"Barbara Hambly - Windrose 3 - Dog Wizard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

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DOG WIZARD
Barbara Hambly

[18 jun 2002-scanned and proofed for #bookz]


Chapter I
And as for the wizards who use their power to further human ends, even ends which seem to them to
be good, or who sell their skills, even such skills as they themselves deem harmless-they are but
dogs who will feed from any master's hand. Such dog-wizards the Council of Wizards will neither
recognize, nor teach its skills, nor protect from the haters of magic.
-Isar Chelladin
Archmage of the Council
Precepts of Wizardry

"Is your friend really what he says he is?"
There was a carefully casual note in Ruth Kleinfeld's voice that made Joanna hesitate a long time
before replying.
"What has he told you?" she asked at last, cradling the receiver of the telephone against her
shoulder to hit the SAVE key. As an afterthought, she punched through a save and exit, parked the
heads, and took the computer down. Something in Ruth's tone told her this could get complicated.
"And why do you ask?"
There was a pause. Ruth, Joanna guessed, was ensconced in the dingy gray office of her father's
construction company in the cement wilds of South Central Los Angeles, painting her fingernails
and trying to guess the amounts of the checks her father had written on the office account last
week. The temperature down in her neck of the woods-Venice Boulevard and Hoover Avenue-would be
hovering in the nineties. Up here in Van Nuys it was worse, and Joanna, clothed in her oldest
jeans and a black Enyart's Bar & Grill T-shirt with sleeves and neck cut out, was wondering
whether the air conditioner would make it till sunset, let alone till Thanksgiving, when the San
Fernando Valley would finally cool off.
There was no question about which friend Ruth meant. It was just like Antryg Windrose, Joanna
reflected, not to come up with an alternative to the unvarnished truth.
"He says," reported Ruth in a just-the-facts-ma'am tone, "that he's an exiled wizard from another
universe."
Why not? Joanna sighed mentally. Antryg had been considered hopelessly insane by everyone who knew
him in his former life. Why alter things now?
There was momentary silence on the line, something the girls had grown used to over the course of
their years of friendship. On the other side of what had once been her Aunt Rachel's dining table,
Chainsaw yawned and rolled over to a more comfortable position, all four feet in the air, on top
of the pile of documentation Joanna was using to try-vainly, so far-to figure out why Galaxsongs
Records' spreadsheet program refused to work. Chainsaw and Spock deeply appreciated Antryg
Windrose 's arrival on the scene last January, coinciding as it did with Joanna's decision to
become a free-lance consultant and full-time dispenser of cream and catnip. It amused and
interested Joanna that, although the living room had been transformed into a barely restrained
chaos of papers, drawings, physics books, tarot decks, used teacups, animal skulls, dried and
potted herbs, gutted computers, dismantled clocks, pinwheels in various stages of construction,
and an artillery battalion of windup toys, the cats left most of Antryg 's things alone.
After a moment Ruth went on. "Now, I mean, Antryg is definitely not from this universe ... "