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

"Tea leaves would probably be more helpful," he muttered, collecting the cards again and making a move toward the room's small hearth, where a pot burbled softly with water on the boil. At least tea would be comforting and would warm his aching hands, now that the evening air was growing sharp.
Damn the Witchfinders ...
And they, too, were on their way.
If there are social climbers in the High Council who seek to bring wizardry into fashion again in the circles to which-they aspire ...
Would Daurannon have betrayed another wizard to win himself into the Regent's approval? A wizard who had murdered Salteris, perhaps, but a wizard all the same?
It was a week and a half to Angelshand by horseback. Daur would have to have known that far in advance that the Council was bringing him here. According to the Lady Rosamund, it hadn't been decided to bring him until a day or so, at most, before Ruth and Joanna and the children had started having visions of the Tujunga Wash. But whose suggestion had it been to fetch him in the first place?
On the other hand, he thought, dealing out, around the King of Wands, the five of wands ("All right, you've made your point!"), the reversed four of cups, the eight of pentacles ("Well, I knew that!"), and the doughty seven of wands, since the Citadel lay upon a major node in the ley-lines, the lines themselves could have faulted as far away as Angelshand. The Inquisitors might easily have set out to ask the mages a few questions about the sudden appearance of abominations in the streets of the capital. For a moment he stared down at the last card dealt; "Now what," he murmured, as he gathered them back like great flakes of colored fire, "is our Daur defending against all comers? His right to inherit the Master-Spells when Auntie dies? Or something else? Something in the Vaults, perhaps?"
He set the cards aside. Half rising, he began to search in the chaos of the tabletop for the little japanned canister of tea that Pothatch had sent back with him. Just in twenty-four hours, the table had become littered with books Seldes Katne had let him abstract from the Library, with papers and notes regarding the Void-she was still hunting, she said, for Munden Myndrex's notes on tortoise-rubbings-with maps of the Vaults he'd drawn to refamiliarize himself with its lower levels and with sketches of Bentick and Rosamund and the way the vines in the little garden below twined up around the windows of the Cat Lair ... pens, inkpots, pestles; pinwheels in various states of construction and experiments with straws and bottles; prisms and chalk and magnets. At one end of the table, he'd pushed aside the litter to draw in red crayon a compass rose, over which he'd already dangled a pendulum stone; the stone had refused to move, meaning a) that Joanna was dead, b) that Joanna was neither north, nor south, nor east, nor west, but, in fact, virtually beneath him ... i.e., in the Vaults, or, c) that as a method of divination, pendulum dowsing was a washout. Neither the ritual strewing of the hazel-nuts he'd begged from Q'iin nor the construction of a feather-circle as he'd been taught by an old granny from the marshes of Kymil had yielded further information regarding Joanna's whereabouts. Divination with peach pits was supposed to work, but regrettably, peaches would not be in season until July.
Tea canister in hand, he turned back, deftly sorted his own significator, the Mage, from the pack and, laying it down, cut and flipped a card at random from the center of the deck.
For a moment he stood, regarding the skeleton on horseback bearing the black banner of the rose, where it lay in the molten amber pool of candlelight. Of course, he told himself, the Death card meant many things ... change, transmutation, travel, passage to another world even.
"I really ought to stop doing this to myself." He folded the pack together for the last time and went to make himself a cup of tea.

