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

The woman who owned the place had recently taken custody of her niece and nephew at her sister's death, and had cut back her psychic counseling to weekday mornings; she'd been happy to find someone willing to rent space afternoons and weekends. A Mazda Miata of a shade popularly known as give-me-a-ticket red sat in one of the two parking spaces in what had originally been the front yard; Antryg's bicycle was propped, unlocked as usual, against one of the splintery awning posts of the porch.
The bike was a good-quality Nishiki touring job, purchased with part of the spoils of Suraklin the Dark Mage's secret bank accounts shortly after Joanna had attempted to teach Antryg to drive a car. The neighborhood averaged five burglaries a week, but whatever it was that prevented Spock and Chainsaw from making free with Antryg's pinwheels in the apartment evidently worked on the local druggies as well. There was a parking place available, too, directly in front of the duplex, on a street whose proximity to a pre-zoning-law industrial park made walks of a block or more almost routine.
As she mounted the cracked brick steps to the jungle of the porch, Joanna heard Antryg's voice through the window screens, a brown velvet baritone like some mad Shakespearean actor's, the drop and flex of its intonations like the swirl of a stage villain's cloak. He was talking to a client, of course.
Joanna grinned inwardly. Another of her friends in Antryg's home world, the sasennan Caris, onetime sworn warrior of the Council of Wizards, once said of Antryg in scandalized tones, "He's nothing but a dog wizard!" Raised in the purest mainstream of Academic wizardry, Caris meant it as the basest of insults, for in the Empire of Ferryth the dog wizards were the semi-taught free-lance mages who refused to take the vows imposed by the Council as a condition of teaching. Lumped into the same category were the outright charlatans who claimed powers they had not been born with at all, relying on sleight of hand to deceive their customers ... men and women who used magic, or claims of magic, for gain.
The Academics, of course, were above such things, even had they not been forbidden by civil law and their own vows to use their powers to meddle in human affairs.
In a way, Caris and the Academics-who had chucked Antryg out of their highest councils when he was barely thirty-were right. Antryg Windrose was a dog wizard.
And in this world-in this city, with its scruffy palm trees and limpid swimming pools, its perpetual stink of exhaust and its shining glass high rises, all pretending like hell that it wasn't constructed on a desert and a dozen earthquake faults-fugitive and exile and unable to work the magic that was his in his own universe, he was making a fair living at it.
From the rump-sprung wicker loveseat in the porch's slatted shade, Joanna could see through the screen door into the room where Antryg talked to his clients. Mrs. Pittman would not have permitted another swami to use the same rooms she used, nor would Antryg have dreamed of doing such a thing-an assumption on both their parts that had gone far toward reconciling her to the whole deal in the first place. Instead they had cleared out what long ago had been the front bedroom of its years' worth of nameless junk, draped it with mysterious-looking hangings at $1.49 a yard from Fabric Champ, and set up Antryg's private sanctum. The plain wooden table and kitchen chairs lacked the elegance Joanna recalled from the house of the most famous dog wizard in Angelshand, the renowned Magister Magus, with its tufted carpets, black velvet drapes, and ebony throne ... but then, Antryg was just starting out in the business.
She could tell by the pitch of his voice that his formal patter, as he laid out the cards, was done. The deep murmur of his words was interspersed by a woman's voice, soft and questioning, and her occasional laughter. After not very long she came out, beautiful in the same leggy, fashionable, well-cared-for style that Ruth epitomized, a style that always made Joanna unhappily conscious of her shortness, the prominence of her nose, and the fact that, at the age of twenty-six, she still had no idea how to put on makeup. In the presence of girls like the one leaving, Joanna always felt as if she had CAN'T COOK, EITHER printed across her forehead in large block letters. The absurdity of that image teased her into a grin in spite of herself as she pushed her way through the screen door and into the wizard's salon.
"My dear Joanna!" He looked up from the new spread he was laying out on the stained and mended silk of the embroidered tablecloth, his face breaking into the beaming grin of a slightly pixilated rubber doll. "Don't tell me Galaxsongs' programmers are more competent than their sound engineers and you actually were able to unwind what they'd done? Or have you come about the thing in the cement river?"
Joanna stopped in her tracks. Of course, she thought, Antryg would know.
