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

The muttering whisper grew louder as Joanna felt her way along the smooth, featureless corridor. A woman's voice, droning and exhausted, low as if the speaker were huddled in some corner, rocking herself like a beaten child to this threadbare litany of despair. Joanna had heard it telling over and over to itself those same few sentences for nearly an hour, as she'd tried to get a fix on it through the darkness-drearily, monotonously-until she was ready to scream. Sometimes it would stop, but always it started again, not even filled with pain ... filled with nothing at all. She had begun to suspect that the woman who crouched there in what could only be more corridor was insane.
But it was a human voice, the first she had heard. And maddening as it quickly became, she made her way toward it.
She had encountered other things besides human voices in her wanderings in the darkness.
She had lain weeping on the floor until she could weep no more, then had slept in her exhaustion and despair. Waking, she found the darkness as impenetrable as before. Neither flashlight, nor light-up digital readout, nor the matches in her purse would work; she still felt neither hunger nor thirst. Fear swept over her in a long, familiar wave, holding her sweating and nauseated for she had not known how long-fear of the clawing demons with their laughter, fear that she was now utterly separated from her point of origin ... fear that these facts did not matter.
After a time-a non-time-she had gotten up and gone on.
Fear had come and gone ever since.
Some of it had been fear of meeting the demons again, or things like them: things that screamed at her, clawed at her, chased her in the darkness. This had happened once more, and now she walked every step in the stomach-clenching dread of the silence around her.
Once, turning a corner, she had encountered something else, something ... She knew not what. Some vast, silent aura of waiting, some sound that was not a sound-as if something huge were holding its breath, a filthy, living silence. But a silence that drew her as if against her will.
As she'd stood there wondering if this was her imagination, if this was madness, she had felt a hideous sensation as if life, energy, her will, and the very electromagnetic heat of her body's chemistry were being pulled at-with a gruesome sensation of inner tugging, as if whatever it was that lay unseen in the horrible night before her wanted the life out of her flesh, down to its tiniest, most animal cellular energies. She had had a sense-and she didn't know why-of obscene vastness, as if she stood close to some enormous black yearning at whose center gaped a well that could never be filled, that would draw everything and anything into itself.
She had backed away, trembling, and in the dark before her, though she still heard no sound, she thought she could sense it move.
And she had run again, run and run and run, desperately turning and twisting in the winding corridors, queasy with the thought that she might have run in a circle and would stumble smack into it-or into something worse-from the other side ...
And then she had heard the whispering, the dreary mutter of another human voice.
And had stumbled, seeking it, her mind conjuring scenario after scenario from the fertile fields of Hollywood horrors.
The dark thing, the silent thing, the energy-drawing thing, could mimic human voices.
Whoever had put her here had put a tape recorder here, too, with an endless tape loop-never mind why. Maybe just to hear her burst into tears of despair when she found it.
She'd find some haggard crone in rags who'd been rocking to herself, muttering to herself, for ninety years.
"Curse him, curse him, oh, curse his name ... oh, God, please get me out of this ... God, send someone to get me out of this ... Oh, curse his name ... "
"Who's there?" Her own voice sounded loud, queer, unreal in her ears.
"Who is it? Oh, who is it?" sobbed a voice-Not a tape loop, anyway-and a moment later there came a thick, heavy rustling of cloth, the froufrou of taffeta and a fusty smell of powder, perfume, and the slightly dusty odor of silk. A hand touched her extended hand, groping and fumbling in the dark ... Good. It really is dark. I'm not blind. A woman's hand, soft and well cared for, with long nails and a bracelet of what felt like pearls.
"My name is Joanna Sheraton."
"Are you his prisoner, too?" she whispered. "Is your husband also one of his enemies? I know my husband will give him what he wants." The hands were all over her, clinging, pawing, patting, like an ill-mannered child's; grabbing handfuls of her hair, fumbling at her mouth, until Joanna seized them by the wrists and pushed them away. There was no resistance, and there was something very childish about that, too.
"When he talks to my husband-to my Gwimat-Gwimat will come to terms with him. His terms aren't so very unreasonable ... it's only the waiting I can't stand. It seems so long ... it seems like I've been here forever ... oh, curse him, curse his name ... "
"Who are you?" Joanna asked. She felt at the woman's arms in her turn, careful not to let her start pawing again, something Joanna hated because it reminded her of her mother's intrusive, fussy fingering and straightening of her clothes and hair. She felt plump, rounded arms in smooth, slippery fabric, the scratchiness of lace at the elbows. She'd worn dresses like that herself, when she'd been in Antryg's world under his protection. The woman threw her arms around Joanna, clutching her close, her face pressed to her shoulder-slightly taller than she, her long hair disheveled and spiky with jeweled hairpins.
"Oh, curse him, curse his name ... I know it was he. I know he took me prisoner. It has to have been him." Joanna turned her face aside but suffered herself to be held. Only lately had she realized how desperately most people-herself included-needed to be held. Only, she realized, from the unselfconscious physicalness of Antryg's hugs and her own delight in hugging him in return.
