"Hambly,.Barbara.-.Dog.Wizard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Antryg fell silent a moment, listening to the sheer, glittering mastery of the music; Seldes Katne said softly, "That will be Brighthand-Zake Thwacker, Otaro's pupil. He has ... great skill."
He glanced back at her downcast dark eyes, the sudden pinch of her thin lips. After her failure to scry Joanna's image in the white crystal, she could not bring herself to say, He has true magic. But the lightness, the delicate strength of the music, ignited the air above the butterfly jungle between the two houses; had he not been afraid of what was happening in the Vaults, afraid that Joanna might be imprisoned down there, Antryg could have easily slipped under the spell of it himself and spent the rest of the evening dreaming on the windowsill, until the last light faded from the northern sky.
"In any case," he said, turning back from the enchanted sharpness to the deepening gloom within the upstairs room, "I suspect that's why the mazes were dug, level upon level of them ... their patterns are disturbingly similar to the garden mazes I saw in the east, and I know that glass, water, and bone were used by certain sects to further channel power-all things which have been found in the walls down there. And that's what frightens me about a Gate having been jammed open in the Vaults."
Seldes Katne startled so badly that she dropped the crystal. "Jammed open?"
Antryg blinked at her in surprise in the failing light. "Of course. Isn't it obvious that's what has happened?"
She said nothing, only stared at him, dark eyes wide with shock.
"That didn't occur to you?"
"I ... I thought the Gates didn't remain open for more than a few minutes."
"They don't," he said simply. "And it takes a tremendous amount of power to hold one open even for that long, which is as it should be, given the way the fabric of the universe weakens around a Gate. If one were held open even under ordinary circumstances, I'm not sure what the results would be; given the nature of the maze and the presence of the energy lines, the fact that the Gate is moving shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, though it will make it a beast of a job to track."
He rubbed his hands absently, as if trying to massage old aches from the twisted fingers. "At the moment it seems to be confining its ambulations to the Vaults, which is well and good. But the problem is, I can feel the situation is deteriorating. More Gates and wormholes are opening and closing, strange energies acting on the energies already moving through the Vaults ... and I don't like the idea that Joanna may be imprisoned down there in the middle of it."
She murmured assent and fumbled to pick up the crystal, which had skidded beneath the rim of a painted blue-and-yellow plate; then her eyes returned to his. "I might try working in conjunction with a teles-ball," she said after a hesitant moment. "Or you might, though I'm not sure how that will work with the geas. But teles can be used as power-sinks, as you know, and there are several very strong ones here in the Citadel."
"No."
The hard decisiveness in his voice made her look up in startled surprise. "What's wrong with a teles?"
Antryg shrugged and resumed his gawky pacing, now more purposefully, hunting around for his shawl. "I've never liked them. I know people use them for all manner of spells, from the summoning of elementals to the sending of messages to non-wizards ... but I've never trusted them."
She could only stare at him, baffled-rather, Antryg supposed, as Joanna would be by someone who refused to use the telephone out of a professed fear that such devices ate the souls of their users.
"They're only glass and mercury ... "
"Glass through which magic has been channeled, in which power has been accumulated, year upon year, century upon century," replied Antryg, finding his shawl at last, wrapped around the teapot to keep the contents warm. The upper room of the Pepper-Grinder, though occupied by him for only a few hours, already had the beginnings of a formidable collection of books and scientific journals, stray flowers pressed for drying and at least two splendid, varicolored pinwheels set in a vase beside the window, turning like enormous sunflowers with the shift of the grass-scented wind.
"I know most of the academics consider it balderdash, but Brynnart of Pleth wrote that glass and mercury in combination have powers of their own, and I happen to believe him."
"Brynnart of Pleth was insane," Seldes Katne pointed out.
"So am I. That doesn't mean he wasn't right. And personally, I'm a bit leery of anything which has been imbued with that much magic over that long a period of time."
She gave an uncertain half laugh. "If you're going to suspect things that have had magic go through them, you might as well hold suspect the ... the," she groped for an example of absurdity, "the stones of the Citadel themselves."
He paused in the act of slinging the slightly tea-stained shawl around his shoulders and turned enormous, deranged gray eyes upon her. "Oh, I do," he said. He plucked one of the pinwheels from the vase, large, delicately balanced, and of a brilliant red and yellow like a hallucinatory sunflower, and blew gently on its curving sail. "Daurannon should be in the Senior Parlor by this time, drinking his evening tea; I think it's high time that you and I had a look at the Vaults."

"As a theory it's preposterous," Daurannon had said. "The mazes in the Vaults were dug as a protective measure to guard the old wizard-lords' treasures against invaders, and their more dangerous secrets against the curious, the same way the very ancient lords built mazes into their castles. That's all those garden mazes mimic. And true or not," he'd added, seeing Antryg open his mouth to argue, "the Council has agreed not to permit you to enter the Vaults without one of us as escort."
Perched on the arm of the oak chair on the opposite side of the parlor fire, Antryg had experienced-and now, as the scene recurred to him through the smoky overlay of his dreams, experienced more strongly-a sense of odd and painful deja vu. The Senior Parlor, on the third floor of the Polygon, above the level where the classical mass of that great building broke up into a stylistic jackdaw nest of additions and alterations, had been a home to him once upon a time. Asleep and dreaming in his borrowed bed in the Pepper-Grinder, even as his mind played back the scenes of the earlier evening, it tangled them with the memories of those other nights: hundreds of them, thousands of them, when he'd sat in the same fashion, perched, knees up, on the arm of that very chair, with Daurannon slouched comfortably in the opposite seat of heavily carved and age-blackened oak, stirring milk into his tea after the fashion of the lower classes on the western seaboard.
