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

Through the broad openings from pantry to refectory, Antryg and the cook saw Brunus, usually the most mild-tempered of men, standing a few feet inside the refectory and screaming at Zake Brighthand, who had just entered. Brighthand rounded on the older student with a perfect spate of amazing and barely comprehensible docker's cant, his thin face twisting with rage. Others-not all of them Juniors-rose from their seats at the long trestle tables and came to the open space before the door to fling themselves into the affray; Daurannon, sitting by the broad windows that overlooked the Polygon's main court, got to his feet and started to break things up but, within moments, was shouting at them all, a situation not alleviated by the arrival of Lady Rosamund on the scene.
"It's a pocket-spell, a field of anger." Antryg grinned at the cook and at Tom, who had just entered from the door that led into the drying-room. The voices were rising, echoing in the big room's scarlet-painted rafters. "Just inside the door, look ... "
He gestured with his teacup. The Lady, usually frigidly polite to her colleague, was screaming like a fish-hag about "social-climbing little guttersnipes" and "slick traitors who'd sell us all to the Regent for an attic bedroom at Court"; Daurannon in turn abandoned his usual charming mask and made reference to "holier-than-thou aristos who can't stand anyone whose lives they can't run." Both opinions, Antryg was quite well aware, had been expressed privately at other times.
"My guess is it starts about three paces inside the door and runs to the corner of that table where Kyra's standing. Ah! Here comes Bentick. Now, is he going to fly into the fray or try to get them all out of there so the spell can be dispersed ... ?"
"Will they come, though?" Tom inquired interestedly, folding his arms and cocking his head a little to one side.
Mage, cook, and gardener watched in fascination as the Steward of the Citadel, assisted eventually by Issay Bel-Caire and Sergeant Hathen, coaxed, called, and gestured the assorted combatants away from the open space and in among the tables, where the spell's field did not extend.
"Looks like our Bentick's had a bit of a rocky night," Tom commented, when the show seemed to be over and Pothatch had returned to his tea urns and muffin batter. This was true: though immaculately shaven and prissy as always, the Steward appeared even more haggard than he had yesterday in the Council chamber and seemed to be scanning every corner of the big, raftered room for something or someone ... probably, Antryg thought, himself.
"I shouldn't be surprised," Antryg murmured. "Did you happen to see if Aunt Min was about yet?" he added, looking back at the gardener. He knew Min was an early riser and frequently would sit on the terrace of her little cottage to watch the sun rise. If Bentick was here, dispersing the spell-field-which he was doing, assisted by Daurannon and Lady Rosamund, who scrupulously avoided one another's glance-it would be safe to duck over and discuss possible reasons why the Starmistress would want to assassinate anyone who entered the Castle.
Tom shook his head. "I haven't seen her. But there's something I heard, something I thought you ought to know of."
Antryg set his teacup down and regarded more closely the mournful-looking little man in his rough peasant smock and heavy boots.
"See, one of Gru Gwidion's hunters mentioned to me yesterday that he'd heard a woman's voice crying in the Green King's Chapel. When he went near it, he said, he was too afraid to go in. He said it was his instinct warning him that there was something unnatural there, but I know the mages do that: put spells of fear 'round a place if they want to keep us out-me, and the milkmaids, and Pothatch's kitchen help when he's got 'em. And I know you're looking for your lady."
"So I am," Antryg murmured thoughtfully. "The Green King's Chapel." He recalled the blue twilight on the dark woods, the glimpse of bleached stone like bone chips far off among the trees.
More people were coming into the refectory. Sergeant Hathen, posted in the doorway like an usher at a wedding, was warning them to edge around the wall to avoid the three mages at their rites of dispersal.
Out in the courtyard, the great bronze clock in the Assembly Hall tower struck seven. If Aunt Min started her conjurations at noon, thought Antryg, he would still be back in time to assist her throughout the afternoon ... not that she actually needed it. For all her impersonation of senile vagueness, he had no doubts that she knew precisely what she was doing and would have no trouble following his notes.
And then, after last night's events, the thought of getting out of the Citadel for a few hours wasn't such a bad one, either.
"Kitty will kill me. I did promise I'd help her with the research into the teles-balls, and I've yet to do it. You'll let her know I was called away?"
Tom hesitated for a moment, as if that snagged some thought in his mind, then nodded slowly. "Aye. That is ... "
Bentick, Daur, and Rosamund lowered their arms with an air of completion; the latter two turned promptly away to seek places at tables in opposite ends of the long room. Bentick made one last scan of the interested faces of the newcomers, then strode in a purposeful billow of black robes toward the serving-hatch to get his morning coffee. Rather hastily, Antryg gulped the last of his tea, shoved two rolls from one of the serving trays into his coat pocket, and said, "Thank you, Tom. You haven't seen me."
The long purple skirts of his coat flicked around the doorway leading down to the kitchen just as the Steward reached the hatch.

The road from the Wizards' Tor to the village of Wychstanes lay straight, following the track of the Brehon Line: on both sides it was marked with eroded and weed-shrouded standing stones of the sort that in more civilized portions of the Realm had been pit-broken or buried. For most of its length the road sank below the level of the surrounding land, rutted-typically for the Sykerst-with gluey runnels of foot-deep mud. Though winds moved the dark roof of spruces overhead, down in the roadbed itself the air was muggy and still, thick with the murky pungence of nearby ponds and the green shaggy scents of the moss that furred the alders and birch. Feathers of gold light played across Antryg's shoulders and face as he picked a way along the drier center of the roadbed between the ruts, the familiar dappling of warm and cool a reminiscence of home. Even the drag of the mud at his boots was a part of those childhood dreams.
Home. After all these years.
