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

"Yet you escaped from this Silent Tower before," the Bishop said impassively. A spurt of
yellow firelight winked balefully on the iron collar in the smith's hands, flaring across the
crooked symbol of lead and jewels worked into its center. "The Sigil of Darkness is the Seal of
the Dead God, the death of power. It should keep you from escaping again until the time of your
execution."
"I won't," Antryg said, his voice low and desperate, staring at the thing in the smith's hands
as if hypnotized. "I swear to you I won't try to escape, only don't... You don't understand,
you're not a wizard, please..."
The smith stepped forward, the iron collar in his hands. It took four guards to force Antryg
to his knees, to strip back his faded robes, and to hold him immobile by the hair, the arms, the
shoulders, while the smith fixed the collar around his neck and soldered shut it lock. Caris was


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one of them; but, mageborn as he was, even the proximity of the Sigil left him sweating and gray
lipped. Though his grip never slacked, not once throughout did he look at the thing they were
fastening against Antryg's flesh. Only when they were done and the other guards released him did
Caris thrust the renegade wizard from him, sending him sprawling to the filth of the stone floor.
Every time she had dreamed this, Joanna fought to leave the shadowy corner where she stood to
go to his side. It was like trying to move, not under water, but smothered like a fly in the
treacly amber of the firelight. Even her cries were stillborn in her aching throat. For a long
minute, there was no sound in that dreadful room, save the cracking of the fire, and Antryg's
hoarse, sobbing breath.
Then Caris asked quietly, "Why this?"
The Bishop fixed upon him her clammy blue gaze.
In a face still white from the mere closeness to the Sigil of Darkness, the young man's brown
eyes smoldered with hate. "He has confessed and been condemned by the Emperor, by the
Witchfinders, and by the Council of Wizards. Why take the trouble of binding his powers, instead
of killing him now? Has someone on the Council gotten jealous of the Council's rights to judge its
own?"
"You are a sasennan of the Council, Caris, their living weapon." The words came out as flat
and cold as her fishbelly eyes. "It is not for the sword to question the hand that wields it."
Passion shook his low voice. "Salteris was my grandfather, damn you!"
"Caris." Ghostlike, the form of the wizard Lady Rosamund materialized in the darkness of the
low doorway, the mage who had led in Antryg's arrest. Behind the glitter of her bullion stitched
stole of office, she seemed little more than shadow within shadow, and those gathered behind her
even less than that. "You put that away," she reminded him, "when you took your vows as sasennan.
From that moment, you had no grandfather. It is nothing to you which member of the Council has
spoken for this man's life, or why. Until that vote changes, he remains as he is."
Huddled in the shadows, Antryg had turned his face from the other wizards and covered it with
his hands, as if by so doing he could hide from them. Twice Joanna had seen his fingers move
toward the iron collar, but he could not bring himself to touch it. His whole body shivered. She
thought he wept.
The hearth fire had sunk to a bed of rubies on powdery ash. The smith and his apprentice had
already departed. In the blood colored glare, the Bishop gave that crumpled form one last scornful
glance and followed, with her black clothed guards about her; the wizards faded back into the
shadows from whence they had come. For a time Caris alone remained, looking after them, his face
like carved bone dyed by the sinking embers, motionless but for the somber glint of his eyes.