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

Slung over one shoulder he carried breathing equipment and the silver-chloride spray pump, which had, as he'd suspected, not only made visible but incapacitated the haunters that had attacked him again on the fourth level. He had left the hideous things flopping like gross, misshapen wasps on the stone floor and descended the switchbacks of the stairs, water trickling in a thin stream beside his feet.
"Pity about the multiscanner," he went on, turning to install the torch in one of the chamber's crude sconces. "We're going to have to act quickly once the field is activated if we're to have sufficient time to dismantle the balance between Circles of Power and the oscillators rather than let them fall into random decay. Given the energies at large in the Citadel, I'm not entirely certain what would happen, but it probably wouldn't be pleasant. Once your equipment is set up, we'll have to put a guard around this chamber."
"Not this chamber." The Dead God moved his great head, iridescent eyes flashing as he gestured toward the far door. "The water is rising: if the wormholes through which it is leaking are open when the field stabilizes, this chamber is too deep for safety"
"True enough," Antryg murmured, and his stomach flinched at the sudden image of Joanna, trapped in some pitch-dark cell, despairingly watching water trickle in under the door. He thrust the thought from him even as he felt the sweat start on his hands. The multiscanner would have registered something.
"The Chamber of the Glass Pillar, then," he said quickly. "It's on the fourth level directly above this-that will still put us immediately beneath the North Hall. How long will it take you to set up?"
"Three hours, four hours."
"Splendid! With both fields synched into the ley-lines ... "
His voice must have quickened with his nervousness, or else the Dead God, usually cold-bloodedly phlegmatic, was more sensitive than Antryg had given him credit for. For after a moment's silence, the monster laid one tarantulate lower hand on Antryg's sleeve and said, "I have taken two other multiscan readings at different frequencies and from different points. Never has human presence shown up that could not be accounted for by those who patrolled seeking you."
Antryg drew a deep breath and let it out, trying to expel with it his awareness of dark waters rising and the poisoned images of his dreams. "And I expect they'll be seeking me again as soon as our Daur realizes I've disappeared."
"Here." With a thin shearing of Velcro, the Dead God stripped a timepiece from one of his arms and held it out. The maggotlike tentacles of his palm, wrapped around the square lozenge of black and gray, gleamed moistly in the torchlight. "I had thought that we might synchronize electronically, but with the shifting of the energy fields, I find that radio beams do not always pass."
"Marvelous stuff, Velcro." With a certain amount of difficulty, Antryg fastened the timepiece around his own far thinner wrist, his quick movements concealing the nervous tremor of his hands. The Dead God watched him with that great dragonlike head tilted a little to one side, the opaque eyes and rigid, leathery skin stretched tautly over the bones impossible to read.
"If I could figure out a way to manufacture it here, I should be able to retire from magic-working completely-not that I haven't been compulsorily retired, at least for the time being, but never mind. I suppose the High Council would never let me get away with it, or peanut butter, either." Antryg patted his pockets to assure himself that his spare oxygen bottle was safe and hitched the breathing tubes up over his shoulder where he could easily get to them.
"I will have the equipment ready and attached to batteries, at your hour of midnight tomorrow," the Dead God promised. "Not that I have the smallest belief that it is possible for you to do what you say you are going to do, but I will do as you ask as if it were."
"Thank you." Antryg took the torch from its holder and held it aloft, the Dead God's grotesque shadow curtsying hugely across the black faces of pillar and wall. "It is all anyone ever needs do."
After seeing the Dead God back to the slit of blackness that marked the Gate of his own universe, Antryg stayed until past midnight searching the lowest levels of the Vaults. In his heart, he suspected that the alien physicist was right and that Joanna was imprisoned elsewhere, yet he could not rid himself of the dread that he might be wrong. To his horror and grief, he had been wrong before.
In places the coiled black tunnels were knee-deep in water, the surface curling with faint ribbons of steam; in other places, waist-deep or deeper, where small stairways led randomly upward and downward, or the floors underfoot slanted, or gave way suddenly to unexplained pits and traps.
In a broad corridor, flooded shoulder-deep and thick with choking mists, he called her name outside a locked door written over in ancient runes, the flame of his torch sinking in on itself in the woolly vapors and his deep voice echoing across the broken yellow reflections of the water's surface. If a Gate opened in the cell with her, he thought, she might very well flee through to save herself, into God knew what other universe, and then she would truly be gone.
