"Hambly,.Barbara.-.Dog.Wizard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)
Yes, he thought. He had to go back.
Here on the rock-the Throne-the pain had hit him, two long, shuddering waves an hour or so apart, as if lungs and spine and nerves were being ripped out in bleeding handfuls: greedy silver knives and long, clever fingers pushing apart the sutures of his skull to dig out portions of his brain. He'd blacked out the second time, come to weak and sobbing with a pulped exhaustion, the warm rock beneath his cheek and the shadows of the long weed stems lying far over on the granite's bleached breast.
Then he had only lain, like a rag on a beach, listening to the sigh of the wind in the endless sea of spruce and ghostly aspen that stretched out behind him and the soft chewing of the Crooked River over its stones below the high platform of the Throne. Listening, and knowing that if he hadn't yielded to the Master-Spells of his own accord, it would have been much, much worse.
Below him he heard a meadowlark's cry, lilting and joyous as the bird flung itself free of the earth. He fetched a deep breath, the air entering his lungs with that cold, startling sharpness that is neither taste nor smell, but rather a sort of awakening; there was a stab of pain deep inside him, as if he had incautiously rolled over onto something sharp, but not nearly as bad as it had been. After a time he struggled up onto his elbows, looking down and back at the Citadel and the country around.
He lay near the edge of the Throne, in reality a sort of natural platform, a blurred and misshapen square of granite overlooking the little break in the ring of high ground that surrounded the Valley of Shadows. The valley itself, an irregular, oblong dale two or three miles long by nearly two wide, was mostly open meadow and not shadowy at all, though the encompassing sprucewoods of the taiga encroached on its northern end and sent a long tentacle of trees down both sides of the Crooked River, which wandered in a series of twisting loops down its eastern edge. Boulders dotted the short grass; from Antryg's vantage point, he could see great patches of frail northlands flowers, lupine and anemones and gaudy, paperlike poppies, as if a gypsy had passed through and left colored scarves lying carelessly strewn in the grass.
There were stories that spoke of some local grand duke-back in the days before wizardry became respectable-who had marched his army against the Citadel in vengeance for some real or fancied slight. His men had camped around the walls of the Citadel for two nights, and on the third night (Bentick's version of the story said that the wizards in the Citadel had warned the attacker repeatedly to take himself away; Suraklin, recounting it to Antryg years previously, had said, Without warning ... ), the waters of the Crooked River had risen in roaring spate, mysteriously prevented from flowing out through the gap between the Throne and the granite hillock opposite, and had drowned the offending grand duke and all his train.
Looking down into the dale, Antryg believed it. Certainly the long fan of strewn rock below the gap in the hills spoke of floods in the past-not one, but over and over. The main wall of the Citadel itself, rising on its great jutting cone of gray rock in the midst of the vale, circled the granite hill just above the level of the surrounding ring, though these days the newer structures-the mule barn and dairy among their web of paddock and fence, the stillrooms and vegetable gardens-lay spread like a lady's train over the lowest slopes and among the clumps of spruce and alder on the valley floor.
Shaggy with its ancient trees, its moss-choked fountains and tiny gardens, the Citadel itself rose, buildings of every age and period clinging like swallows' nests to the steep rock. Suspended over the sheer northeast face, the Conservatory flashed dully in shadow, like a collection of dirty glass. Higher up, triumphant in the daffodil sun of afternoon, the marble turret of the observation platform shone white and blue with mosaic work and flashed with threaded lines of gold.
"Study for the sake of study-pah." He could still hear Suraklin's soft, even voice saying it. He'd been buttering a scone-the scene was as clear to Antryg as if it had taken place that morning-the slant of early beams through the narrow lights of the sunroom window had turned his eyes and hair nearly the same color as the butter, the honey, the biscuit in his hand. "They like to pretend they have withdrawn from the vulgar world of money and politics and the petty groping for power. But let the Emperor cut one copper of his subsidies to them or try to appropriate the revenues of one of the pieces of property they own in every city of the Realm-let the Church step one inch over the lines they have drawn up for the Church to follow-and you'd see what they've been quietly studying in their peaceful bookrooms all these years. Why should they fight, when they've made the Emperor tamely give them whatever they wanted? Why take the trouble to police their competition, when the Inquisition will do it and let them pretend their lily white hands are clean?"
