Pokrewne

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Chelsea Handler Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang (epub
Brit Brinson [Dia of the Dead Dia of the Dead (epub)
Cody Goodfellow [Radiant Dawn Radiant Dawn (epub)
Cate Tiernan [Immortal Belove Immortal Beloved (epub)
C J Busby [Deep Amber 01] Deep Amber (retail) (epub)
Carl Ashmore [Time Hunters 01 The Time Hunters (epub)
Drew Hayes [Super Powereds 02 Super Powereds Year 2 (epub) i
Beth Harbison [Shoe Addict 02 Secrets of a Shoe Addict (epub)
Cara Lynn Shultz [Dark World The Dark World (retail) (epub)
artystka wedrowna proszynski i

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.They had had such beer in the Lakht, three years ago.They had captured a wagonload of beer and behaved like boys.Here we are, they had laughed, where the ships came down.Shall we look for ships in the desert?“Here we are!” they had shouted at the sky, blasphemed, and waved their arms as if they would beckon down heavenly watchers.They had roused up a band of the Ila’s men by mischance and fought them, drunk as they were.His father had hit him when he found out, but not been greatly angry, since none of them had died, and they had killed the Ila’s men.Hup-hup-hup, the word came.The wife was dully compliant now, having had a double ration of beer, and they set her on her feet and had her walk.6710.01 5/31/01 11:52 AM Page 1414 • C.J.C H E R RY HThe potter, equally drunk, asked after his mother.“Be still,” others of the mad shouted at him, and the Ila’s men laughed and rode down on either side of the potter, picked him up by either arm, and carried him far ahead of them, where they dropped him.The potter sat down until the column overtook him, and then they roused him good-naturedly to his feet.The Ila’s men were in high spirits, with the city so near.They gave their sour beer to their prisoners and planned on better in the city that ran with water.The old man fell down just before dawn and died, so it seemed: no one had touched him.The Ila’s men argued among themselves and decided they needed to bring the body along, all the same.It might draw vermin, and it was a danger.They had abandoned the others that had died.But the Ila would pay them a bounty for each madman, and they might argue a little gold even out of the body, proving there was one less of their kind in the world.The city was close.So was reward.Marak ate what he was given at dawn, drank what water he was given.The sun came slipping over the Qarain’s saw-toothed ridge with morning, red fingers lancing across the powder sand, and the city that spread itself like a seam of light now was no mirage.Many of the mad cried out, but some, once fooled, disbelieved it in silence.In the light and the trickery of the land Marak walked, walked, walked.The city grew nearer all day, the Lakht never seeming narrower, or the city nearer.The sun beat down, blinding, and now, having been generous, the Ila’s men turned impatient.They did not camp at noon, but pressed onward in the blazing sun.The boy from Tijanan, whose sight was dimmer than the rest, at last saw the city the rest of them had seen for hours.“The holy city!”he shouted, and began to dance about, waving his arms, but the guards, out of humor, beat him, and shoved him ahead.The boy, Pogi, walked, striking his head with his hands.Marak likewise found in the city walls, however distant, an inspiration.He no longer trudged blindly.He walked as a man walks toward an encounter with his lifelong enemy, full of righteous anger.“Look at him,” one of the Ila’s men said.“Does he know where he’s going? He’s as crazy as the boy.”The boy kept his course when the world tilted.The boy never had moved to the visions that stirred the rest.His madness was of a different kind.He was innocent, if their madness was a crime.6710.01 5/31/01 11:52 AM Page 15H A M M E R FA L L • 15Marak felt the world slide, but he kept his course as well.He looked at the walls and ignored the pitch.They reached the stone-paved road.There was no escape at all, now, and now if never before the dullest must ask themselves what waited for them.But Marak knew.There was comfort in knowing there would be a reason for his dying.There was even a satisfaction in it, when all other purpose had left.See, Father? I am not that mad.I am not that useless.I lied.All my life was a lie, but it was a rational lie.What pretenses do the sane make?What did you pretend, Mother, knowing from my birth that I was not like the rest of you?And what did you pretend to yourself, Tain Trin Tain, when time after time you believed my lies? You kept asking, but you took all the lies.Why now are you angry?The sun sank as they walked.The walls of the holy city, slanted and crested with imbedded shards of glass, caught the sunlight and sent light knifing into the eyes as if all the walls were hedged with divine fire.The dome of the Beykaskh, the dome of the Ila’s Grace, was wholly tiled with glass, and it blazed like the sun itself.A man could no more look at it by noon than at the burning Eye of Heaven itself.The mad and the guards alike began to walk with heads lowered, not from shame, but to protect their eyes from the glory of the city.Birds flew thick about the walls, black spots in the glare.The southern wall was where the gallows were: the city gave the birds its unwanted, its malefactors, and its garbage.In its wealth it threw out in a day, men said, what whole villages could thrive on for a year.A pool of water stood by the gates, rimmed in stone and overflowing into the sand a good ways out: and out across the sand, on a bed of sandstone, a green-rimmed pond stood always filled.There vermin of every sort came to water, and to serve as sport for the Ila’s archers and her riflemen.That spillage, that pond, was the most profligate consumption of resource possible, and the mad wondered at it, and called that reed-rimmed pool a mirage.But a pipe ran beside the road, and whereas villages measured and sold every drop, whereas they pressed moisture out of every bit of waste and distilled it in huge stills, it was not the way things were done in Oburan.They sent it out to the pool, to draw vermin.6710.01 5/31/01 11:52 AM Page 1616 • C.J.C H E R RY HAnd as they came up under the shadow of Oburan, they met that rumored wonder greater than the blazing dome and the glass-edged walls.Beside the gate, that fountain known as the Mercy of the Ila gushed from stonework mouths and ran out so profligately that it splashed from the fountain bowl to the troughs and some onto the stones of the street, to be trampled underfoot.There travelers and traders were free to drink, while the remnant continually overflowed and ran from the trough through tiles until, Marak knew, it reached that distant, reed-rimmed pond.The beasts had not drunk for ten days [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]