The mosses that padded the ceiling in a wet quilt of orange and purple seemed to pucker and shift at the sound of his voice; a moment later, a low, rolling bow wave lifted the slick surface of the water near him, and he felt something huge glide past his legs, the water bubbling thickly in its wake. He shuddered, wishing there were several of Joanna's favorite cinema films he hadn't seen.
In the end he had to be satisfied that Joanna was neither on the ninth level nor the eighth. He retrieved his coat, shawl, and boots, and climbed, dripping wet and bone-weary, up the spiraling vent shafts toward the stores-cellars far above. There was a little room downstairs from the main pantry where he could spend the night, cut into the rock of the hill's eastern face but open, save for a light lattice, across one side.
But even as he turned toward the minor stair that led there, another thought came to him.
It was well past midnight now-like most wizards, he could feel that in his bones. Carefully secreting his sword, spray gun, extinguished torch, and breathing apparatus behind some oil jars, he ascended noiselessly to the kitchen and began to work his way through the hidden byways of the Citadel toward the house they called the Castle, over on the north side of the hill, where Phormion the Starmistress lived.
The trapdoor between the cellar of the Castle and that of the Sea Lady's House-the tiny dwelling that Pentilla Riverwych and old Idrix of Thray shared-was barely twelve inches wide and a yard high; a heavier man than Antryg, or a less limber one, could never have made it. The Castle's cellar ran deep into the hill and was filled, mostly, with bins of wood and coal whose fusty odor caught at the back of Antryg's throat. There was a huge brick furnace there, to warm the hypocaust beneath the floors during the bitter winters; a long, unrailed stone stairway ran up one wall, debouching, if Antryg recalled aright, into a sort of tiled hall between Phormion's rooms, Bentick's, and those of the two other mages who shared the place. Even occupied as it was by four Senior mages-pack rats by definition-the Castle, Antryg knew, contained half a dozen unused chambers, tucked away in turrets at the top of winding iron steps or reachable by spidery back stairs concealed in walls.
The trick, of course, would be getting up there. He could feel magic all around him in the cellar, spells of warning, ward, and guard. As far as he could tell there was nothing written on the trapdoor he'd come through; very few people knew of its existence, most preferring to use the passage that led through the lowest floor of Bentick's rooms in the north tower. Still, he supposed, pushing up his glasses onto his nose, the most they could do would be to lock him up for the remainder of the night and have Daur read him a lecture in the morning.
By clambering over the woodpiles, he was able to reach the foot of the stair without touching any of the ward-spells on the flagstoned floor. The ghostlike grayness of a cat poured itself at a startled run up the stairs-one of Bentick's, probably. Ascending undetected himself would be a more difficult matter.
With a faint clanking of the iron latch, he heard the door above him open. A moment later, a whisper of magic drifted upon the air.
Antryg's breath seized as if he'd been struck beneath the ribs by the thrust end of a massive pole; he gasped and caught the wall to keep from falling but felt his knees turn weak. His lungs felt numbed-pain like the jab of a dull knife seared his chest as he tried to fill them.
Darkness covered his eyes, his vision tunneling down to the few square inches of granite stair just before his face, but he heard a footstep at the top of the stair, smelled dirty wool permeated with stale incense and smoke. In the darkness of his blurring mind he heard a hoarse voice whispering death-spells.
Vicious little pains knifed his hands and feet like the bite of snakes as he tried to drag himself up the stairs. The power within him, bound and mute beneath the razor wire of the Council's geas, could have resisted those spells, could have thrown off the burning river of sand that seemed to be filling his lungs, could have flung back count erspells of life and light. His heartbeat sounded huge in his ears, a slow, bucking heave that hurt more on every throb. He had to reach the top of the stairs, he thought blindly. It was fifty feet, surely he could make it up fifty feet.
His arms collapsed under him; he barely felt the ragged pain of his cheek hitting the unrailed stone step. One arm dangled over the edge, and he was queerly conscious of the cold airmoving around his hanging fingers. Though the whisper of the death-spells was now very soft, it seemed to fill his mind.
"Stop it!" Another voice, a whisper like the first, inconsequential as the squeaking of bats. The spell shifted a fraction, like a suffocating monster fidgeting its weight. A thread of air leaked into his lungs.
"Let him go!"
