"Phyllis Eisenstein - Elementals 02 - The Crystal Palace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eisenstein Phyllis)

conjura-tion. He was Everand, who had lived three mortal lifetimes already and called himself a sorcerer.
His clothes were rags, his fingernails and the creases of his skin were dark with grime, his eyes were
reddened with lack of sleep, but he smiled. He savored the moment as if it were fine wine, and then he
could not keep from shouting, тАЬNow! Now!тАЭ as exultation rose strong within him, and power. And with a
wild ges-ture, he flung both at the clear evening sky.

From the horizon, scattered wisps of cloud, flushed pink by the setting sun, came like starlings to a
cherry tree. From every direction they sped, meeting above the crumbled walls of the castle in a wild
cyclone, darkening as they gathered and piling up, up, into a towering thunderhead. Roiling, billowing like
smoke from some vast conflagration, the cloud expanded upward until its summit began to flatten and
spread as against some invisible barrier. Only then did the first bolt of lightning lash earthward, illuminating
Everand and his lonely citadel with a ghastly whiteness.

The castle stood in the heart of a great and trackless forest. Once, it had been many-spired, its lofty
walls and turrets built of demon-quarried marble. Once, solid and polished smooth and ever-renewed, it
had been the proud residence of a powerful sorcerer. But with his death the castle, too, had died, its
towers collapsing, roofs caving in, walls crumbling. Now, where stone still stood on stone, weeds grew
from the cracked mortar, and even trees had taken root.

Everand called the ruin his home; he had no other.

His poor shelter of wood and broken stone, patched together with his own hands against the base of the
standing tower, betrayed his weakness as a sorcerer. Though he could command clouds, though he could
strike men dead from afar, though he could turn the forest night into day with a nod of his head, he could
not build himself a proper dwelling. For three mortal lifetimes he had studied sorcery, and still there were
many things other sorcerers accomplished easily that remained beyond him. Too many.

In the castleтАЩs open courtyard, upon the bare ground where the lightning danced and crackled, lay a
circlet of copper-gold alloy as big around as a manтАЩs arm. Bolt after bolt of lightning played about it,
making its ruddy, polished surface gleam sun-bright; Everand could feel the force of each stroke in the
fine-drawn copper wires wound about his wrists and arms, in the copper-gold ring on the first finger of
his right hand. And with each stroke he looked for flames to gush abruptly from the circlet, flames that
would roar and thrash and finally subside into some bizarre, misshapen creature that would yield him its
name and do his bidding forever. A Fire demon. The first of many Fire demons. EverandтАЩs fingers curled
and worked against each other with his eagerness.

Brilliant in the lightningтАЩs glare, the arm ring lay empty on the steaming earth.

Empty.

Thunder seemed to echo in his ears long after dark-ness had settled upon the castle, long after he had
allowed the cloud to shred apart like rotting cloth and reveal the icy stars. He stood in the dark for a
time, the afterimage of the armlet glowing in his mindтАЩs eye. Step by step, he called the details of the
conjuration from his memory, searching for some flaw. But no; everything had been perfectтАФthe
weighing and mixing and smelting of the alloy, the words, the gestures, everything precisely as Regneniel
had taught him. Yet the procedure had yielded nothing.

Rage grew thick and hot within him. He snapped his fingers to bring a dazzling blue-white spark into
being on the nearest wall and, by its glare, stalked down the tower stairs. In the courtyard, he picked up
the copper-gold armlet and turned it slowly in his hands. It had not changed; its inner surface was blank