By the time he was finished, it was close to midnight. Brighthand's music had ceased but across the way in the Cat Lair, the novices and Juniors and a few of the younger sesenna were still talking, casting spells on one another for the sheer joy of it and shouting with laughter and triumph. The cats for which the place was named stalked moths and fireflies in the rambling carpets of wild grape, spruce needles, and fern. Pulling his sloppy rainbow shawl around his shoulders. Antryg descended through the great downstairs chamber where Kyra was supposed to be studying her lists but wasn't, slipped through a narrow door to the cellar steps and, from the cellar, passed through a rough-hewn entrance, up a tunnel in which he had to walk half bent over, and thence into the subcellar of the Cat Lair.
By attics, side stairs, more cellars, and a generally disused breezeway between the Pavilion and a tiny pear orchard clinging halfway up the tor, gritting his teeth now and then as he passed over an energy line and felt once again the stifling prickle of the Void, he made his way up to the scriptorium in the Library tower.
From the breezeway he'd caught a glimpse of light reflected through the glass panes of the Conservatory, like the far-off refraction of candleflame through an enormous, dirty diamond. The light would be in Seldes Katne's rooms, adjoining that ornate gothic folly. There was a rickety wooden stairway that stitched its way from the attic of the Pavilion, back and forth across the granite rock face beneath the Library walls, with a door at the top leading into the scriptorium. As Antryg ducked beneath the low lintel he saw wizard's marks written in a trailing scribble of faintly glowing magic on the stone doorjambs-Seldes Katne's personal mark. Across the room in the darkness he could see she'd so marked the door down from the Library above and portions of the floor as well.
Clearly, he thought, Kitty Katne was taking no chances on Daurannon or Lady Rosamund coming down here at this hour of the night and wondering why the librarian had been seized with the desire to make a Talisman of Air.
Dim lamplight gleamed suddenly on gold leaf and leather, picking out a leopard's eye, a skeleton's hand, carved on a pillar head. The marks had given their warning. The stout little form framed in the light of the opened doorway turned back for a moment to close it behind her; Antryg remained where he was, a loose-limbed shadow with his hands in his pockets, watching her as she hastened across the room.
"Here it is." She held out to him a rough ring of silver on a thong. Even in the darkness the two opals wired to it seemed to flash with inner fire.
"Thank you. Thank you very much." He took the thong and bound it around his head, centering the talisman on his forehead. "I shall be on your doorstep tomorrow with a bouquet of daisies and the finest and most beautiful pinwheels in all the land."
She swallowed a grin she knew was undignified and said gruffly, "Go along with you-don't be silly."
He regarded her with startled surprise, the talisman on his forehead picking up a thread of starlight from the window, flashing like a weird third spectacle lens. "Why not?"
The talisman was not a particularly strong one and would allow him at most fifteen or twenty minutes' extra air, but there was nothing he could do about that. Any of the stronger mages in the Citadel were ipso facto suspect, and any of the Juniors would not have been able to weave elements in this fashion at all.
"Are you going into the Vaults tonight?" Her voice sank to a whisper, and she glanced nervously over her shoulder, though not even a member of the Council could call the image of another mage in a scrying-crystal without the subject's consent. But this portion of the Library lay on the Vorplek Line, the main energy-track, and through it Antryg's own sense of the Void's instability had grown; here in the Library's foundations, it was particularly strong. "Will you ... will you need help?"
"My dear Kitty, I should be delighted to have you," Antryg said earnestly. "But in point of fact I haven't the faintest idea how and where I'll be able to find my way into the Vaults, and in any case, when I do, I shall probably finish by having to run away from something very fast, and I'd hate to have to be gallant and slow down to let you keep up."
"Run away from what? And how ... "
Antryg swung around abruptly and swept the talisman from his forehead; a moment later the door to the gallery opened, framing against the starlight outside a tall, thin, solemn-faced garden-rake of a boy in a Junior's gray robe-the boy whose harping could make butterflies dance.
"Me lord Antryg?" His voice was deeper than most boys' his age, settled already into a black-oak baritone with the soft, slurry drawl of the Angelshand slums. He was panting as if he'd taken the long stairs up from the Pavilion at a run. "Kyra said she'd seen you come this way. It's me master ... Otaro. He's seen that thing in the Vaults, that Movin' Gate. The Lady and them, they say you ought to come."


Chapter VIII
The great problem with the creation of deathless elemental daemons to do one's bidding lies in finding a place to put them afterwards.
-Pipin the Little
Archmage of the Council of Wizards

I'm going to kill Antryg Windrose. I swear it.
Joanna sank against the wall, hugging herself as if with cold, though the tepid mildness of the dark around her had not altered. Nor was it hunger that made her shiver uncontrollably as she rested her head against the featureless smoothness behind her. Tears rose, a strangling heat in her chest and throat, and she fought them back. She was tired enough without hysterics adding to her exhaustion, and she had the hideous suspicion that once she gave way to them, she wouldn't be able to stop.
Ever.
Or was it, she wondered, that she knew that if she wept, when she did finally stop she would be precisely where she was now-sitting on a smooth floor in the darkness, with no idea where she was, or why.
Wearily, it crossed her mind that in a way, she had brought this on herself. If she hadn't been Antryg's lover-if she hadn't brought him into her life, knowing him to be a fugitive from vengeful mages in another world, knowing they'd eventually come after him-she wouldn't be here now.
Wherever "here" is.
However long "now" is going to be.
She had begun to be terribly afraid, not of what had brought her here or of what would eventually happen to her, but of how long they would keep her before anything did.
If anything did.
Ever.
Three times she had rewound the thread on its spool and returned to her point of origin, half hoping to find some evidence that someone had come looking for her ... food, water, torture-droids, a human footprint in the sand, a Post-it note from her mother, a troop of armed orcs tracking her down the thread-anything.
The third time she had had to fight, as she was fighting now, to keep from sitting on the floor and crying with disappointment, loneliness, and terror.
What if they never came?
Antryg would rescue her, she told herself.
But in her heart she knew that the chief difference between the movies and real life was that the hero didn't always rescue the heroine.
Antryg, for all his blithe air of lunatic competence, could be dead.