"James Alan Gardner - League of Peoples 06 - Trapped" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

Impervia soared aloft on Myoko's mental hoist, raised high above the mob's clamoring reach.

At first, the fishermen didn't grasp what was happening. One of them actually made a bumbling attempt
to leap up and slap Impervia's legs, the way boys jump to tag dangling store signs as they walk down the
street. The man missed and thumped heavily to the pavement... which seems to have been the moment at
which he and his companions realized there was something less than ordinary about a woman levitating
above their heads. They fell back open-mouthed, staring up at Impervia as if she were some new celestial
object, a sweat-gleaming chunk of dark matter suspended in the night.

"Ahem. Gentlemen?"

The Steel Caryatid stepped from a doorway five paces down the street. She was pale in the lamplight,
the sort of Nordic blonde who looks three-quarters albino... and like many a sorceress, she wore nothing
but a skin-tight crimson body sheath. If that sounds seductive, you're too eager to be seduced. The
Caryatid was a big-hipped woman of forty, broad, round, and motherly; ninety percent the kind of
mother who bakes the best cookies in the neighborhood, and ten percent the kind who has to be locked
in the attic and fed bouillon through a straw.

All the sorcerers I'd known had been that way: a little bit crazy. Or a lot. Maybe it was impossible to
learn the craft unless you were slightly divorced from reality; or maybe the things sorcerers did were
enough to make a sane person unbalanced. Incantations. Rituals. Attunements. I didn't believe that
sorcery was truly supernaturalтАФlike psionics, sorcery started working only after the League of Peoples
paid their visit to Earth, so "magic" was another type of high-tech in disguiseтАФbut even though I knew
there had to be a scientific explanation, sorcery and its practitioners could be bone-chillingly creepy.

"Now that my friend is out of reach," the Caryatid told the fishermen, "it's time to say good night. And
here's something to light you to bed."

She pulled a match from her sleeve and struck a light on the wall beside her. (The Caryatid possessed an
inexhaustible supply of matches; I could almost believe a new box materialized in her pocket whenever
an old box ran out.) The match flame flickered in the breeze of the laneway, but after a moment it
stabilized.

"Do you like fire?" the Caryatid asked, as if she were speaking to children at storytime. "I don't mean the
things fire can do. Do you like fire itself? The look of it. The feel of it." She swept her finger lazily through
the flame, just fast enough to avoid getting burned.

None of the fishermen seemed to realize the match was lasting longer than it should. In fact, the men
might have been so stupefied at seeing Impervia float overhead, their brains weren't questioninganything.

"I like fire," the Caryatid said. "I've always liked it. Some children talk to their dolls; when I was young, I
talked to the hearth. It worried my parents... but fortunately, one of my schoolteachers realized I didn't
have a problem, I had a gift. Something to remember, the right teacher can makesuch a difference."

Far from burning out, the match flame had begun to growтАФroughly the size of a big candle now. Off
down the street, Sir Pelinor knocked the broadsword from the Divian's hand and kicked the weapon
down a storm sewer drain. "Listen to the lady," Pelinor told the alien.

"Fire loves those who love it back," the Caryatid said. "It's very warmhearted." She smiled. I usually