"Watt-Evans,.Lawrence.-.Ethshar.2.-.Single.Spell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragon Stories)
Tobas had thoroughly and beyond all question mastered his first spell, practiced it until he could do it perfectly with no thought at all; when Roggit had at last admitted that the lad had mastered it, he had promised to teach Tobas a second within the month. The apprentice had been looking forward eagerly to this next step in his education when, just two nights ago, the old man had died quietly in his sleep, leaving Tobas with his house and his Book of Spells and his jars and his boxes and his mysterious objects of every description but with only a single spell learned, and that nothing but the knack of lighting fires.
The old man had called it Thrindles Combustion, and Tobas had to admit that it was very useful to be able to light a fire anywhere, at any time, under any conditions, regardless of how wet the fuel was or how fiercely the wind blew, so long as he had his athame as Roggit had called the enchanted dagger that was the key to a wizards power and a few grains of brimstone and something that it was theoretically possible to burn. Since learning it Tobas had made it a point never to be without the knife and a supply of brimstone, and had impressed people occasionally by setting fire to this or that. He had used the spell to light Roggits pyre, and that had added a nice touch to the cremation ceremonies, an appropriate farewell; the villagers had murmured approvingly.
Of course, not every use of the spell had gone so well, he remembered wryly; he had once embarrassed himself by trying to ignite a black rock he had mistaken for coal. The only result had been a shower of ineffectual sparks. Fortunately, the girl he had been showing off for had not realized any more was intended, and had been appropriately amazed.
Useful as it might be, Thrindles Combustion was not the sort of spell a lad could build an entire career on. It would not earn his bread, nor convince anyone to marry him most of the village girls had been noticeably cool of late, though he was not sure why. He had never expected to wed for love, of course hardly anyone did but he doubted, under the circumstances, whether any of the available females would even consider a marriage of convenience.
He needed to learn more spells, quickly, and establish himself as the towns new wizard. If he failed to secure his position as soon as possible someone might well invite in a foreign magician of some sort, leaving him out of work. The cottage garden, with its handful of herbs, would not be enough to keep him alive if that happened.
Fortunately, he did have Roggits Book of Spells, but as he picked up his pace, hurrying down the slope to the cottage, he found himself unwillingly imagining reasons he might not be able to use it. Had Roggit written it in some esoteric wizardly tongue? Would the spells he needed call for ingredients he could not obtain? The book was old; might the pages have faded to illegibility, leaving just enough to remind Roggit of what he already knew? Was there some important secret he did not know?
He intended to waste no time. If he lost even a single day in mourning poor old Roggit, something might go wrong. He would open the Book of Spells as soon as he got home.
He crossed the dooryard impatiently, lifted the latch, and stepped into the cottage that was no longer Roggits. This was his, now.
He looked around, reacquainting himself with the place. His own little bed, a pallet, really, which he would no longer be using, lay in one corner; Roggits narrow bed, where he intended to sleep henceforth, stood in another. A fireplace yawned at each end, both empty and cold; the weather had been mild, and he had not bothered to do any cooking since Roggits death. The lone table, used for cooking, dining, and as the wizards worktable, stood in the center. The long walls, on both sides, were jammed with shelves, cabinets, and cupboards, all packed with the necessities of the wizards simple life and arcane trade. The ceiling overhead was the underside of the thatched roof, and the floor beneath his feet was packed dirt. The Book of Spells lay in solitary splendor atop its reading stand.
The cottage wasnt much, he thought critically, but it was dry and, when the fires were lit, warm. It was not at its best at present the mattress on the bed was bare, as the only blankets had been wrapped around Roggits remains atop the pyre, and the woodbin and water bucket were empty as Tobas had not paid much attention to the details of everyday life since the catastrophe of Roggits demise. A few spells that Roggit had cast might still be going here and there, and a few potions or philtres might be tucked away somewhere in the clutter, but no sign of anything magical showed. It looked much like any drab, ordinary cottage.
Still, it was his.
His gaze fell on the Book of Spells and fixed there. That, too, was his. Alone of all Roggits possessions, that was the one he had never been allowed to touch. The old wizards sorry handful of semi-precious stones was hidden somewhere in the cottage, hidden even from his own apprentice, but Tobas had been permitted to handle them freely on the occasions when, for one reason or another, they had been brought out. Only the book had been forbidden.
