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

Or locked up back in the Silent Tower.
Stop it, she told herself firmly. You've quite obviously been kidnapped for a reason and the only reason I can think of is to gain some kind of leverage over Antryg. Being kidnapped at random by another wizard from some other place on the other side of the Void is stretching the bounds of probability.
But there were bounds of probability regarding what had happened to her already that were beginning to make her profoundly uneasy.
Wearily, she got to her feet and, with the utter patience she'd used in conversation with recalcitrant DOS programs, hefted her purse more firmly onto her shoulder and began to rewind the thread on the spool once again, following it back to its source. Though her hands were shaky, she still didn't feel particularly hungry or thirsty-and her common sense told her that she must have been here for hours already. At times she'd been tempted to eat part of the granola bar she carried in her purse, more from boredom than anything else. But every time she returned to find nothing at the point of origin, she put it off.
Besides, it would only make me thirsty, and I haven't come across water, either.
When she'd hit the glow-in-the-dark button on her digital watch-also in her purse-and had gotten no result, the old panic that she might be blind had returned. But the matches still wouldn't strike-the problem seemed to be with energy, rather than her own vision.
What the hell is going on?
Antryg, she thought, pushing aside the wave of baffled despair. If I wasn't involved with Antryg ...
If I'd stayed what I'd always been, I might not have been as happy, but at least I'd be safe.
Is knowing him, loving him, having him in my life worth ... ? Her mind shied quickly from the first sentence formed, the sentence she didn't want to think about: worth dying this way? She changed it hastily to, worth going through this? Is having Antryg in my life worth going through this?
She wasn't doing to die. She told herself that several times as she walked. It would never have occurred to her to live with a crack dealer, or an outlaw biker, or a terrorist, or anybody else whose very life-style was a walking invitation to chaos-anybody whose enemies might seize upon her. But Antryg wasn't like that. The sound of his voice returned to her, that deep, flexible baritone that would be a part of her consciousness if she lived to be ninety, and the touch of his fingers along her arm. The way it felt to know he cared about what she did, and the knowledge that he'd back her up in whatever she chose to do. Gentle, considerate, careful of her feelings for all that he woke up at the crack of dawn to watch cartoons and sang in bed.
Something moving and cold like a stiff, membranous wing sliced at her face; a shriek like a steam whistle went off in her ear and claws snagged in her hair. With a scream of shock and terror Joanna slapped at the thing with both hands, springing back, crashing into the wall.
In the blackness her hands came in brief contact with something chitinous and moving-the only things that sprang to her mind were the hideous palmetto bugs that rattled 'round the porch light of her aunt's home in Miami on summer nights. Only this was vastly more huge, the size of a small child, bumping and crawling on her, grabbing at her hair and laughing.
Screaming, she fled, and it pursued her, vacant idiot laughter fragmenting from the walls. Sobbing, screaming, gasping, she ran on and on, bruising herself against walls and comers, stumbling down tunnel after tunnel, hallway after hallway, until somehow it was gone and she collapsed on the floor, hugging herself in the sudden silence and weeping as if her heart would break.


Chapter IX
Wizardry lies in naming the true names of things-in knowing what they are, and what they were. Sometimes when one learns the true name of the thing one seeks to Summon, one loses all desire to meet it face-to-face.
-gantre silvas
Annals of the Mages

