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

"As it happens," he said, bowing in a great sweep of coat skirts and shawl, "I've been working at a way of stabilizing the field so the situation won't worsen-as it has been doing-and so all things will remain in place while a thorough search can be made, not only of the Vaults but of the Citadel itself and of the countryside around. The nexus of the trouble may be in the Vaults, but since energy is transmitted instantaneously along all the ley-lines-as Trukild was saying, abominations are appearing in the woods north of the village, so obviously ... "
"No," Rosamund said, her voice like chipped flint.
"This is balderdash," Daurannon stated, after a quick glance through the papers he had snatched from Antryg's hand. "These aren't even real spells, the energy isn't grounded off ... "
"What exactly are you looking for?" Bentick demanded in a voice that bordered on shrillness, and his long fingers quivered as they sought the watch about his neck. Though the Steward had been twitchy for as long as Antryg had known him-well over twenty years-since yesterday his dark eyes had acquired a haunted look, and he'd picked up the trick of glancing nervously around the room. The result of seeing a boy whom he'd taught slaughtered horribly before his helpless eyes? Antryg wondered. Of learning that his own powers could fail? Or from some other cause?
Antryg replied airily, "Oh, I'm afraid I won't know that until I see it."
"I daresay." Daurannon studied his face for a long moment, the sheaf of papers held so that their raggedy edges touched his cupid lips. Then Aunt Min stretched forth one shaky, blue-veined hand, and almost unwillingly, the younger mage passed the papers on to her. His eyes never left Antryg's. "And I suppose you're to head up this search and have access to everything that's found?"
Over Aunt Min's shoulder, Lady Rosamund said quietly, "I can't let you do this. I've never seen power-circles like those in my life, you have no idea what they'll do."
Antryg regarded her with limpid innocence in his gaze. "I do." He turned back to Daurannon. "Well, that is why you brought me here."
"The Council voted to bring you here," replied the Handsome One with icy precision, "for your advice on the problem, not to permit you to rummage through every secret in the Citadel's Vaults. There are things down there even the Archmage no longer understands-but that Suraklin, or his student, might well have been waiting for years to get his hands on."
"Come with me, then," Antryg said cheerily. "All of you come with me."
"I take it," put in Lady Rosamund, looking up from the scribbled papers like a queen cornered by a barbarian in a sacked palace, "that you came here to ask the Archmage to actually execute these spells of yours."
"Well," Antryg pointed out, "I'd be delighted to do it myself, but the geas has made that rather difficult."
"I should say rather," Daurannon murmured, "that some member of the Council should head up the search, and that whatever is found is reviewed by the Council as a whole before being passed along to you."
"An excellent suggestion!" Bentick said, rather too quickly, Antryg thought, but then, the Steward had always distrusted him and had probably been one of the original dissenting votes about bringing him here in the first place. "That way disruption could be kept to a minimum."
"Disruption?" Antryg's eyebrows vanished into the curly mop of his hair. "You don't consider novices being eaten by monsters in the Vaults sufficient disruption, to say nothing of everyone having to do their own milking and weed pulling? It is a splendid idea, Daur, except that it won't work. I need to be in the Vaults, and I need to see everything-everything-that is found."
"Because we have only your word on what is important?"
"That was the entire reason you dragged me here," Antryg retorted. "Because you do have only my word-my word or nothing. And personally, I would just as soon have this done as quickly as possible, because not only is the situation in the Vaults deteriorating, but the geas isn't the most pleasant thing in the world to live with ... "
"You speak as if you feel you have some sort of right to be released from the geas afterward," Bentick said. His dark eyes, which had flickered back and forth from face to face during the discussion, with an anxiety very unlike his usual bossy self, turned cold and prim again. "As if you think that it will be your right to go free ... "
"THEN KILL ME!" Antryg cried passionately, shaken suddenly with the cumulative effects of fatigue and dream-racked, unhealing sleep. The three wizards fell silent, moving back a step to close ranks against him, suspicious, hostile, and chill. Among them Aunt Min bent calmly over the jumble of notes in her hands, shuffling them and letting them fall from her grip to float like huge, lazy yellow leaves around her chair as if none of this matter concerned her. Not, Antryg reflected, that he was foolish enough to think for a moment that she wasn't paying attention to every word uttered.
