"David Zindell - Ea Cycle 04 - The Diamond Warriors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

she held her bow in one hand and her scryer's sphere of clear, white gelstei with her
other. The sun's light poured down upon her in a bright shower. Her beautiful face,
as perfectly propor-tioned as the sculptures of the angels, turned toward me. She
smiled at me, too: but coldly, as if she had seen some terrible future that she did not
wish to share. All she said to me was: 'The only bear you'll find here today is the one
that nearly killed you years ago. It still lives, doesn't it?'
Yes, I thought, as my fingers tightened around the hilt of my sword, the bear called
out from somewhere inside me - and in some strange way, from somewhere in these
woods. Even as Asaru, who had saved me from the bear, still lived on as well. My
mother and grandmother, and all my murdered family, seemed to take on life anew in
the stems of the wildflowers and in the breath of the leaves of the new maple trees.
My father, I knew, would always stand beside me like the mountains of the land that
t loved.
Liljana, who could not smile, came up to me and grasped my hand. Her iron-gray
hair framed her pretty lace, which too often fell stern and forbidding. But despite her
relentless and domineering manner she could be the kindest of women, and the
wisest, too. She said to me, 'You've always been drawn to these woods, haven't
you?'
Her calm, hazel eyes filled with understanding. She didn't need to call on the power
of her blue gelstei to read my mind - or rather, to know what grieved my heart.
Across the clearing through the shadowed gloom of the elms, I heard a tanager
trilling out notes that sounded much like a robins song shureet, shuroo. I looked for
this bird but I could not see it. It seemed that this wood, above all other places, held
answers to the secret of my past and the puzzle of my future. There dwelled a power
here that called to me like a song of fire racing along my blood.
'Drawn, yes,' I said to Liljana. I felt a nameless dread working at my insides like ice
water. 'And repelled, too.'
'Well.' Maram said, wiping a bit of raspberry juice from his lip, 'I wish you had been
repelled a little more that day Salmelu shot you with his filthy arrow. But who would
have thought a Valari prince would go over to the Dragon and hire out as one of his
assassins? And use the filthiest of poisons? Does it still burn you, my friend?'
I pressed my hand to my side in remembrance of that day when Salmelu's poisoned
arrow had come streaking out of the tree -not so very far from here. The scratch that
it had left in my skin had long since healed but I would forever feel the kirax poison
like a heated iron sizzling deep into every fiber of my body.
'Yes, it burns,' I said to him.
'Well, then perhaps we should take greater care here. If a prince of Ishka can turn
traitor, then I suppose a Meshian can - though I've always thought your countrymen
preserved the soul of the Valari, so to speak.'
I suddenly recalled Lansar Raasharu, my father's greatest lord who had lost his soul
and his very humanity to Morjin through a hate and a leaf that I knew only too well.
And I said, 'No one is immune from evil.'
'No one except you.'
I felt my throat tighten in anger as I said 'Myself least of all Maram. You should
know that.'
'I know what I saw during this last Journey of ours. Who else but you could have
led us out of the Skadarak?'
I did not need to close my eyes to feel the blighted forest called the Skadarak pulling
me down into an icy cold blackness that had no bottom. Sometimes, when I looked
into the black centers of Maram's eyes - or my own - I felt myself hurtling down