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

She knew it existed, but she had no proof.
She was fighting him absolutely alone.
She edged the car out of traffic, off the freeway and into a supermarket parking lot in
Encino, still halfway across the San Fernando Valley from her home. From the front seat, she
fished her purse, a monstrous affair of macrame and bunny skins the size and weight of a dead
Labrador dog; from the trash pit of the trunk she dug a blue nylon backpack of the kind schoolkids
carry books in, crammed to bursting and heavy as if it contained lead. Slinging these over her
shoulder, she locked up the car and crossed the parking lot on foot, a small, sturdy girl, her
untidy blond curls now damp and matted with sweat, like a schoolkid herself in her worn blue jeans
and sleeveless top. Within fifteen minutes she was on a bus headed back toward San Serano.
Definitely, she thought, a candidate for the Academy for the Bewildered. Her behavior in the
last monthтАФbreaking into computer files, hiding her car and sneaking back to the darkened plant
after everyone was gone, avoiding the man she'd been sleeping with for the last two yearsтАФwas
bizarre enough to qualify her as a paranoid in anybody's book. Her dreams were something she
wouldn't wish on her worst enemy.
"I've spent most of my life terrified of a man who's been dead for years," Antryg Windrose had
told her once. And she understood now how the Prince Regent had become a hopeless paranoid at the
age of ten, positive that his father the Emperor had ceased to be his father and unable to prove
it to a soul.
She leaned her head against the vibrating metal of the window frame of the bus, closed her
eyes, and tried not to smell the fattish man in a brown leisure suit who'd come to sit next to her
on the crowded conveyance.
The whole situationтАФthe events of her disappearance, the terrible thing she had learned, the
tall, gentle madman who had kept her safe both from the Inquisition and from the random
abominations traveling now through the Void between universesтАФhad the aspect of some hideous
quadratic equation, with two solutions and no means of determining which was correct.
The daylight side of the equation was simply that she had been temporarily insane. That was
easy. At Gary's house party last August, she'd imbibed some chemically enhanced punch, of which
there'd been a fair amount, and had undergone a long period of illness and violent hallucinations,
peopled by wizards, warriors, evil princes, and the kind of man whose love she had always craved.
And, like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, she had waked again to a black and white world of
people she had known all her life saying soothingly to her, "It was only a dream, dear; only a
dream."
The night side of the equation was also a dream.
That dream had come to her a few nights after her return to this world from wherever she had
been. It had recurredтАФcloudy, haunting, terrible five or six times since.
In the dream she was in a stone walled room, like the dungeon of the Inquisition from which
Antryg had rescued her; by its heavy proportions, it was somewhere underground. Clammy cold
radiated from the damp wall behind her, but she was sweating from the heat that blazed from the
condensed cherry flames on the room's small hearth. A man was working at the fire, bent over it
with his troll shadow flung vast and fidgeting on the curved stone of wall and roof groin,
stripped to loincloth and shoes in the heat, with his skull shaved bald. In the corner where she
stood, Joanna could smell the acrid reek of his sweat. The faint, brisk tapping of his little
hammer on iron sounded loud in the silence, punctuating the crackle of the coals and the asthmatic



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