"Diane Duane - Wizards 3 - High Wizardry" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

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"Hey, there's somebody in the driveway! It's a truck! Mom! Mom, the com-puter's here!"
The first sound Nita heard that morning was her little sister's shrieking. Nita winced and scrunched herself up into a ball
under the covers. Then she muttered six syllables, a very simple spell, and soundproofed her room against her sister's noise.
Blessed silence fell. Unfortunately the spell also killed the buzzing of the locusts and the singing of the birds outside the
open window. And Nita liked birds. She opened her eyes, blinking at the bright summer sun coming in the window, and
sighed.
Nita said one more syllable. The mute-spell came undone, letting in the noise of doors opening and shutting, and Dairine
shrieking instructions and suggestions at the immediate planet. Outside the window a catbird was sit-ting in the elm tree,
screaming, "Thief! Thief!" in an enthusiastic but sub-standard imitation of a blue jay.
So much for sleeping late, Nita thought. She got up and went over to the dresser by the window, pulled a drawer open and
rummaged in it for a T-shirt and shorts. "Morning, Birdbrain," she said as she pulled out a "Live Aid" T-shirt.
The catbird hopped down to a branch of the elm right outside Nita's window. "Bob-white! Bob-white!" it sang at the top of
its lungs.
"What's a quail doing in a tree?" Nita said. She pulled the T-shirt on. Listen to those locusts! Hot one today, huh?"
'Highs in the nineties," the bird sang. "Cheer up! Cheer up!"
'Robins are for spring," Nita said. "I'm more in the mood for penguins at the moment. . . ."
"What's up?" .w^ jr. ,-Myv...,ivj<-.;/

336 SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL WIZARD

"Enough with the imitations! I need you to take a message for me. Wfz. ards' business. I'll leave you something nice. Half
of one of Mom's muffins? Huh?"
The catbird poured out several delighted bars of song that started as a phoebe's call and ended as the five-note theme from
E. T.
"Good," Nita said. "Then here's something new to sing." She had been speaking all along in the Speech of wizards, the
language everything alive understands. Now she added music to it, singing random notes with the words. "Kit, you wanna
see a disaster? Come on over here and watch my folks try to hook up the Apple."
The bird cocked an interested eye at her. "You need it again?" Nita said.
" 'Kit, you wanna see a disaster?' "
"That's my boy. You remember the way?"
In a whir of white-barred wings, the catbird was gone.
"Must be hungry," Nita said to herself, pulling on her shorts, and then socks and sneakers. While pulling a sneaker on, she
glanced at the top of the dresser. There among the stickers and the brushes and combs, under the new Alan Parsons album,
lay her wizard's manual.
That by itself wasn't so strange; she'd left it there yesterday afternoon. But it was open; she didn't remember having left it
that way. Nita leaned over, tying the sneaker, and looked at the page. The Wizards' OathтАФNita smiled. It didn't seem like
only a few months ago that she'd first read and taken that Oath herself: it felt more like years. February, was it? she
thought. No, March. Joanne and her crew chased me into the library. And beat the crap out of me later. But I didn't care. I'd
found thisтАФ
Nita sighed and flipped the book back to the Oath. Trouble came with wizardry. But other things came tooтАФ
Whamwhamwham!
Nita didn't even need to turn around to see who was pounding on her door as it banged open. "Come in!" Nita said, and