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

Sir Pelinor socked on his mustache, producing a wheezy, bubbling sound that was amusing the first time
I heard it, irritating the next dozen times, totally maddening the three hundred times after that, and now a
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source of complete indifference. "Depends what you call a quest," he said. "Suppose a village hereabouts
was having trouble with a largish animalтАФa bear, perhaps, or a cougar. I wouldn't call it insane to gather
a few friends and go hunt down the beast."

"Especially," Myoko added, "if the villagers offered a reward."

"Or suppose," Sister Impervia said, "a gang of heathen bandits stole St. Judith's jawbone from the
academy chapel. Wouldn't we be honorbound to organize a party and retrieve the saint's remains?"

The Caryatid made a face. "Those aren't quests, they're errands. You'd leave such business to the town
watch... if Simkahad a real town watch, instead of Whisky Jess and the Paunch That Walks Like a Man.
I'm not talking about junkets to the countryside, I mean real live quests."

"What qualifies as a real live quest?" Myoko asked. "Finding the Holy Grail? Slaying the Jabberwock?"

"Saw a Jabberwock once," Sir Pelinor said with another mustache-suck. "Rusty mechanical thing in the
remains of an OldTech amusement park. Four hundred years ago, parents paid for their kiddies to ride
its back. No wonder OldTech society collapsedтАФifI'd seen that monster when I was a child, I wouldn't
have slept again till I was twenty."

"I don't care about your Jabberwock," the Caryatid said. "I don't care about quests at all."

"Then why," Myoko asked, "do you keep talking about them?"

"Because," the Caryatid answered, staring moodily at the cockroach guts on the table, "this afternoon I
had a sort of a prophecy kind of thing."

"Uh-oh," said the other four of us in unison... even Sister Impervia, who's theologically obliged to treat
prophecies as Precious Gifts From Heaven. We all knew the Caryatid had flashes of second sight; alas,
her gift of prophecy only raised its head when something really ugly was about to happen.

I won't bother you with the full story of how the Caryatid got this way, but here's the gist: twenty years
ago, when she still had a normal name and was doing her bachelor's in thaumaturgy, the Caryatid got
shanghaied into a necromantic experiment run by a grad student. Like most sorcerous projects, this one
required a long disgusting ritual... and partway through a procedure involving two tubs of lard and a
hand-puppet, the grad student lost his nerve and ran shrieking from the room. Our friend Caryatid
managed to slide off the pony and shut down the calliope before she could be incinerated by eldritch
forces; but the experience gave her a serious sunburn and an incurable case of the premonitions.

Personally, I have nothing against premonitions if they provide useful information about the future... like
whether your partner has a stopper in spades, or if Gretchen Kinnderboom will be in a forthcoming
mood two weekends hence. But the Caryatid never foresaw anything helpful; she only perceived
disasters, and then only when it was too late to avert them.