He stepped over to the reading stand and studied it.
It was a large volume, and thick, bound in hinged tin plates of a dull, dark blue-gray; a single large black rune that Tobas could not identify decorated the front. He knew most of the pages were blank, but Roggit had boasted that it held more than thirty different spells, and Tobas had glimpsed several. This book, he was sure, would be the key to his future.
He hesitated, the force of the old mans prohibition still lingering, but then reached out for the dented metal cover. He was well within his rights, he assured himself, and acting in a perfectly reasonable manner, in reading the Book of Spells he had inherited, so that he might teach himself more magic and make a living. It was his now.
He stroked the book gently, as if expecting to feel its magic, but it felt no different from the side of the water bucket. He smiled at his own folly in thinking he might be able to feel the books magic if it even had any of its own. At last, more excited than he cared to admit even to himself, he grasped the worn edge and pried at the heavy tin-coated cover.
Without warning, the black rune on the front exploded loudly and violently in his face, throwing hissing gobbets of orange flame in all directions; none struck him, though one seared away a stray hair as it passed.
Astonished, Tobas simply stepped back at first, staring at the smoldering, blackened face of the Book of Spells. Roggit had, it seemed, put a protective spell of some sort on it, to frighten away thieves. Then the scent of smoke reached him, and he realized that the fireballs had not been pure illusion.
Puzzled and dismayed, he looked about; scattered sparks were dying on the hard-packed floor, and one had singed the table-top but seemed to be expiring without doing much damage.
Where, then, was the smell of smoke coming from?
He sniffed again, then looked up at a faint crackling sound, and saw that one of the fiery projectiles had set the roof afire, right up near the ridgepole. The dry thatch was already burning vigorously.
On the verge of panic, he spun his head about, looking for some way of extinguishing the blaze before it spread. He had not bothered to fetch water; that meant that he had had none on hand to douse the fire, and by the time he could make a trip to the well, or even the swamp, half the roof might be gone. He snatched up Roggits old spare tunic from a nearby shelf, but could not reach high enough to beat at the fire with it. The large blanket, which might have reached, had been on the old mans pyre.
He clambered atop the table, the tunic wrapped about his forearm; as he reached upward one of the legs snapped beneath his weight, dumping him roughly back to the floor. He rolled aside, unhurt, then got to his knees, looking for something else he could stand on.
There was nothing. The chairs, he saw instantly, would not be tall enough to help.
The sight of the spreading fire spurred him to frantic desperation, and a thought occurred to him. He was a wizard; he knew a spell, just a single spell, and it was a fire spell. Didnt the proverbs say to fight fire with fire?
Quickly, he snatched the dagger from his belt, fumbled in his pouch for brimstone, and flung his spell at the burning thatch.
The resulting explosion dwarfed the first; half the roof vanished in flaming shreds, and the force of the blast knocked Tobas to the floor hard enough to daze him.
When he recovered his wits the whole cottage was ablaze, dripping bits of burning debris on all sides. Panicking, he forgot all concern for his inheritance and for anything except saving his skin; he ran out the door, calling wildly for help.
Chapter Two
He watched disconsolately as the cottage burned. The entire structure was going up in smoke, its complete contents with it, and he could do nothing but sit and watch.
This, he thought sorrowfully, beyond any possible doubt, beyond any chance of recovery or hope of salvage, marked the end of his apprenticeship any sort of apprenticeship. As if his masters death had not been bad enough, taking away the last person in all the World who cared a whit for him, now, just a few hours after the funeral, he had accidentally destroyed everything the old man had left him. His home, and all his worldly possessions save the clothes he wore and the few precious items on his belt, were vanishing before his eyes, being reduced to smoke and ash.
Roggits Book of Spells was certainly gone, and just as certainly no other wizard would take him on as an apprentice. He was seventeen what sort of a wizard would take on a lad of seventeen under any conditions, let alone one who had as yet learned so little of the arcane arts? He had learned the basic secret of wizardry, true that secret was the nature of the athame, the ritual dagger that each wizard prepared that held a part of its masters soul. Beyond that, though, he knew only his single spell. What could a wizard do with a single spell?