"She sent him. He is her cat's-paw. She brought him here that he might do her dirty work, that he might spy and probe ... "
The spell locked down hard and Antryg cried out a little with the renewed pain. The specks of blinding fire swimming before his eyes blended into one huge slab of killing light.
"Then she'll know if he dies here! Let him go. I'll take care of him ... "
Air in his lungs. Enough air-he would never, he thought, raise any objections to the smell of coals and mildew again. They were beautiful. Cold granite under his face was beautiful.

The voices were gone. He lay in darkness. He must have blacked out, he thought, gingerly gathering his arms beneath him. If so, he couldn't have been unconscious long, and the owner of the second voice would be back. I'll take care of him ... Aunt Min's protection extended only over those who obeyed her command that he not be harmed, who feared her wrath. Quite clearly, there were those in the Citadel who did not.
Distantly, his straining hearing picked up returning feet, a voice whispering distantly, "Oh, God ... Oh, God ... " He still couldn't stand but was past caring. Pins and needles racked him, seeming to originate somewhere in the marrow of his bones; every muscle trembled as he crawled and stumbled like an intoxicated rag doll across the cellar, dragged himself through the trap while the door at the top of the long steps was still shut. He fell repeatedly as he made his way through the dark byways, coming at last to open air-he barely noticed how he got to the little rock-cut chamber where he was to spend the night.
For a long while he could only lie there, trembling, as his muscles twitched and burned with cramp and his breathing steadied out to its regular rhythm again. It wasn't the first time such spells had been laid upon him-Suraklin had done so twice, the second time to the point where he'd gone into convulsions-but it was the first time he'd been completely unable to meet them with any magic of his own.
For what must have been nearly an hour he lay, looking out through the screen of lattice to the clear, blue-gray twilight that filled the land like an imbuing radiance. White mists drifted over the river; the taiga forest lay black and formless beyond, broken by the chipped brightness of streams; bogs and ponds reflected the queer glow of the sky in shining sheets. Beyond the trees the cleared fields of the village of Wychstanes slept, coarse and shapeless and gray; smoke rising from the long ibeks marked the settlement itself. And beyond that, deep in the woods of spruce and hemlock, was the Green King's Chapel, ancient shrine of the Lord of Animals, the Lord of the Trees, back when this whole area had been part of the estate of the Earls Boreal. Daurannon had been investigating reports of abominations there-allegedly-when Rosamund had conjured the power to pass through the Void.
Antryg pulled off his coat and wrapped himself in it, pillowed his head on Aunt Min's shawl. While he'd been in the Vaults, it had rained a little, and the warming ground gave back the smell and dampness, a thick sweet strength in the air. Clouds heaped the southern edges of the sky.
He supposed he ought to seek out Aunt Min immediately. At a guess it was Phormion who had tried to kill him, Bentick who had stopped her ... But if Bentick was part of a plot with Phormion, why stop her? Had Rosamund actually brought him here for some ulterior purpose? It didn't seem terribly likely, considering how little she trusted him, but it might account for her having sent Daur away while she was doing it.
Or by she, had they meant Aunt Min?
It was a new thought, and not a comfortable one; and it would account, he thought, for Rosamund's enmity toward him-not that that wasn't sufficiently accounted for already. But why would Min be using him as a cat's-paw against Phormion, if it was Phormion?
Far above him, against the dark bulk of the Library, a yellow glow of lamplight shone in the dirty glass walls of the Conservatory, marking where Seldes Katne still labored over her piled volumes, searching for references to the teles even as Nandiharrow and Issay sought clues to other magics in the Vaults.
And Joanna was somewhere, imprisoned in this maze of deadly secrets. His every instinct warned him that the longer she remained a prisoner, the more danger she'd be in.
He wondered if it was possible to get to Min's cottage at this hour. Rosamund would flay him for waking up the old lady.
But the ache in his body was like lead wrapped around his bones, and the thought of getting up and doing anything at the moment was more than he could bear. He shifted his head on his makeshift pillow and gazed out over the black pelt of the forest toward the Green King's Chapel again. At length he slept, and though he recalled no dreams, he woke up weeping, with the feeling that some irreplaceable thing had been taken from him during the night.

Tom the gardener found him at breakfast, hard on the heels of a near-riot in the refectory. Antryg, cautious now about dealing with any member of the Council, at least without several other persons present, was consuming muffins and tea in a corner of the kitchen after helping Pothatch stir porridge and cut bacon. Furious shouts drew them up the stairs to the pantry behind the serving-hatches.