His own hands, very narrow and long-fingered, wielded the tiny silver butter knife as if he were dissecting a lizard in his workroom; when he was done, he handed the buttered scone to Antryg, who sat, a long, gawky, strange-looking boy of fifteen, at the other side of the pale-scrubbed oak of the little table. It was a gesture of curious kindness beside which the bone-stripping sarcasm, the hideous magics in which he called Antryg to participate, dissolved like shadows in morning sunlight and left Antryg even now-knowing everything that he knew-with the memory only of how warm that illusion of caring had been.
Antryg sighed and shook his head at himself. What a consummate vampire the man had been.
A shadow fell across him. Rolling over, with a little shock of residual pain in his bones, he shaded his eyes and looked up to see the librarian Seldes Katne standing in the long grass that grew from a split in the faded rock of the Throne.
"I've brought you a coat." She held it out to him-a ridiculous garment from the Citadel slop chest, clearly the former property of some actor or mountebank: broad bands of tarnished red and gold tinsel slashing the worn plum-covered velvet of its extravagant skirts. The small wind stirred its folds and moved Seldes Katne's black robe and ash gray braid. "It's growing cold."
"Thank you." He got unsteadily to his feet, Aunt Min's asymmetrical shawl sliding from his shoulders as he accepted the more substantial garment with hands that still felt oddly weak. But the first wave of nausea had faded, replaced by ravenous hunger. By the lay of the shadows, it would be nearly suppertime, and he felt chilled and empty to the marrow of his bones. "And thank you for speaking out for me. It was kind of you-good, too, to go against the Council. That couldn't have been easy."
Her round, homely face flushed unprettily in the primrose light. "I may not have much power," she muttered, "but I've been at the Citadel long enough, I should hope, to have a vote."
She sounded angry and shaken, and would not meet his eyes. For as long as Antryg had known her-which was well over twenty years-Seldes Katne had borne cheerfully the fact that she had only the barest minimum of magical ability. The Library was her bailiwick and the home of her heart, and though she was unable to accomplish three-quarters of the spells and cantrips, the great fields and Summonings and wielding-weirds recorded in its volumes, she had power enough to understand what they were and how they should be done by those who could. It crossed Antryg's mind to wonder whether it was this very mediocrity that had given her sympathy for him: having so little power herself, she had protested the casual violence with which they had ripped his from him.
Or perhaps, he thought, it might have been because they had been friends, partners in the wizardly greed for knowledge. But then, Daurannon had been his friend, too.
She went on gruffly, "I don't suppose that carries much weight with the likes of Lady Rosamund Kentacre or Daurannon the Handsome."
"Well," Antryg pointed out gently, pulling the shawl up over his shoulders again, "I couldn't actually disagree with them, you know, Kitty." And she smiled at the private nickname he'd given her in his novice days. "I did break my vows, and I have misused my powers ... and perhaps that's the entire strength of the Master-Spells. To give the Archmage understanding of another wizard's mind sufficient to obtain that wizard's consent-be it ever so subconscious-to whatever spell she will cast. Suraklin did that sort of thing, too," he added, and shivered; the evening was cooling, and the coat she'd given him, for all its outrageous appearance, had been made for the gorgeous courts of Mellidane and the south.
Her dark eyes rested doubtfully, worriedly, on his face for a moment, and he could see she didn't really understand. "They still needn't have done to you what they did," she said after a time. "You're going to need your powers." She stepped closer to him, her small, square hand reaching out to touch his threadbare sleeve, and her voice sank to a frightened whisper.
"Antryg, I've seen it. I've seen that thing in the Vaults."
