"Hambly,.Barbara.-.Darwath.1.-.Time.of.The.Dark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Rudy simply couldn't figure the guy. But something in that serene self-assurance prompted him to ask, "Yeah, but how can you be a wizard without magic?" He finished his beer, crumpled the aluminum with one hand, and tossed it into the corner of the bare room.
"Oh, wizardry has really very little to do with magic."
Taken off-balance, Rudy paused, the old man's voice and words touching some feeling in his soul that echoed, like the distant note of a long-forgotten guitar. "Yeah, butЧ" he began, and stopped again. "What is wizardry?" he asked quietly. "What is magic?"
"What isn't?"
There was silence for the space of about two long-drawn breaths, Rudy fighting the sudden, illogical, and overwhelming notion that that was the reply of a man who understood magic. Then he shook his head, as if to clear it of the webs of the old man's crazy fantasies. "I don't understand you."
Ingold's voice was soft. "I think you do."
He really did step out of that light.
In another minute you'll be as crazy as he is.
Confusion made Rudy's voice rough. "All I understand is that you're crazier than a loon ... "
"Am I really?" The white eyebrows lifted in mock offense. "And just how do you define crazy?"
"Crazy is somebody who doesn't know the difference between what's real and what's just in his imagination."
"Ah," Ingold said, all things made clear. "You mean if I disbelieved something that I saw with my own eyes, just because I imagined it to be impossible, I would be crazy?"
"I did not either see it!" Rudy yelled.
"You know you did," the wizard said reasonably. "Come now, Rudy, you believe in thousands of things you've never seen with your own eyes."
"I do not!"
"You believe in the ruler of your country."
"Well, I've seen him! I've seen him on television."
"And have you not also seen people materializing out of showers of silver light on this television?" Ingold asked.
"Dammit, don't argue that way! You know as well as I do ... "
"But I don't, Rudy. If you choose deliberately to disregard the evidence of your own senses, it's your problem, not mine. I am what I am ... "
"You are not!"
Slowly, in an absent-minded imitation of Rudy's can-squashing ritual, Ingold crushed his empty beer can into a wad slightly smaller than his own fist. "Really, you're one of the most prejudiced young men I've ever met," he declared. "For an artist you have singularly little scope."
Rudy drew in his breath to reply to that one, then let it out again. "How did you know I'm an artist?"
Amused blue eyes challenged him. "A wild guess." In his heart Rudy knew it had been nothing of the kind. "You are, aren't you?"
"UhЧwen, I paint airbrush pictures on the sides of custom vans, and pinstripe motorcycle fuel tanks, that kind of stuff." Seeing Ingold's puzzled frown, he conceded, "Yeah, I guess you could call it art."
There was another silence, the old man looking down at his scarred hands in the sunlight on the table top, the isolated cabin utterly silent but for the fault creaking insect noises in the long grasses outside. Then he looked up and smiled. "And is it beneath your dignity to have friends with, I think you call it, nonstandard reality?"
Rudy thought about some of the people who hung around Wild David's bike shop. Nonstandard was one way of putting it. He laughed. "Hell, if I felt that way I'd have maybe about two friends. Okay, you win."
The old man looked startled and just a little worried, "You mean you believe me?"
"NoЧbut it doesn't bother me if it doesn't bother you."

If he's schizo, Rudy found himself thinking later in the morning, he's got it all down. Wizardry, the mythical Realm of Darwath, the Hidden City of Quo on the Western Ocean where the garnered learning of a hundred generations of mages was stored in the dark labyrinths of Forn's TowerЧIngold had it all, seemed to know it as intimately as Rudy knew his own world of bars and bikes and body shops, of smog and steel. Through the long, warm morning, Rudy messed with the Chevy's engine, Ingold lending a hand occasionally when one was needed and staying out of the way when it wasn't, and their talk drifted over magic, the Void, engines, and painting. Ingold never slipped up.
Not only was he totally familiar with his own fantasy world, but Rudy noticed he had the lapses of knowledge that a man imperfectly acquainted with this world would have. He seemed totally fascinated with Rudy's world, with the wonders of radio and television, the complexities of the welfare system, and the mysteries of the internal combustion engine. He had the insatiable curiosity that, he had said, was the hallmark of wizards: the lust for knowledge, almost any kind of knowledge, that superseded even the most elementary considerations of physical comfort or safety.
If it wasn't for the kid, Rudy thought, glancing from the tangled shadows of the car toward the wizard, who was seated in the long grass, thoughtfully dissecting and examining a seed pod, I wouldn't care. Hell, the guy could claim to be Napoleon and it'd be no business of mine. But he's got no business with a kid that young, wandering around a million miles from noplace.
And his hangover hallucination of their stepping out of the burning air returned to him, the absolute reality of the vision, far clearer than anything muscatel or anything else had ever done for him. Something about it troubled him, something he could not yet define.
Then the rusted nut he was working on gave way, and other matters claimed his attention. Ten minutes later he crawled out from under the car, grease-smudged, hot, and disgusted. Ingold set aside the seed pod and raised his eyebrows inquiringly.
Rudy flung the wrench he was holding violently into the dirt. "Goddam fuel pump," he sighed, and dropped crosslegged to the ground at the wizard's side.
"It is the pump, then, and not the line?" Rudy had briefed him on the problem.
"Yeah." He cursed, and elaborated on the car, its owner, and things in general. He finished with, "So I guess the only thing to do is walk to the highway and hitch."
"Well," Ingold said comfortably, "my contact in this world should be here very shortly. You could always get a ride back to civilization with her."
Rudy paused in wiping his oily hands on a rag he'd fished out of the back seat. "Your what?"
"My contact in this world." Seeing Rudy's surprise, Ingold explained. "I shall be stranded the night in your world and, though on occasion I've starved, I see no reason to do it if it can be avoided."
"So you're just passing through, is that it?" Rudy wondered if there was, in fact, such a contact, or if this was yet one more strange figment of the old man's peculiar imagination.
"In a manner of speaking," Ingold said slowly.
"But if you're a wizard in your own world, how come you'd starve?" Rudy asked, more out of lazy curiosity than anything else. "How come you can't just make food appear if you're hungry?"
"Because it doesn't work that way," Ingold said simply. "Creating the illusion of food is relatively simple. To make a piece of grass like this one convincingly resemble bread requires only that in taste, texture, and appearance, I convince you that you are eating bread. But if you ate it, it would provide you no more nourishment than the grass, and on a steady diet of such things you would quickly starve. But literally to transform the inner nature of the grass would be to alter reality itself, to tamper with the fabric of the entire universe."
"Lot of trouble to go through for a crummy piece of bread."
"Well, more than that, it's potentially dangerous. Any tampering, no matter how small, with the fabric of the universe is perilous. That is why shape-changing is seldom done. Most high-ranking wizards understand the principle behind turning oneself into a beastЧwith the mind and heart of a beastЧbut very, very few would dare to put it into practice. An archmage might do it, in peril of his life. But ... " He raised his head suddenly, and Rudy caught the far-off chugging of an engine in the still, pale air of afternoon.
"My friend," Ingold explained. He got up, brushing dry grass and twigs off his robe. Rudy scrambled likewise to his feet as a dusty red Volkswagen beetle crept into view around the shoulder of the hill.
"This I gotta see."
The bug's tires surrounded it in a light cloud of dust as it made its slow approach, bumping cautiously over every rut and pothole of the treacherous road. It came to a stop a few yards away, the door opened, and a girl got out.