After a moment he drew breath and went on, "But not until the field has been stabilized and the entire Citadel, from turrets to Vaults, searched. If the central Gate, be it the Moving Gate or some other we don't know about, is not located and closed, the situation will worsen until ... I don't know what. You know that. I know you know it. If you want to kill me afterward, go ahead-in fact, if you're planning to leave the geas on me I'll probably reach a point where I'd rather you did-but don't stop me from doing this. And please," the deep, flexible baritone dropped almost to a whisper, "please let Joanna go."
"She isn't here," Daurannon replied, with equal softness, his face like some ancient mask of a beautiful god.
There was silence. Then, into it, like the chirp of an insect, Aunt Min murmured, "Hmmm ... power." She shuffled the papers in her hands again, then let half of them slide off her knees to the floor while she blinked appraisingly up at the tall figure before her, like a shabby and degenerate iris in his purple coat. "Channeled ... illusion ... interesting. Was it Suraklin who taught you to see power in this fashion?"
Antryg bent quickly to pick up the drifted sheets from the floor. "No, actually it was Wilbron of Parchasten's studies of optics and refraction, and a mad kitchen witch in Pretty Creek who held conversations with the stones of her hearth."
Aunt Min nodded interestedly, though Lady Rosamund's lips compressed with scorn and annoyance to cover her concern. "It will take all of a day," the Archmage continued. "Yes, the accomplishment of it must come at midnight, so that the power of the day will rise up into it. The North Hall of the Cloister here is on the Vorplek Line."
"It lies directly above the Basin Chamber on the seventh level," Antryg said. "The spell-circles need to be aligned with the Dead-er, with my friend Ninetentwo's machines in the Vaults in order to establish the field. I'll need to consult with him and establish the times exactly. The alignment needs to be precise. Everything depends on the spells' balance, or the whole thing will collapse before it starts."
"Yes," she murmured, rocking a little in her chair. "Yes, I see that." Behind her, Daurannon mouthed nonsense and Ben tick fiddled with his watch. In the clear, shadowless whiteness of the Council chamber's light, Antryg was interested to see that a film of sweat had sprung out on the old man's high, balding head.
"I can't let you do this to yourself," Lady Rosamund said, laying a protective hand on the skinny shoulder before her. "The energy needed to establish these spells is too much for your body to bear. Let me do it. God knows, I understand what he seems to think are the principles ... "
"You're willing to put that much of your power into a rite you don't even understand?" Daurannon's eyebrows shot up and he glanced, speculatively, across at Antryg again. "One of Suraklin's spells, most like?"
"Pish." Aunt Min slapped her pupil's hand dismissively, then, to take the sting out of it, patted it like a grandmother. "It has been a long time, Rosie, since I've worked a truly new spell, let alone a spell as great as this one ... Now, don't argue with me! Always arguing ... " She clicked her tongue and looked vaguely around for her knitting basket and cane.
Antryg picked up the basket, which lay beside her chair. She shoved the notes into it, dislodging a shower of yarn, needles, and crochet hooks that clattered on the marble floor. As Antryg collected them, Lady Rosamund handed Min her cane and began to lead her to the door, the old lady moving with painful, brittle slowness and leaning heavily on the younger one's arm.
They were still arguing about who was going to perform the unknown spells.
Nearly a century ago, the stories went, Minhyrdin the Fair had thrown a chamber pot at the Emperor's First Minister, who'd been sent to bribe her away from the then-Prince. Like a mad fairy, they had said; she had caused riots in taverns that spread through half the dock quarters, had accumulated one fortune by the age of nineteen and spent another.
