"04 - The Fallen Fortress" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cleric Quintet)

"Will they come for Castle Trinity?"
The spirit, beginning to fade away, did not answer, and Aballister realized that he had erred, for he had asked the apparition a question which required supposition, a question which could not, at that time, be positively answered.
"You are not dismissed!" the wizard cried, trying desperately to hold onto the less than corporeal thing. He reached out with hands that slipped right through Bogo's fading image, reached out with thoughts that found nothing to grasp.
Aballister stood alone in the graveyard. He understood that Bogo's spirit would come back to him when it found the definite answer to the question. But when would that be? Aballister wondered. And what further mischief would Cadderly and his friends cause before Aballister found the information he needed to put an end to that troublesome group?
The Fallen Fortress 5
"Hey, you there!" came a call from the boulevard, followed by the sounds of boots clapping against the cobblestone. "Who's in the cemetery after nightfall? Hold where you are!"
Aballister hardly took notice of the two city guardsmen who rushed through the cemetery gate, spotting him and making all haste toward him. The wizard was thinking of Bogo, of dead Barjin, once Castle Trinity's most powerful cleric, and of dead Ragnor, Castle Trinity's principle fighter. More than that, the wizard was thinking of Cadderly, the perpetrator of ail his troubles.
The guardsmen were nearly upon Aballister when he began his chant He threw his arms out high to the sides as they closed in and started to reach for him. A cry of the final, triggering rune sent the two men flying wide, hurled through the air by the released power of the spell, as Aballister, in the blink of an eye, sent his material body cascading back to his private room in Castle Trinity.
The dazed city soldiers pulled themselves from the wet ground, looked to each other in disbelief, and fled back through the cemetery gates, convinced that they would be better off if they pretended that nothing at all had happened in the eerie graveyard.
Cadderly sat upon the flat roof of a jutting two-story section of the Edificant Library, watching the sun spread its shining fingers across the plains east of the mountains. Other fingers stretched down from the tall peaks all about Cadderly*s position to join those snaking up from the grass. Mountain streams came alive, glittering silver, and the autumn foliage, brown and yellow, red and brilliant orange, seemed to burst into flame.
Percival, the white squirrel, hopped along the roofs gutter when he caught sight of the young priest, and Cadderly nearly laughed aloud when he regarded the squirrel's
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eagerness to join himЧa desire emanating from PercivaTs always grumbling belly, Cadderly knew. He dropped his hand into a pouch on his belt and pulled out some cacasa nuts, scattering them at Percival's feet
It all seemed so normal to the young priest, the same as it had always been. Percival skipped happily among his favorite nuts, and the sun continued to climb, defeating the chill of late autumn even this high up in the Snowflakes.
Cadderly saw through the facade, though. Things most certainly were not normal, not for the young priest and not for the Edificant Ubrary. Cadderly had been on the road, in the elven wood of Shilmista and in the town of Carradoon, fighting battles, learning firsthand the realities of a harsh world, and learning, too, that the priests of the library, men and women he had looked up to for his entire life, were not as wise or powerful as he had once believed.
The single notion that dominated young Cadderly's thoughts as he sat up there on the sunny roof was that something had gone terribly wrong within his order of Deneir, and within the order of Oghman priests, the brother hosts of the library. It seemed to Cadderly that procedure had become more important than necessity, that the priests of the library had been paralyzed by mounds of useless parchments when decisive action was needed.
And those rotting roots had sunk even deeper, Cadderly knew. He thought of Nameless, the pitiful leper he had met on the road from Carradoon. Nameless had come to the library for help and had found that the priests of Deneir and Oghma were, for the most part, more concerned with their own failure to heal him than with the consequences of his grave affliction.
Yes, Cadderly decided, something was very wrong at his precious library. He lay back on the gray, slightly pitched roof and casually flipped another nut at the munching squirrel.
No Time for Guilt
The spirit heard the call from a distance, floating across the empty grayness of this reeking and forlorn plane. The mournful notes said not a discernable word, and yet, to the spirit, they seemed to speak his name.
Ghost. Clearly it called to him, beckoned him from the muck and mire of his eternal hell Ghost, its melody called again. The wretch looked at the growling, huddled shadows all about him, wicked souls, the remains of wicked people. He, too, was a growling shadow, a tormented thing, suffering punishments for a life villainously lived.
But now he was being called, being carried from his torment on the notes of a familiar melody. Familiar?