He looked up at her, and behind the mischief sparkling in his eyes, she could see guarded concern as he studied her face. He wore, as usual, a faded and unwizardly T-shirt with the sleeves cut off-this one was green, and whatever rock-concert logo it once bore had long since flaked away to obscurity-and a pair of senile Levi's. A livid scar marked his bare left arm; just above it, fresh and blue, the Anheuser-Busch eagle was tattooed on his bicep, the result of an exchange of services with an artist in Long Beach. She knew that both still hurt. His hands, where they lay upon the cards, were large, bony, deft, and beautifully expressive despite the twisted fingers and swollen joints.
For the rest, Antryg Windrose could have been any age from his mid-thirties to his mid-fifties, though in fact he was forty-three. There was something oddly ageless about the beaky, mobile face, whose rather delicate bone structure seemed overbalanced by the cresting jut of the nose and the extravagance of the mouth. The round lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles were thick as the bottoms of Coke bottles, and behind them his gray eyes, enormous to begin with, were magnified still further. There were people who attributed his habitual air of demented intentness to the glasses as well, but this, Joanna knew, was not the case. That was just how Antryg was.
Unkempt curls in the final throes of fading from brown to gray, mismatched earrings of yellowing crystal, and half a dozen strings of cheap glass and plastic beads in assorted garish colors around his neck completed the impression of an unreconstructed sixties flower child turned abruptly adrift in the steel-edged cyberpunk streets of fin de siecle Los Angeles; an impression, Joanna thought, not wholly inapt. Antryg had the definite air of being in the wrong place and time, though most people didn't guess quite how wrong. In his own universe, he had been a practicing wizard since the age of ten.
He laid down the cards-Joanna noticed the two of swords and the chaotic five of wands-and reached with one booted foot to hook a chair for her.
She said, "Ruth told me where it is."
"Ah." Something changed in his eyes.
Then he reached into the ice chest under the table for a couple of Cokes and, under cover of the motion, said with unimpaired cheeriness, "I'm delighted to hear it-I had visions of exploring the entire Los Angeles watershed system by bicycle, and that could take weeks, if I didn't die of thirst in the process ... though I suppose I could cut my time down by running the location of all purple houses in the city through a computer."
"What's down there?" Her hand on his wrist brought his head up again-his first instinct when frightened, she knew, was to duck behind a screen of persiflage.
He widened his eyes at her like a befuddled Harpo Marx. "Nothing," he said, as if surprised she had asked. Then he handed her a Coke, flipped over the final card of the spread-a nine of swords-and swept all the cards up into his hand again with barely the flicker of an eyelid. "But it's east of here, isn't it? Southeast?" He turned his head as he spoke, like a man sniffing smoke on the wind.
"Did you have the same dream?" Her heart beat more heavily, almost painfully, at only the memory, and she tried not to recall any of it too clearly to her mind.
"Well," Antryg said carefully, "I don't expect it was precisely the same." He shuffled the cards lightly together, wrapped them in silk, and replaced them in their carved Indian box. "Whereabouts, exactly?"
"I'll drive you."
His eyes avoided hers. "That's extremely good of you, but ... "
Thunderous knocking on the outside door interrupted him, followed instantly by a stampede of sneakered feet. Antryg rose with an odd, disjointed grace for all his gawky height as four small children barreled in, carrying between them a very grubby cardboard box bearing the legend CHUN KING SLICED WATER CHESTNUTS on its side. One of the children announced, "We got another one for you, Antryg. Zylima's mom, she says she got this one from a pet store down in San Diego five years ago."
"Her name's Ripley," one of the little girls added. Angling her head, Joanna saw that the box contained an enormous land tortoise. "My mom says she's a girl, but I don't know how she can tell."
"Here." Antryg gently lifted the tortoise out of the box and set it on the table. "Let's ask her." He laid his big, crooked hands on the mottled gray and brown shell, half closing his eyes as though listening. "Definitely a girl." From a drawer in a sideboard he produced a sheet of thin paper; rice paper, thought Joanna, watching in some bemusement: the sort of paper that antiquarians traveling through England use to take rubbings of tomb brasses with.
This was precisely what Antryg proceeded to do. He laid the paper very carefully over the tortoise's shell and, with infinite delicacy of touch, rubbed it lightly with red chalk, while all four children watched in fascination and Ripley retracted her head and limbs in resigned disgust. "One has to do this very carefully," he told them as he worked. "If you don't do it exactly right, it hurts the tortoise-they're really very sensitive, you know, and don't like to be picked up. Thank you for bringing her here in a box instead of your hands."