And then one day she'd met old Tiamat the White, Arch-mage of the Wizards of the West.
Antryg reached under the carved oak chair for a last crochet hook; when he straightened up, arms full of balls of silk and hanks of unwoven wool, Daurannon still stood before him, arms akimbo and face smooth and unreadable as ever. "And I suppose," Daur said, "while we're searching the Vaults, and the Citadel, and all the countryside 'round about, you'd like us to collect tortoises for you, too?"
"Would you?" Antryg beamed. "I doubt you'll find many at these latitudes, but you know, that would be the first time I could assemble enough from a single geographical area to get some idea of how various segments of encoded knowledge are distributed-once I decode them, of course. Thank you. I appreciate that."
Turning from his former friend's disgusted gesture, he saw Seldes Katne, who had lingered all this time near the doorway, almost pushed aside by Bentick as the Steward hastened from the room. The old man's black robe billowed behind him, vanishing into the dimness of the hall as he passed the two women and disappeared at a run.


Chapter XIII
Once a thief broke into the house of Pipin the Little, Archmage of the Council, and stole a talisman of garnets, a golden chain, and a glass ball. But on that night, the thief's woman and several others at the inn she owned fell down deadly sick; and when the thief tried to prise loose the garnets from the talisman, the chisel slipped and cut his hand to the bone; and when he tried to melt down the chain, the crucible broke and burned him sorely, and set fire to the inn. He returned all the things to Pipin, laying them upon his doorstep and running away, and for long after that no thief in Angelshand would enter the places where the mages lived.
-Gantre Silvas
Annals of the Mages

The Dead God was waiting for him in the basin chamber, a hulking shape that seemed to unfold itself like a skeletal flower out of the rock and shadows as he entered.
"There are fearsome things down there," Ninetentwo said, gesturing with two of his huge, clawed hands toward the doors at the chamber's far end. From the stairways beyond rose strange smells of wet stone, acrid mosses, and queer, unidentifiable, ozonous wildness. Another clawed hand touched the black loaf of the multiscanner. "Water is flowing down into the lower levels, seemingly seeping from the stones themselves in places. My readings show a sharp increase in the number of wormholes, energy fields, and Gates. I fear the randomization is accelerating still further."
"I've been working on that," Antryg replied cheerfully. "At precisely midnight tomorrow ... Do your people have digital watches? Excellent! At precisely midnight tomorrow Aunt Min will put into being a spell to cause the xchi-particle energy in the stones of the Citadel to behave temporarily like electromagnetic energy, so that it can be polarized into a stable field and we can finally search the place from top to bottom and see what we've got."
The Dead God made a rumbling noise of disapproval deep in his enormous chest but apparently found even the starting point, let alone the conclusion, of the argument too alien for quibbling.
"I don't suppose your multiscanner would register fields of energy as well as Gates in the Void, would it? It would save us considerable time."
"Some types it does, some it doesn't." Ninetentwo unslung the black rectangle of the sensor from one shoulder, and its small screen gleamed flatly in the pale light of his forehead nodule. "Personally, I should hesitate to trust my life to any information this gives once the Vaults are blanketed in a polarization field of any kind. I have moved my equipment through the Gate into this world and, I hope, sufficient batteries to run it should the Gate close again. But there are pocket fields wherein neither the batteries nor the equipment, nor this," he touched the massive weapon that hung strapped to his back, "will work at all. Should such a field manifest itself around me at the operative time ... "
"Yes, that could get awkward." Antryg scratched the side of his long nose and viewed the masses of electronics stacked, like the basalt blocks of the ancient wall of Ygron, near the frozen black slit of the chamber's far door. In addition to the sword he'd found-conveniently abandoned-in the cellar of the Harlot, he carried a torch, more for a weapon than for illumination; its yellow light played uneasily over the hard edges, the sightless eyes of the now-darkened gauges and the blank, idiot faces of empty monitor screens. A dragon tail of cables stretched through the door and away into the impenetrable dark of the maze.