"Debra Doyle & James MacDonald - Mageworlds 05 - The Long Hunt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doyle Debra)

"Thank you," said Mael gravely. "It's discourteous enough of me to arrive on your doorstep
unannounced. To show up injured and in need of tending would be even worse."

In the mountain peaks of Galcen's northern continent, the air smelled of snowmelt and the first
hints of new growth.
Mistress Klea Santreny drew a deep breath, relishing the change in the atmosphere. Even after
more than two decades away from the warmth of equatorial Nammerin, she still wasn't wholly reconciled
to the winters here at the Retreat. Let others think that her preference for the high collar and the
close-buttoned sleeves of an Adept's formal blacks signaled an ingrained commitment to distance and
rigidity. Klea knew better. If she had an ingrained commitment to anything, it was to keeping warm during
the two-thirds of the year when the centuries-old stone-built citadel was-for everyone but the natives of
this windy and isolated district-damned near uninhabitable.
The Master of the Guild, she supposed, counted as a native. He'd come to the Retreat for
apprenticeship when he was still a boy, and had grown to manhood inside its walls. Klea knew before
she opened the door to his private office that he would have celebrated today's foretaste of spring by
abandoning formal garb for a lightweight coverall in dusty blackтАж and never mind that it's going to be
snowing again by the end of the week, he's not going to switch back until next autumn.
She palmed the lockplate.
"You're right," she said as the door slid open, before he could make the remark she knew he
would; "it's a beautiful morning, and positively balmy outside as long as the wind isn't blowing. Of course,
the wind hasn't stopped blowing since the day I first came here, and that was back in '05, but what's a
minor detail like that among friends?"
Owen Rosselin-Metadi laughed under his breath. "What, indeed?"
The Master was working at his desk, a massive, domineering piece of furniture that only
grudgingly shared office space with three chairs and a Standard calendar. An overhead light panel, its
crude metal brackets dating back to the first time the citadel had undergone a conversion to more recent
technology, supplied the room with most of its illumination. The single window was a narrow vertical
opening that might at one point have been an arrow slit. These days, treble-thickness armor-glass
covered the gap.
Owen gestured at the more comfortable of the room's two empty chairs-the other was reserved
for unwelcome guests and errant apprentices-and went back to contemplating whichever piece of
business was currently occupying his desktop. Klea sat.
"So what's today's headache?" she asked.
There was always a headache, of one kind or another. Directing-however gently-the affairs of the
galaxy's Adepts took more comm time and comp time and paperwork than any one job ought, especially
for a man who would have been happy to spend his days teaching the apprentices and the junior masters.
In Klea's opinion, it was all Errec Ransome's fault, for selling out the Guild and betraying the Republic
and then handing everything over to Owen without bothering to clean up what he had done.
Dead over twenty years, she thought, and still screwing up everybody's lives for them.
Bastard.
If Klea Santreny hated anybody these days, it was the former Master of the Guild. But she was
careful to keep those thoughts well below the surface of her mind. Owen had loved his teacher-had
willingly done whatever tasks the Guild Master had set for him-and the knowledge of Ransome's
treachery had been hard for him to bear.
"The galaxy is behaving itself at the moment," he said in reply to her question. "It does that,
sometimes. Mostly so I can worry about my family, I think."
Klea pressed her lips together. The members of Owen's far-distant family were more than
capable, in her opinion, of handling their own problems without looking to the Master of the Guild for
assistance. But she'd made that argument, and lost it, too many times already. These days, she tried to
cultivate patience instead.