"Barbara Hambly - Windrose 2 - The Silicon Mage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

and we talk. Okay?"
Two and a half months ago the invitation would have meant merely that he was going to try and
talk her into bed with him. Now she knew, with a cold that seemed to spread from her hands and
feet to the very pit of her stomach, that what he wanted was to get her alone.
"Another time, Gary." Her hands fumbled the typed commands; she hit the ESCAPE button and
tried again, hoping he wouldn't read her fear and begin to ask himself why.
"Babe..." He came around behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, bare in the sleeveless
top that was the only answer to the heat of an unspeakable California autumn. She had to clench
her teeth and fight not to strike his hands away with loathing and terror. "Next week?"
"Maybe..." For a horrifying instant she blocked on the proper command to get out of the
mainframe, her distracted mind praying he wouldn't notice.
"Tuesday?"
She was about to say "Maybe" again, then realized that every moment the discussion lasted,


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people were leaving the plant. In a very few minutes Building Six would be virtually empty, and he
wouldn't have to maneuver to get her alone...
She turned in her swivel chair, looked up into his eyes, and conjured up a sigh. "All right."
He smiled, but there was a gleam of a different triumph in his eyes.
She was shaking all over as she walked out to the parking lot.
He had been trying for weeks to get her alone, sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly; like
her, he was working delicately around things that he wasn't supposed to know, pretending he didn't
know exactly what had happened to her in those weeks at the end of summer when she'd been gone,
pretending he hadn't met her on the other side of the dark Void that separated universe from
universe.
He hadn't been Gary then, of course.
Joanna shivered as she started up the car, a decrepit blue bomber of a '75 Mustang,
remembering the frail, delicate old Archmage, the head of the Council of Wizards, Salteris
Solaris. He'd fooled them all: his grandson the young warrior Stonne Caris; GaryтАФthe real Gary, in
those days whom he'd duped into acting for him on this side of the Void; and all the Wizards of
the Council... herself... He'd fooled them, and had left poor Salteris' stripped out husk of body
and mind to migrate on and devour Gary's self in his turn, as he'd left others.
He was Suraklin the Dark Mage, now after her.
The damnable thing was that there was no proof.
It was no wonder, she thought, that Antryg Windrose went insane.
She guided the car down the long stretch of Lost Canyon Road to where the Ventura Freeway lay,
a glittering snake of constipated steel wavering with heat dance, and wondered bleakly if Antryg
were still alive.
He has to be, she thought, a threadbare litany with which she had tried to sustain herself for
the last four weeks. Please, God, don't let him be dead.
She had no proof of that, either.
Tears of remorse, anger, and shame burned her eyes.
Likewise, she had no proof that those blank periods of gray and causeless depression that had
more and more often troubled her and everyone she knew were anything other than her own unsettled
mind. Yes, at such times no one at San Serano seemed to be able to do any work or to perform such
tasks as they attempted correctly; yes, such spells coincided with an increase in newspaper
accounts of both suicides and senseless gang violence, not only in Los Angeles, but in San