"David Zindell - Requiem of Homo Sapiens 01 - The Broken God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zindell David)

startling and splendid against the night time sky. It was
beautiful, yes, but it was not a halla beauty, for something
in the grand array of stone buildings hinted of pride and
discord and a terrible longing completely at odds with halla.
'Losas shona, 'he said. Shona – the beauty of light; the
beauty that is pleasing to the eye.
He studied the City while the wind began to hiss. He
marvelled at the variety and size of the buildings, which he
thought of as immense stone huts flung up into the naked air
with a grace and art beyond all comprehension. There were
marble towers as bright as milk-ice, black glass needles, and
spires of intricately carved granite and basalt and other dark
stones; and at the edge of the sound where the sea swept up
against frozen city, he beheld the glittering curves of a great
crystal dome a hundred times larger than the largest snowhut.
Who could have built such impossibilities, he wondered? Who
could cut the millions of stone blocks and fit them together?
For a long time he stood there awestruck, trying to count
the lights of the City. He rubbed his eyes and peeled some dead
skin off his nose as the wind began to build. The wind cut his
face. It hissed in his ears and chilled his throat. Out of the
north it howled, blowing dark sheets of spindrift and despair.
With his ice-encrusted mitten, he covered his eyes, bowed his
head, and listened with dread to the rising wind. It was a
sarsara, perhaps the beginning of a tenday storm. Danlo had
thought it was too late in the season for a sarsara, but there
could be no mistaking the sharpness of this icy wind which he
had learned to fear and hate. He should go into his hut, he
reminded himself. He should
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light the oilstone; he should eat and pray and wait for the
wind to die. But there was no food left to eat, not even a
mouldy baldo nut. If he waited, his hut would become an icy
tomb.
And so, with the island of the shadow-men so near, he struck
out into the storm. It was a desperate thing to do, and the
need to keep moving through the darkness made him sick deep
inside his throat. The wind was now a wall of stinging ice and
blackness which closed off any light. He couldn't see his feet
beneath him, couldn't get a feel for the uneven snow as he
glided and stumbled onward. The wind cut his eyes and would
have blinded him, so he squinted and ducked his head. Even
though he was delirious with hunger, he had a plan. He tried to
ski straight ahead by summoning up his sense of dead reckoning
(so-called because if he didn't reckon correctly, he would be
dead). He steered straight toward the bay that separated the
mountain, Waaskel, from the City. If it were the World-soul's
intention, he thought, he would find the island. He could build
a hut beneath some yu trees, kill a few sleekits, rob their
mounds of baldo nuts, and he might survive.