"He knew my husband was working against him, you see; he brought me here, left me here, to blackmail Gwimat. And as soon as Gwimat hears his terms, of course he'll do as he asks to get me back. He'll do anything to get me back. It's just the waiting that's so hard for me, I never had any patience, never. God sent you, my dear, God sent you to help me bear this in patience ... "
"Who are you?" Joanna asked again, gently disengaging herself. "And who put you here? And where are we?"
But the woman was already sinking to the floor in a vast billow of satin skirts and rustling petticoats, rocking and moaning and cursing the name of the man she would not name, clinging to Joanna with her perfumed hands and trying to make her sit, too. Try as she would-and she did try for some time-Joanna could get no sense out of her, only endless wailings and whispered mutterings, the same few sentences over and over that she had already heard repeated endlessly: her husband would come to get her out, her husband wouldn't allow him to keep her prisoner-she found the waiting so difficult.
After what felt like endless time Joanna extricated herself, not without difficulty, from the clutching grip and moved away into the sightless labyrinth once again. Her pajamas held the cloying sweetness of the woman's perfume, a reminder of her presence, like the mumblings fading behind her. When she was still within earshot she took another spool of thread from her purse and taped one end to the wall. She might in time, she reflected uneasily, become desperate enough even to long for such company and want to find her way back.
But as she unreeled the thread-that meticulous guide through the darkness of nowhere, a guide from nothing back to nothing-she wondered how soon it would be before she herself sat down against some wall and started muttering.
"Joanna!"
Startled nearly out of her skin, she swung around, flattening to the wall behind her, thoughts splashing through her mind-the dark thing that drew at her life, mimicry of voices, how did it know my name ... ? Why does the voice sound familiar ... ?
"Joanna Sheraton?" The voice in the darkness was known but unplaceable, male, a pleasant and well-trained light baritone. What made her think of an actor ... ?
"It's me. Magister Magus. Is that Joanna Sheraton ... ?"
"Magus!" she sobbed. "Here ... I'm here ... "
A hesitant hand touched her shoulder; she caught the wrist in a gesture that even as she made it felt horribly like the madwoman she had just left. The arm was cased in what felt like the sleeve of an expensively quilted and corded velvet dressing gown. To hell with it, she thought, and flung her arms around the slender waist and hugged the little dog wizard tight. He gathered her to him, as grateful as she for the human contact in spite of the fact that at their last encounter she'd been responsible for nearly getting his skull cracked for him. Against her temple she felt the scratchiness of his close-trimmed black-and-silver beard.
"My dear, dear girl ... "
"Magus, what the hell is going on?" Her words came out as a sob. "Where are we, who the hell was that woman, what are we doing here?"
She felt his body relax a little in her grip, felt a kind of tension go out of him, his slender shoulders slumping. His breath escaped him in a sigh. "Oh," he said in a discouraged voice. "You don't know?"
Dammit, she thought, knowing what he was about to say. Dammit, dammit, dammit ... "You mean you don't know, either?"
"Well," he said after a moment, "I know where we are, and I've got a good guess who that woman is. But as to why we were brought here ... "
"Look, right now any information is better than stumbling around in the dark waiting to run into that ... that thing ... "
"What thing?" But by the uneasiness in his voice she guessed he'd felt its power, too. He had stepped back, but his hands still held hers; she felt the tapered fingers, forever innocent of manual toil, stroke the soft skin of her own hands.
"The thing that ... I don't know. Something in the dark. Something that ... it felt like if I got close to it, it would draw out my life, draw out everything in me."
"Ah," the Magus breathed, "so it wasn't my imagination. I was afraid ... "
As ineffectual as this friend of Antryg's could be in an emergency, her delight in meeting him was unalloyed. Magister Magus might be a dog wizard, with a dog wizard's uncertain and frequently inaccurate training-he certainly was no more than a charlatan who made a royal living telling fortunes and peddling love potions, simple nostrums and fortune-cookie advice to the more superstitious members of the Regent's court in Angelshand-but in times past he had been a friend to Antryg and a friend to her when they were in need. Even had this not been the case, even had the Magus been a total stranger in this dark maze, he was, at least, sane and kind. And he did know something about the situation.
"What was it?" she asked.
"I believe," he said after a moment, "that it has to have been the tsaeati ... " And the Spell of Tongues, whose aura still clung to her from long association with Antryg, translated the word to her mind from some archaic variant of an ancient speech as devourer or glutton.
"It was said to be indestructible. It devoured everything which came in its path and turned everything-fire, lightning, the magic of the wizards who fought against it-back upon its attackers, until Berengis the Black imprisoned it in a crystal called the Brown Star, where it is apparently technically impossible for anything to devour anything."
"And the Brown Star is where we are now?" Joanna asked. "I mean, it may not be impossible to devour something, but I certainly haven't been either hungry or thirsty since I got here, and I must have been here for days. And," she added, "the matches in my purse don't work, so there seems to be some kind of bar to the transformation of energy ... technically, the sulfur of the match tip won't oxidize."
"Precisely," the Magus agreed, his voice radiating a scientific cheerfulness Joanna was far from feeling.