"Mom told us to," the older boy put in. "She don't let us pick her up at home." Then, "Antryg? Mom says she had this dream about you last night. About this place-this place where you was supposed to go."
"Did she?" Antryg removed the paper and held it up to the light, studying the lumpish pattern of squares on its surface with a critical eye.
"Yeah. She says it was like down this old riverbed-not a real river with water in it but like one of the rivers here. She said there was somethin' bad down there-she said it was pretty weird, 'cause usually she doesn't dream about strange stuff, just about going shopping and stuff like that. Do dreams like that mean stuff, Antryg?"
"Of course." Antryg smiled and returned Ripley gently to her box. She didn't deign to emerge from her shell, even when he touched the horn-hard carapace lightly and said, "Thank you very much, Ripley. You have contributed inestimably to the sum total of human knowledge. If your mother dreamed about it, Jemal, I suppose I shall have to go there. Thank her for me-and thank you. And Ripley, too, of course."
The children accepted the quarters he passed out to them and started to leave. The girl Zylima paused in the doorway, frowned up at him with narrowed, mahogany eyes. "You know where that place is that Mama dreamed about?"
Antryg's imp grin widened. "Of course."
"Course he knows, Zylima," the other girl said. "He a wizard, ain't he?"
And they were gone.
There was a curiously awkward silence as Antryg went to place his newest tortoise-rubbing in the drawer of the battered old sideboard from which he'd taken the paper. He had, Joanna knew, at least two dozen similar rubbings in that maelstrom of papers at home. "There's really no need for you to come with me, you know," he said at length, as if speaking of a beer run. "If you tell me where it is, I have my bike." Thanks to Joanna, Antryg could drive a car after a fashion, but it was just as well, she thought, that he preferred an alternative mode of transport.
The memory of the vision was like the dry scraping of a knife along her bones, and she had to fight not to say, Can't we just go have dinner and forget the whole thing?
But she knew that Antryg wouldn't forget.
She took a deep breath. "I think we'd probably better both go-"
For she had an awful feeling about what was down in that wash and knew that neither Antryg nor anyone else had any business going there alone.

Joanna's heart began pounding hard again as she braked her old blue Mustang to a stop on the service road. The white-yellow dust that lifted in a cloud around them settled slowly, soaked in the long brazen glare of the evening light. Daylight saving time had recently come into force, lengthening the tepid Southern California twilights far into prime time, and as usual for May, it was blazingly hot, a pretend-summer that got everyone in Los Angeles scrambling for shorts and tank tops, heading for the beaches and forgetting-as people invariably forgot-that it would turn cold and misty again in a matter of days and stay that way till the Fourth of July. Somewhere the cutting, unmuffled roar of an RV whined in the distance above the far-off rumble of rush hour going full-swing on the Ventura, yet about them, as Antryg swung one thin, jeans-clad leg out of the car, hung the baked and heavy silence of the desert. Los Angeles was full of these tiny patches of urban wilderness, mini-domains of lizard and coyote that served occasionally to remind the Angelenos that theirs was, in fact, a City of Dreams, an unlikely mirage called forth against long odds from arid lands.
"I'm going to have to ask you to stay up here, my dear," Antryg said quietly, looking down into the wash at the bottom of graffiti-scribbled concrete cliffs, cement floor glaring like old bone under the harsh slant of the sun. "If you see anything happen to me, don't hesitate. Get away immediately. All right?"
"Happen like what?" Joanna touched his wrist, staying him as he started to rise.
A frown flicked into being between his sparse, reddish eyebrows; then he clambered out of the car, extracted an old railroad watch from one pocket of his jeans and a compass from another, and stood for a time comparing their readings.
"If I should turn into a toad, for instance ... or get devoured by giant ants ... " Antryg had been entranced by fifties science-fiction movies on the late show. Joanna rolled her eyes.
"Though I'd actually prefer being transformed into a tortoise, if it has to be some member of the reptile family. It would make asking other tortoises for rubbings much less embarrassing. They may even know something about why all the wisdom of the universe is encoded upon their backs, though I don't suppose that's at all likely."
Joanna sighed resignedly. "Well, if it happens, don't come around here expecting me to kiss you and make it better."
"My dear ... "