"Debra Doyle & James MacDonald - Mageworlds 06 - The Stars Asunder" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doyle Debra)

required to present himself at Harradi's offices to take possessionтАж in this case, of a portfolio full of
deeds and account-books.
Nobody had bothered to mention that the last of the sus-Demaizen line was also a Mage; or if
they had, they'd done it so long ago that Serazao had not been there to hear. From the length of time that
the estate had been in the hands of the legalists, she assumed that its ultimate heir would be another one
like the deceased claimant, whom she'd had the misfortune once to meet: Elderly, avaricious,
ill-tempered, and infirm, with more money already in his possession than any one man could reasonably
think to spend.
Garrod syn-Aigal was not what she'd expected at all.
Her first impression, when he came into the outer office, was that he was the heir's driver, or
perhaps his bodyguard: A big man, broad in the shoulders and firmly muscled, but with none of the
clumsiness that so often came with strength. He wore plain street clothes, of good quality but far from
new, with a long weather-coat thrown over them. It was the middle of Hanilat's rainy season-she
remembered the date ever afterward, very clearly-and both the coat and the loose-brimmed hat he wore
with it shed water in puddles on the office floor.
He paused inside the door, still dripping, and looked about with a searching expression that
lightened when he saw her at work behind the office-bar.
"Good morning, Syr-"
"Zulemem," she said, and then, in reply to his unspoken question, "There's a coatrack in the
corner behind you."
He smiled, which made his heavy dark eyebrows bristle even more fiercely than they did already.
She didn't like men with thick eyebrows-she preferred an elegant antipodal arch, like her father had, or
her cousins-but the newcomer's good humor made them, and the roughness of the features around them,
surprisingly attractive.
"Ah. So there is. Thank you, Syr Zulemem."
"Serazao," she said, as he pulled off the coat and the hat and hung them up on the polished brass
hooks of the coat-rack. With the coat out of the way, she caught her first glimpse of the short wooden
staff that the man wore clipped to his belt. Seeing it, she frowned.
He was quick; he caught the change in her expression almost before the muscles of her face
made their fractional changes to echo the shift within her mind.
"Is there something wrong?"
"No," she said hastily, "nothing wrong. I didn't realize that syn-Aigal had a Mage-Circle on his
side, is all."
"He doesn't, not really." He smiled again. "Or I don't, at least-and I was Garrod syn-Aigal the
last time I looked."
She felt the blood rising in her face. If any of the office partners found out that she had, at least by
implication, insulted their clientтАж "I'm sorry; I was impertinent."
"You told the truth as you saw it, Syr Zulemem. No impertinence there."
"Maybe not for you," she said. "But I want to work here someday, when my schooling's
finished."
His eyebrows went up again. "You don't look like a legalist to me."
"Oh?" Irritation flared; she frowned at him, never minding what the office partners might have to
say. He hadn't looked like a man who would pay heavy-handed compliments of that sort, and it was
depressing to find out otherwise. "What do I look like, then?"
Once again, he surprised her. "A Mage."
"You're joking."
"About that, never."
"I couldn't-"
"There should be a Circle working near your school," he said. "Ask your instructors; one of them
will know. And when you've trained in Hanilat long enough, come to Demaizen Old Hall and ask for me.