"Anthony, Piers - Adept - 06 - Unicorn Point" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anthony Piers)

A number of Phaze creatures could change their forms.
There were the unicorns, each typically having two forms in
addition to the equine one. The werewolves, who changed
from wolf to man and back. The vampires, who were bats
and men. And the Adepts, who could do almost anything they
chose. But though the animals could change forms as many
times as they wished, they were limited to those few they had
mastered, and Stile knew of none who had elected a non-
Phaze form. The Adepts could take any form, but only once.
Thus it would be necessary to find new variants of the spell
to achieve the same alternate form, which seemed like too
much trouble.

However, a single appearance in this form might be enough,
depending on its purpose. Why should an Adept assume the
form of a griffin to chase another Adept? Was one of the
Adverse Adepts breaking the truce? Trying to take him out
anonymously, using this shape in case Stile escaped and tried
to identify the perpetrator? That was possible, for some
Adepts had few ethical scruples, but unlikely, because the
Adverse Adepts already had the upper hand and were likely
to win the complete power they sought, in time. They had
succeeded in tilting the balance of power in their favor when
they had given Mach and Fleta sanctuary. Now Mach and
Bane were both working for them, and their facility with
magic in this frame, and with science in the other, was in-
evitably growing. Stile and his allies were waging little more
than a holding action at this point, staving off the reckoning.

6 | Piers Anthony

Why should the enemy try to kill him, when this would only
stir up his allies to desperate measures, and change nothing?

Yet there was the griffin, closing the gap between them.
"Neysa, I believe I should intercede," he said.

But she remained stubborn; she wanted to pull this out
herself. She was angling toward the Lattice, that dread,
demon-infested pattern of cracks in the ground. She had done
that during their first encounter, trying to shake him loose;

could she shake loose a flying predator? Since he wasn't sure
how to proceed, he let her try; if the griffin actually caught
them, he would invoke a spell that would set back even an
Adept. The truth was that a single Adept could seldom really
harm another Adept; their magic tended to cancel out. That
was another reason it was easier to abide by the truce; vio-
lation was not likely to be effective.