And he had little chance of finding any other employment in Telven or the surrounding area; even an advantageous marriage was more than he could hope for, since he had no favors to call in, no close relatives who would help in arranging a betrothal, and no prospects for a love-match. He was quite sure that nobody who knew anything of his past would want anything to do with him especially after this latest disaster for fear his bad luck might be contagious.
He sighed. He hadntalways been unlucky or at least he hadnt thought so, but now, as he mentally reviewed his life, he wasnt so sure. Certainly it had been a bad sign when his mother died bearing him; that was hardly an auspicious start for any child.
Other than that, however, he had done well enough until he was fifteen. He had been happy with his fathers cousin Indamara and her husband, the two of whom had raised him in his parents absence, and he had gotten on well with their children, his second cousins. He had had no more than the usual number of childhood mishaps falls from trees every so often, almost drowning in a farmers pond once, but nothing out of the ordinary. He had missed the plague that killed a few of the neighbors when he was eight, and had come through a bout of pox unscarred. Life had been good to him throughout those years; he had played in the fields with the other children, taken long walks with his father whenever the ship was in port, and generally lived the normal, happy life of the son of a successful pirate.
Privateer, he corrected himself; his father had been a privateer, defending the Free Lands of the Coasts from the tyranny of the Ethsharites. That was what all the neighbors said.
He had never quite understood how robbing merchant vessels kept the overlords of the Hegemony of Ethshar from reconquering the Free Lands and ruling harshly over them, as they had ruled long ago, but everybody said that it worked, so he had long ago stopped questioning it.
His father had never worried about polite names, never bothered with excuses; to the neighbors dismay he had insisted on calling himself Dabran the Pirate, rather than Dabran the Privateer, and had told anyone who asked that he was in business to make money, not for the sake of patriotism.
Dabran had been careful with his money, too. That was a major reason his son Tobas was now penniless. The pirates entire fortune had been aboard his ship,Retribution, when he tried to board the wrong vessel and got sent to the bottom of the Southern Sea, along with his entire crew.
From that stroke of monumental bad luck had descended all the rest of Tobas misfortune. Who would have expected an ordinary Ethsharitic merchant vessel to be carrying a demonologist capable of summoning such a thing? The witnesses on the shore had agreed on very little in their descriptions, save that the thing that pulled Dabrans ship under had been huge, and black, and tentacular.
Tobas sighed again. He missed his father. He had never seen much of the old man even in the best of times, but at least he had known that Dabran was alive, out there somewhere plundering, until the demonologist had brought that thing up out of nowhere.
He tried to cheer himself up by telling himself that it could have been worse. At least he hadnt been on boardRetribution when she went down. If he had accepted his fathers offer of an apprenticeship, in addition to the eventual inheritance of the ship and money, he would be with Dabran right now, moldering on the bottom of the ocean. His own laziness had saved him there he had intended to use his inheritance to set himself up in some comfortable business, which he would let employees run, rather than carrying on in his fathers rather strenuous trade, so he had had no interest in going to sea.
He remembered that awful day when the news of his fathers death had arrived. The weather had been horribly inappropriate, a beautiful sunny spring day, the fields warm and green, the sky a perfect blue strewn with fluffy white clouds. He had been lying on the hill behind the house, doing nothing in particular, just lying there enjoying the weather, when his second cousin Peretta had come trudging up looking for him, her hair tangled and her face serious. He had known right away that something was wrong; Peretta wasnever serious, and would only leave her hair unbrushed for the direst of emergencies.
She had wasted no time, but simply announced, Theres bad news from Shan. Your fathers dead; a demon got his ship and pulled it under. There were no survivors, and no salvage has been found; its all gone.
He had stared at her, he recalled, just stared at her; her words hadnt seemed real. Not until her parents packed up his meager belongings for him and told him to be out by sundown did he really believe that his father was dead and his old life gone. No one would have dared to offend Dabran while he was alive, but when he was gone and no more support money was to come, they were all too eager to be rid of his lazy, worthless son. Family ties didnt count for much, compared to silver.
That had hurt. One disaster had come right after another.
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