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

"What about your family?" she asked.
"That's a good question." Owen touched a spot on the surface of his desktop. "All I know so far
is that this showed up in the morning message traffic."
A display panel lit up the desktop where Owen had touched it: letters and numbers, routing
codes of some kind or another. Klea didn't recognize them. They weren't for the Retreat, she could tell
that much, or for any other place on Galcen that she knew of.
"Transmission glitch?" she asked.
"That's what I thought. But this was riding the wave along with it-don't ask me how, I don't do
that sort of work anymore."
He pressed another spot on the desktop. The routing codes vanished, and a voice-tense and
hurried; it could have belonged to either a man or a woman from the pitch-came on over the desk's
onboard speaker.
"I'm going to keep this short. I think this is a safe line, but you never know. Listen, Owen-
there's something nasty going. on with the Khesatan succession, and I want you to keep Jens the
hell out of it. I can handle everything else, no problem, as long as the kid stays clear."
The audio clicked off and the desktop went dim. Klea let out her breath. "Your sister, right?"
"Who else? Jens is her boy."
"I thought he was on Maraghai with your brother's family."
"He is," Owen said. "But that doesn't mean he's going to stay there. The law on Maraghai says
that once you're grown, you leave the homeworld-and Jens has been grown for a year now, by
Maraghite reckoning."
"Your sister thinks he'll head for Khesat when they kick him out?"
"She's afraid he will, anyway." Owen looked thoughtful. "I don't know what's happening on
KhesatтАж we haven't heard any rumblings from the local Guildhouses, so whatever's going on there hasn't
spread outside the nobilityтАж but I expect we'll be getting word on the situation before long, if it's so bad
that Bee wants to steer Jens away from it."
Klea didn't need to ask whether Owen would fall in with the mysterious request. Beka was his
sister, and he had been schooled since earliest boyhood to follow her whimsies and keep her out of
trouble. Whatever she wanted, he would bend the universe itself, if necessary, to deliver.
"So what are we supposed to do?" Klea asked. "Fend him off from Khesat ourselves?"
"Fend him off or lure him elsewhere. As appropriate."
"Mmh." Klea gazed out the narrow window at a vertical strip of scenic vista: a shoulder of
mountain, a scrap of sky, a ragged wisp of cloud. Troublesome and high-spirited young men were a
problem she no longer had to deal with, thank fortune; the ones who came to the Retreat for training or
apprenticeship had invariably been through a few chastening experiences along the way. "So what are
you going to do with him?"
"Them," said Owen. "Jens has a cousin. Several, actuallyтАж but Faral is his agemate and
foster-sib. If one of them leaves the planet, so will the other."
Klea suppressed a grimace of distaste. At that age, they were even worse when they traveled in
pairsтАж "All right-so what are you going to do with them?"
"I can't do anything." He gestured at the desktop, and the dark surface lit up with an
eyestrain-inducing display of glyphs and icons and blinking response-requested message buttons. "And
that's just the ordinary stuff. It doesn't count whatever's brewing on Khesat-we're going to have to watch
that situation, in case the local Guildhouses are keeping quiet out of something besides ignorance or sheer
Khesatan perversityтАж"
He was sounding tired again. And she knew that more than anything else he feared the possibility
of local Adepts involving themselves in political conspiracies. In the old days before the Republic, the
Guild had earned a bad name for that sort of thing in some places-and the temptation hadn't gone away in
the decades since. Klea sighed.
"All right," she said. "You watch Khesat. I'll watch the boys."