Even the people had been the same, as much a part of the small, cozy chamber as the linenfold paneling, the undressed stone of the fireplace, and the smells of herbs and candlewax. Bentick played piquet with someone, usually Phormion but on this occasion Nandiharrow; Otaro the Singer sat on the raised stone hearth, soft phrases and ribbons of melody flowing from his big old harp with the restful ease of conversation, while Zake Thwacker-Brighthand-a seventeen-year-old docker's son from the Angelshand slums in the gray robes of a Junior, sat at his feet. Pentilla Riverwych was curled up in a chair at the long table beneath the western windows, unconsciously plaiting and replacing the end of her thick brown braid as she read from some obscure history that Seldes Katne had brought her down from the library.
Most of them had been Antryg's teachers, before he'd become a teacher himself. Pentilla, now a Senior, had been his student.
And he was an exile.
Even in sleep, deep in the dreams that brought the scene back to him, that hurt.
"But if my theory that the Vaults are an energy maze is preposterous-which of course it is," argued Antryg persuasively, "what harm can I do by going there alone? I mean, I'd have gone down through the kitchen-they connect up with the stores-cellar and the room where Pothatch keeps the flour-except it's locked up for the night, which I must say is rather hard, Bentick, on the poor students who just want a cup of cocoa."
"Considering the things abroad in the Vaults now," Nandiharrow remarked, judiciously rearranging his cards, "that cup of cocoa could be dearly bought."
"It isn't the energy from the lines of power that worries us, and I think you know it." Daurannon set his teacup aside-soft-paste china, white and yellow, from the finest workshops in Angelshand. Everything in the Citadel was that way-either exquisite gifts of past patrons, or rough local work of wool, terra-cotta, or whittled wood. "You know the records are full of rumors and hints and mentions of things that the old mages came up with, things of power that can no longer be accounted for. You know, and I know, that some of these are concealed in the Vaults. That was where you found the Archmage Nyellin's Soul-Mirror, which had been hidden away for centuries."
"If he has no power ... " Seldes Katne began.
"Some of those tales speak of things that didn't need the power of a wizard," Daur replied. "Some of them, we don't know what they were, or whether they'd need a wizard's power or not to cause trouble with them. You know the Vaults better than anyone, Antryg, and I wouldn't put it past you to have located one of these implements in some obscure record and seek it out to lift the geas."
He got to his feet and collected the scabbarded sword propped against the side of his chair. "Believe me, geas or no geas, you are not going down there alone. It's probably better that you stay aboveground, Kitty," he added, as the librarian made ready to fall into step with them. "Phormion's still shaken up from her brush with that thing, and it was two days ago; you can't be up to dealing with the abominations we're likely to meet down there."
He spoke with a brisk dismissiveness that brooked no denial. Seldes Katne threw an anguished look at Antryg, then said stoutly, "I didn't see it nearly as closely as ... as Phormion did."
"Besides, the more the merrier," Antryg said, who had absolutely no intention of descending to the Vaults with no company but his former friend. "Nandiharrow can come to protect Kitty, can't you, Tick-Tock?"
Nandiharrow stifled a grin at the very old nickname; Bentick twitched as if his chair had become unexpectedly animate beneath him. "Don't be ridiculous! For one thing, we're in the middle of the game."
"Well, we did vote to bring him here for his knowledge of the Void ... "
"With which Daurannon is perfectly capable of dealing. Besides, it's late." The Steward's long fingers fidgeted with the gold watch he wore on a chain around his neck.
"A perfect opportunity to observe the energy lines down there under increased influence of the moon." Antryg blew on his pinwheel, causing it to spin into a drunken kaleidoscope of color.
"Well, really." Bentick glanced at his watch again and laid down his cards, fretfully feeling at his belt for his ring of keys. "All this trouble to escort a mere dog wizard ... "

"They call us dog wizards."
Like a thread of golden ribbon, the voice laced itself through the fabric of Antryg's dream. Deep in sleep he frowned, trying to escape it, as he had tried to escape it for years.
And for a moment, in his dreaming-in the dream parlor while Daurannon tried to talk Seldes Katne out of going with them and Nandiharrow folded up his cards with the slight clumsiness of one still not used to operating with fewer fingers than he had originally had-it seemed to Antryg that Suraklin leaned against the cobblestone of the chimney face, his long, light brown hair framing those narrow features, topaz eyes gently malicious in the saffron reflections of the fire.
And, as if the Dark Mage had opened the door to some infinite corridor of awareness, for a moment Antryg could see all the way down to the end of the dream and knew what it would be.
He tried to cry out, tried to wake himself, tried vainly to surface from sleep.
There was an old circular turret called the Rotunda attached to the Polygon, which it antedated by at least seven hundred years. An old temple, the ancient records said, though to what god was unknown. It lay on the crossing of three of the major energy lines under the Citadel, the Vorplek, the Brehon, and the Pensyk, and consequently the terrible sense of the Void's nearness was almost unbearable. Prowling back and forth in the brittle moonlight that streamed through the seven oddly shaped windows while Bentick knelt to unlock the square, iron-bound doors in the floor, Antryg had to fight the conviction that there was a Gate within a few yards of him-the Gate whose presence he believed could be anywhere on the Line. In the Library it had been the same, and as they'd descended through the corridor past the doors of the refectory, Seldes Katne had told him that others had reported such sensations elsewhere in the Citadel as well.
Daur and Nandiharrow bent their backs, lifting the iron-bound doors from their bed in the living rock of the floor. Bentick fiddled impatiently with his watch, his keys, his staff. Stepping back out of the range of the witchlight on the Steward's staff, Antryg ran quick fingers over the frescoed plaster of the Rotunda's walls, then, not finding what he sought, laid down his pinwheel and knelt to run his hand along the hewed granite of the floor.