"Have you?" Antryg cocked his head, a curiously storklike gesture, and the slanting daylight flashed across his Coke-bottle spectacles like enormous, insectile eyes.
She nodded and withdrew her hand to clench it nervously before her. "I ... I went down there after ... after you left the Citadel this morning. The downshaft near the Painted Halls leads straight down to the eighth level. I thought if I could find it, I might be able to convince the others the danger was real, that you would need your powers."
The librarian looked away from him and folded her arms closely; the wind, stronger now, soughed through the spruces along the river like the passage of a giant hand, bearing on it the knifelike bitterness of the ice-locked northern bays. The quality of the light had changed across the Valley of Shadow, as the brightness passed from the poppies and the lupine, and the first slow degrees of the long spring evening veiled the grass.
"Yes," she said slowly, "yes, it moves. I only saw it ... distantly. That long reach on the eighth level. I ... I heard voices, shouting something, I don't know what ... saw lights flashing far away. But it was all coming toward me, rushing at me down that corridor. I ran down the nearest side tunnel-I was afraid it would come after me, but it didn't."
"Did you see it pass across the mouth of the passage you were in? See it sideways, so to speak?"
She nodded slowly. "Not ... not clearly." She made a small rueful noise, and her coarse, dark skin reddened a little with embarrassment. "I pressed myself to the wall. When I looked up, it was just to see something like a cloud of darkness moving across the end of the corridor. I stayed where I was until the sound of it, the noise of beating wings, a noise like wind, had died away. Afterward I felt dizzy, but I can show you the place if you like."
"Curious," murmured Antryg. "Curiouser and curiouser. By all means, take me there. But first, let's see what Pothatch can get me in the way of dinner. I have the uncomfortable suspicion that it's going to turn into a rather long night."
Chapter IV
In the days of the Six Kingdoms, a wizard was put to death by the Lord Caeline for trafficking with demons and lending his body to their uses. But as the wizard was possessed by a demon when he was slain, the demon also possessed his ghost, which bred into a monster, devouring all that it touched. No one could destroy this tsaeati, for whatever power was turned against the demon, the ghost drank, and the demon was able to turn it against its wielders in turn. At last Berengis the Black, the greatest Court Wizard of the land, with his own body lured the creature into a piece of crystal the size of his hand, so that it became lost in the crystal's inner mazes, wandering forever in darkness there, unable to escape.
-Firtek Brennan
Dialogues Upon the Nature of Wizardry
tsaeati-anciently, devourer or glutton
There was darkness, and darkness, and darkness. Joanna didn't know how long she huddled in the corner where she found herself, her tousled blond head buried in her arms, shaking with fear and fighting off the urge to scream, to weep, to give in to the terror of what had happened ...
And that was, she realized eventually, the point.
She didn't know how long. But it was long enough for her fear to give way to waiting-and the waiting to impatience, the perverse desire for something to happen, even something bad.
And eventually, it all gave way to boredom.
Because nothing happened. Only more darkness, and stillness more absolute than anything she had previously known; temperatureless black air lying against her face, utter silence hanging like a muffling curtain against the smooth glassiness of the wall against which she sat, the slick unseen floor.
A silence, a stillness, like a soundstage or the acoustical deadness of a radio broadcasting chamber-not an echo, not the hum of air conditioning, not the vibration of weight on some distant floor. Nothing-truly nothing-that elevated even the soft hiss of air through her nostrils to a distinct variety of note and pitch.
A nothing that never altered.
She didn't feel ready to shout-God only knew what might answer-but she uncurled herself from the fetal position she'd unconsciously assumed when ... when ... It troubled her that she couldn't remember the exact mechanism of how she'd gotten where she was.
She remembered jerking to wakefulness in her own bed, sitting up in disoriented horror to see the blackness of the Void materializing out of the corner of her room. She remembered screaming. As if half recalling a dream, she had the impression that for a moment she'd known what was going to happen to her, and that was why she'd screamed.
And then she'd been here, wretched and terrified and weeping in the darkness.
And then she'd still been here, bored.
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