The thin thread that remained of ghost's living consciousness strained to better recall, to better remember its life before this foul, empty existence. Ghost thought of sunlight, of shadows, of killing....
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The Ghearuju! Evil Ghost understood. The Ghearuju, the magical item he had carried in life for so many decades, was calling to him, was leading him back from the very hellfires!
"Cadderly! Cadderly!" wailed Vicero Belago, the Edifi-cant Library's resident alchemist, when he saw the young priest and Danica at his door on the huge library's third floor. "My boy, it's so good that you have returned to us!" The wiry man virtually hopped across his shop, weaving in and out of tables covered with beakers and vials, dripping coils and stacks of thick books. He hit his target as Cadderly stepped into the room, throwing his arms about the sturdy young priest and slapping him hard on the back.
Cadderly looked over Bel ago's shoulder to Danica and gave her a helpless shrug, which she returned with a wink of an exotic brown eye and a wide, pearly smile.
"We heard that some killers came after you, my boy," Belago explained, putting Cadderly back to arm's length and studying him as though he expected to find an assassin's dagger protruding from Cadderly's chest. "I feared (hat you would never return." The alchemist also gave Cadderly's upper arms a squeeze, apparently amazed at how solid and strong the young priest had become in the short time he had been gone from the library. Like a concerned aunt, Belago ran a hand up over Cadderly's floppy brown hair, pushing the always unkempt locks back from the young man's face.
"I am all right," Cadderly replied calmly. "This is the house of Deneir, and I am a disciple of Deneir. Why would I not return?"
His understatement had a calming effect on the excitable alchemist, as did the serene look in Cadderly's gray eyes. Belago started to blurt out a reply, but stopped in midstut-ter and nodded instead.
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"Ah, and lady Danica," the alchemist went on. He reached out and gently stroked Danica's thick tangle of strawberry-blond hair, his smile sincere.
Belago's grin disappeared almost immediately, though, and he dropped his arms to his sides and his gaze to the floor.
"We heard about Headmaster Avery," he said softly, nodding his head up and down, his expression clouded with sad resignation.
The mention of the portly Avery Schell, Cadderly's surrogate father, stung the young priest profoundly. He wanted to explain to poor Belago that Avery"s spirit lived on with their god. But how could he begin? Belago would not understand; no one who had not passed into the spirit world and witnessed the divine and glorious sensation could understand. Against that ignorance, anything Cadderly might say would sound like a ridiculous cliche, typical comforting words usually spoken and heard without conviction.
"I received word that you wished to speak with me?" Cadderly said instead, raising his tone to make the statement a question and thus shift the conversation.
"Yes," Belago answered softly. His head finally stopped bouncing, and his eyes widened when he looked into the young priest's calming gray eyes. "Oh, yes!" he cried, as if he had just remembered that fact "I didЧof course I did!"
Obviously embarrassed, the wiry man hopped back across the shop to a small cabinet. He fumbled with an oversized ring of keys, muttering to himself all the while.
"You have become a hero," Danica remarked, noting the man's movements.
Cadderly couldn't disagree with Danica's observation. Vicero Belago had never been overjoyed to see the young priest before. Cadderly had always been a demanding customer, taxing Belago's talents often beyond their limits. Because of a risky project that Cadderly had given the alchemist, Belago's shop had once been blown apart
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That had been long ago, however, before the battle in Shilmista Forest, before Cadderly's exploits in Carradoon, the city to the east on the banks of Impresk Lake.
Before Cadderty had become a hero.
Hero.
What a ridiculous title, the young priest thought He had done no more than Danica or either of the dwarven brothers. Ivan and Pikel, in Carradoon. And he, unlike his sturdy friends, had run away from the battle in Shilmista Forest, fled because he could not endure the horrors.
He looked down at Danica again, her brown-eyed gaze comforting him as only it could. How beautiful she was, Cadderly noted, her frame as delicate as that of a newborn fawn and her hair tousled and bouncing freely about her shoulders. Beautiful and untamed, he decided, and with an inner strength clearly shining through those exotic, almond-shaped eyes.
Belago was back in front of him then, seeming nervous and holding both his hands behind his back. "You left this here when you came back from the elven wood," he explained, drawing out his left hand. He held a leather belt with a wide and shallow holster on one side that sported a hand-crossbow.
"I had no idea that I would need it in peaceful Carradoon,'' Cadderly replied easily, taking the belt and strapping it around his hips.