"Barbara Hambly - Windrose 1 - The Silent Tower" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

"I sometimes carry one when I know I'm going to be working overtime," she
hastened to fib, because she generally carried one as a matter of course. "For walking
across the parking lot." This wasn't as odd as it soundedтАФSan Serano was situated in
the dry chaparral hills beyond Agoura, as deserted an area as you could get that close
to L.A. Though parking lot crime was generally limited to the more ostentatious
vehiclesтАФ'Vettes, Porsches, and four-wheelersтАФbeing looted or stolen outright, it
was still a spooky walk across the enormous paved emptiness late at night.
The guard's walkie-talkie crackled. He listened, then said, "We've called out
extra people. They'll be here to search the plant in about twenty minutes. He's not
going to get away."
But that was, in point of fact, precisely what he did do. Joanna sat in the guard
shackтАФactually a modest cement-block building near the plant's main gate on Lost
Canyon RoadтАФdrinking tea and feeling conspicuous and hideously embarrassed,
listening to the reports come in and answering questions put to her by the guard.
Every door and entrance to Building Six was checked, and found to be inviolate. The
building itself was methodically quartered by teams of security officers, and nothing
was found.
At four, Joanna went home. She'd toyed with the notion of calling Gary,
because the idea of returning to her apartment in Van Nuys alone tonight was
somehow frightening, but she discarded it. This late, Gary would argue that she
should come and spend the night with him, since his house was just over the hill, and
she was in no mood for the "But why don't you want to?" argument that she knew
would follow. Why she didn't want to was a question she'd never been able to answer
to either Gary's satisfaction or her ownтАФit was too often easier to consent than to
explain.
In the end, the guards walked her out to her solitary old blue Pinto sitting in the
parking lot, and she drove down the dark canyons to the freeway and the brighter
lights of the Valley. She wasn't sure just why the thought of going home alone would
frighten her. When she reached it, the place was quiet and normal as ever; but when
she finally slept, toward six, it was not restful sleep.
No trace of an intruder was ever found.
CHAPTER III
The silent tower stood ten miles from the ancient royal city of Kymil, separated
from it by the sheet-steel curve of the River Pon, and by the silver-and-green
patch-work of the Ponmarish, where sheep and pigs foraged among the boggy pools
and town children hunted frogs in the long summer evenings. As Caris and his
grandfather crossed the long causeway toward the old city gates of Kymil in the hush
of the endless dusk, farmers and the river-trade merchants who made the money of the
town drew aside from the sight of the old man's long black robes, making the sign
against evil. The folk of Kymil had long memories and reason to fear the mageborn,
even Salteris Solaris.
From the causeway, Caris could see the Tower, lonely on its hill; a finger raised
in warning.
A warning, certainly, that no mage ever forgot.
A stage line ran between Angelshand and Kymil; though, like the Old
Believers, the wages did not travel by stage, it meant that the roads were good. Two
nights on the road, Caris and his grandfather had lodged in peasant huts, and once in
the self-consciously rustic country villa of a wealthy merchant from Angelshand who
had conversed with earnest condescension all through dinner about "the hidden
strength of these ancient beliefs," and whose daughters had stolen downstairs after the