head.
"You believe you can get the better of me. A bitter misapprehension, you will find." The Gyrgon said this softly, his voice drifting, it seemed, on the burnished late-afternoon sunshine. "You have the arrogance of youth. You are fearless. You can outwit a Gyrgon. This is what you believe."
Staring down, Kurgan could only see the Gyrgon's tertiurn-studded boots. A vertical row of glittering black metallic talons marched up the center of each boot. He felt his hearts beating fast. As always, he paid very close attention not only to what Nith Batoxxx was saying but also how he said it.
"Fear is my currency, Stogggul Kurgan. Never forget that. I can sniff out the fear in even the staunchest spirit." Of a sudden, Nith Batoxxx knelt and, with his forefinger beneath Kurgan's chin, lifted his head. There was no pain this time at the contact. The ion fire sizzled, quiescent for the moment. "The truth is you hold your fear close inside you where no one can see. But I will get it out of you."
No one knows me, Kurgan thought. But Annon had, reluctant though he was to admit this.
"Your only danger, Stogggul Kurgan, will come from forgetting that I know you."
He put his long, lupine face so close to Kurgan's that Kurgan could smell the mingled scent of clove oil and burnt musk corning off him in waves. It was so strong it made him momentarily dizzy.
"That night in the caverns, the night of the Ring of Five Dragons, did you come across the Dar Sala-at? This is what I need to know." Nith Batoxxx's voice had changed slightly, darkening in timbre and seeming disconnected from his body.
"No," Kurgan replied, carefully monitoring this change.
"That is a very great pity. I know the Dar Sala-at exists," Nith Batoxxx continued in this same eerie voice. "He was there that night, lured by the promise of the Ring. I could feel his power; he engaged Malistra in sorcerous battle. But you tell me you never saw him."
"That's right."
"Even though I sent you to find him."
"It was chaos down there. Rekkk Hacilar was hiding in Haaar-kyut armor. He was causing havoc everywhere. I was diverted."
"It is imperative that I know the Dar Sala-at's identity, do you understand me?"
"Not in the least." The lies in among the truth had sprung surprisingly easily to his lips. He had, indeed, met the Dar Sala-at that night in the caverns below the regent's palace. To his consternation the Dar Sala-at was a young female. He did not know her name, but he was absolutely certain that he could pick her out of a crowd at fifty meters. This was his secret, hoarded for a time when its use would be of most value to him. He would never tell Nith Batoxxx, nor anyone else until it served his purpose.
"The Dar Sala-at is one of the few who is destined to know the location of the seven Portals."
"What are they?"
"You simply cannot manage not to ask questions, can you?" Nith Batoxxx looked at him out of glittering eyes. "The Portals are important because they lead to ... a land of riches."
Why had the Gyrgon hesitated? Kurgan asked himself. Was he lying? And, if so, why?
"I know the location of three of them, but not the other four."
"Why do you need to know the location of all seven?"
Nith Batoxxx threw him an evil smile. "None can be fully opened unless all are opened simultaneously. This is a fiendishly difficult process. The first step is to locate all seven Portals. Then we will move on to the next stage of our assault."
"I noticed you said our."