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

coolly, "it scarcely matters where he goes. Prince Pharos is a madman and should
have been barred from the succession long ago in favor of his cousin."
Issay laughed. "Cerdic? Maybe, if you want quacks and dog wizards like
Magister Magus ruling the Empire."
Her ladyship's aristocratic lip curled at the mention of the most popular
charlatan in Angelshand, but she turned her attention to her plate with her usual air of
arctic self-righteousness, as if secure in the knowledge that all opposing arguments
were specious and deliberately obstructive.
Caris, clearing up the plates afterwards and getting ready for the one last
training session with the other sasenna which the incredible length of the midsummer
evenings permitted, felt none of the wizards' qualms for his grandfather's safety. This
was not so much because he did not believe the mad Regent capable of anything-by
all accounts he was-but because Caris did not truly think anyone or anything capable
of trapping or harming his grandfather.
Since Caris was a child, he had known Salteris Solaris as his grandfather, a
mysterious man who visited his grandmother's farm beyond the bounds of their
Wheatlands village, sometimes twice in a summer, sometimes for the length of a
winter's storm. He had known that afterwards his mother's mother would sing at her
household tasks for weeks. The old man's hair had been dark then, like that of Caris'
mother-Caris took after the striking blond beauty of his slow-moving, good-natured
father. But Caris had the Archmage's eyes, deep brown, like the dark earth of the
Wheatlands, the color of the very old leaves seen under clear water, tilted up slightly
at their outer ends. For a time, it had seemed that he had inherited something else
from him besides. When he had taken his vows as sasennan to the Council, it had
been with the aim of serving the old man as a warrior, if he did not have the power to
do so as a wizard. Only lately had it come to him that there would be a time when it
would not be the old man who was its head.
Caris was too much a sasennan even to think about his grandfather, or the secret
fear which he had carried within him, during that evening's training. With the endless,
tepid twilight of midsummer filtering through the long windows of the training floor
on the upper storey of the novices' house, the swordmaster put the small class through
endless rounds of practice sparring with split bamboo training swords. Ducking,
parrying, leaping, pressing, and retreating under the continuous raking of barked
instruction and jeers, in spite of five years of hard training Caris was still sodden with
sweat and bruised all over by the time he was done, convinced he'd never be able to
pick up a sword again. He was familiar with the sensation. In that kind of training,
there was no room for any other thought in the mind; indeed, that was part of the
trainingтАФto inculate the single-mindedness critical to a warrior, the hair-trigger
watching for the flick of an opponent's eyelid, the twitch of the lip or the finger, that
presaged a killing blow . . . or sometimes the sense of danger in the absence of any
physical sign at all.
By the time it was too dark to see, it was past ten o'clock, and Caris, exhausted,
stumbled with the other sasenna back downstairs to bathe and collapse into bed. It
wasn't until he was awakened by he knew not what in the tar-black deeps of the night
that he remembered his grandfather and what he had wanted to ask of him, and by
then it was too late.
His magic was gone.
Long before, Caris had given up his belief in his magic. Only now, lying in the
warm, gluey blackness, did he understand how deeply its roots had run and how
magic had made the skeleton of his very soul. Without it, life was nothing, a hollow,