"I do not ... I do not even know how I came to be down there." Otaro of the City of Cranes rubbed his round, brown face with one hand, small but broad and strong-looking; Antryg knew the fingers could flick and stop the gold and silver harp wires so that the sound of them danced like spring rain, stirring the heart to visions or the soul to the peace of sleep. In reminiscence of his distant homeland, the Singer wore his hair in long, oiled curls threaded with ribbons down his shoulders and back, and there were plugs of rose-colored jade in the lobes of his ears.
He sat on a bench in a corner of the Citadel's great kitchen. Around him most of the High Council had gathered: Nandiharrow looking flurried, Daurannon wearing a face of grave solemnity, and Lady Rosamund with a hint of grimness about the flowerlike nostrils. Bentick's expression was one of haggard, slightly nervous brittleness; his eyes moving warily, as Phormion's had moved in Council, his white fingers toying endlessly with his watch. While Otaro was speaking, Issay Bel-Caire came hurrying in through the pantry door-a secret stair connected the pantry with the storeroom behind the baths, which was in turn connected, via a covered gallery and a stair up the outside wall of the Island of Butterflies, with the tangle of interlocking cellars that formed the sub-foundations of the Mole Hill, the Pepper-Grinder, and the other dwellings of the Juniors' side of the hill.
"Nandiharrow spoke of having killed an abomination in the Vaults last night," Otaro said slowly, passing his hand across his face again. "I wanted to dissect it, to see what properties lay in its sinew and bones. He said it was on the second level. I entered through the stores-cellars here, under the kitchen."
"Those should have been locked up!" Bentick said indignantly.
"As they were," the Singer murmured. "Pothatch ... I asked for the key from Pothatch."
The cook came over from the smallest of the three great stoves, a patented iron cooker sent by one of the Court's more practical-minded duchesses. A fat little man with a redhead's fair, freckled face, he handed the Oriental wizard a cup of tea; Otaro's hands shook so that he could scarcely hold it.
"I didn't see there was any harm in it, sir." The cook glanced worriedly across at Bentick, who had threatened him with transformation into one of the lowlier orders of amphibians at least once a month for the past twenty years. During his own residence at the Citadel, Antryg had frequently presented the hapless cook with jars of flies and bugs collected from the gardens, Just in case. "People have been going in and out to search."
After a moment Bentick shook his head and sighed. "No ... quite all right ... "
"I still don't understand what happened." Otaro set his cup down-the tea was beginning to spill-and ran stumpy fingers through his beribboned curls. From the shadows by the stove, Brighthand watched with concern in his coffee-colored eyes. "I was on the second level, and then suddenly I was ... I was in an unfamiliar area of the Vaults. It took me some minutes to realize-I had somehow come to be on the sixth level, near the Twisted Ways. I know I did not lose consciousness."
Antryg, prowling along the kitchen's west wall and running his hands over the soot-dyed plaster, swung around in genuine delight. "Folded reality!" he cried.
Bentick glared at him. Seldes Katne, who had followed him down from the Library and now occupied a scullion's stool near the gaping hearth, merely looked baffled.
Otaro shook his head. "I do not know ... if you say so. All I know is that suddenly I ... I saw a darkness rushing toward me. A corridor, it seemed, or a gate, but a gate that seemed to move toward me, filled with crying voices, with sounds like wind, or the sea. I saw ... I don't know what I saw. The voices ... "He shut his eyes, his dark brow folding with pain. "I turned, I ... I tried to flee. I ran down one corridor after another and it pursued me. Every time I looked back it was there, rushing at my heels, the voice shouting to me."
"I found him down the third level." Brighthand stepped forward and put a hand on his master's shoulder. "I'd got worried when he didn't come back. He was sittin' up against the wall, and his color was dead bad."
"Was there a smell?" Antryg inquired, tilting his head to one side like a bird.
"Roses," Otaro said slowly. "Sweet and heavy ... "
Lady Rosamund started to speak, then looked impatiently at the faces around her. "Where is Phormion? She should be here ... "
"The voices you heard," Nandiharrow moved over onto the seat beside the Singer, "were they human? Did you understand what they were saying?"
Under cover of Otaro's answer, Antryg stepped back to where Pothatch stood and asked in an undervoice, "May I borrow the key to the stores-cellars for a moment?"
His attention absorbed in the scene around the table, the fat man produced it automatically. Antryg slipped into the pantry, unlocked the stores-cellar door-the long, narrow hallway of a room was entered by at least five doors-and moved back to the kitchen with an unobtrusiveness surprising in a man six feet three inches tall and wearing a coat like a psychedelic orchid. "Thank you. May I take this?"
Pothatch nodded, not even looking at the enormous meat cleaver Antryg had removed from the chopping block.
The pantry was five or six steps down from the kitchen, part of the tangled complex of small brick-and-half-timber buildings set farther down the hill; from it a very long, very narrow flight of steps cut straight northeastward into the rock of the tor. Antryg had always suspected the big, low-ceilinged stores-cellar of being, in fact, the uppermost collecting chamber of the maze beneath. He threaded his way though the bins of potatoes and onions, and past huge sealed jars of millet, barley, and wheat, the musty odor of tubers and hanging garlic stirring about him and not quite curtaining the wet-stone breath from the archway that led down to the Vaults.
Here, as he had up in the cellar of the Library, he could feel the lowering weight, the terrifying nearness, of the chaos of the Void.
Another short stair, a wine cellar, a passage that turned and wound, descending ...
And then he was in the Vaults.

The Shrieker, Antryg recalled, had been struck down just past the three-way fork near the downshaft with the brick threshold; all the old landmarks leapt clear to his mind. He pulled the Talisman of Air from his pocket and tied it again around his head, then hefted the cleaver and made for the place, listening, scenting, reaching out with all the hyperacute senses of a wizard that he knew would be his only defense. He did not pause, now, to check air pressure or magnetism; he knew he had little time here, and had to find some trace of Joanna, some clue to where in the Vaults she was hidden.
And there was something else he had to find as well.
Slightly more than twenty-four hours had passed since his first visit to the Vaults, but already he could feel the change. The energy seemed more dense; the strange, shuddery crawl of alien power in the stones, growing even in the rock aboveground, was nearly unbearable down here. He quickened his pace, seeking the place where the Shrieker had leaped forth at them.
And as Otaro had described, he felt a sudden shock of disorientation, the sudden awareness that he didn't know where he was ...