He had spent his childhood in a village very like Wychstanes. There were hundreds of them, scattered among the endless forests and stony, rust red hills-villages wherever tiny pockets of earth could be found capable of supporting crops, and all of them much alike. Life in the barnlike ibeks could be incredibly crude-he remembered clearly helping his brothers dump fodder down the floor hatches to the animals who lived below and listening, through the long winter nights, to the murmurs, coughing, lovemaking, and drunken arguments of the sixty or so uncles, aunts, stepchildren, and thralls with whom he shared the place-but even as a pariah, he had felt a kind of delighted fascination with the complex life of the village itself.
He smiled a little, his gloved hands thrust deep in his pockets. Suraklin had almost scoured the skin off him trying to get rid of the stench of cow dung and smoke-at the time, he would have skinned himself, had it been possible, knowing the peasant smell displeased the old man. Ever afterward, when his master had been angry with him, he'd had the illogical conviction that the smell of his village clung to him yet-to his flesh, to the very marrow-bones of his soul-displeasing Suraklin still: the first of all the many things about himself that Antryg could never sufficiently change to meet the Dark Mage's standards. Even when, under Suraklin's tutelage of love and abuse, his powers had flourished so that he could call sand-demons to sit like birds on his hands or change the bread on a plate to nightshade from the other side of the room, or strike a man blind or mute or breathless with a word, he had never been good enough.
He shook his head. Coming back to the Sykerst had been like coming home. But as Joanna remarked upon the one occasion they'd driven out to Pasadena to visit her mother, childhood homes had a way of being haunted by the wan ghosts of former selves, and it was disconcerting to turn a corner and encounter them unawares.
But in any case, he thought, pausing to consider the broader sunlight of the village's open fields at the end of the enclosed tunnel of standing stones, taiga laurel, and overhanging trees, in view of Trukild's warnings it would probably not be a good idea to sashay down the main street. If the village still preserved its former patterns of crop rotation-and knowing villages, he would have bet an entire night's tips at Enyart's on it-they'd be plowing the south fields for the spring seeding and letting the north lie fallow. Thus it would behoove him to cut north through the woods around the far end of those fields rather than risk an encounter with potentially irate villagers at this point in time.
Ordinarily, of course, he'd simply have passed through the village under cover of a spell of illusion, and the goodwives washing clothes or plucking chickens in the yards would have mistaken him for the baker's wife with a basketful of loaves. But with the geas ...
On top of the road bank beside him, a hare started, springing down through the blackberry brambles and away into the willow thickets on the other side of the road. A chaffinch flew up, chirping, and at the same moment Antryg heard the unmistakable stealthy creak of boot leather and the clink of a buckle against the pommel of a knife. A shape moved behind the screen of moss-thick alders ... two shapes ... a bead of sunlight glinted on the stock of a hunter's gun.
Out of sheer reflex Antryg formed the words of illusion in his mind, the illusion of a mangy brown tomcat; it had to be Gru and his hunters, they'd know if there were an odd tree or clump of laurel just here.
He was crossing the road away from their path when he realized the geas still should have been in force upon his mind.
But none of them-and there were six in all, four of them with crossbows, two with old-fashioned, bell-mouthed muskets-did more than glance at him, and he knew by the angle of their heads that those who did saw nothing more than a cat. Even his boot tracks in the deep mud of the lane they saw as the light, rounded stars of cat pugs.
Then they were gone.
Antryg let out his breath, shaken with astonishment and, in spite of himself, delight.
For a long moment he hesitated, uncertain; then he held out one big hand and called to the palm of his ink-stained mitt a small ball of blue light, the lowest-level magic he could think of that did not involve potentially dangerous elements like fire or wind. When it appeared, he tossed it joyfully into the air, spun it on the tip of one finger, and slam-dunked it out of sight into the trees. He knew exactly what had happened.
He had walked into one of those small zones such as had formed within the Citadel, pockets where the Void had leaked the aberrant magics of other universes, universes where magic had different rules, different strengths.
The urge to call some greater magic, some wild pyrotechnic of joy, was almost overwhelming-it was like trying not to gasp in air after emerging from minutes underwater. But that, he knew, could be appallingly dangerous, particularly here on the Brehon Line; he only hoped the tiny dot of blue light wasn't triggering a field of darkness, or the spontaneous transportation of perfectly innocent people, elsewhere on the Line. Keeping the magic down to the smallest possible level, he called another tiny, heatless star to his palm, walked backward until it flickered desperately and disappeared, walked forward again-in a fair imitation of John Cleese's Minister of Silly Walks-until it reappeared and then, in fifteen of his own erratic strides, sputtered and vanished once more.
Still no untoward side effects or, at least, none in his own vicinity. This pocket must be from a world whose magic operated much the same as it did in this one. Jumping cautiously over the cart rut and climbing the northern road bank in the scrambling track of Gru's hunters, he waded through the thick curls of buckler fern and bracken for perhaps another thirty feet before the glowworm brightness once again died.
He stood still, thigh-deep in a pool of blackberry brambles, hearing no sound but the whisper of the spruce and the pounding of his own heart.
It would take him an hour and a half to reach the Green King's Chapel, perhaps that long to return to the Citadel and find an unguarded scrying-stone of sufficient strength to get through whatever spells of guard had been established around Joanna's prison. Provided, of course, spells of scrying wouldn't result in fire or flood or lightning-though, if the magic of this field was similar, they should be fairly safe. And provided Daurannon or Bentick didn't take it into their heads either to stop him or accompany him back.
And on the other hand, Joanna might simply be at the Green King's Chapel.
"Dammit," he muttered, "this place might not even be here tomorrow." He glanced around him, taking note of the dead and leaning trunks of two alders-covered thick with shaggy green moss-that bounded one corner of the zone, and the zone's relation to three boulders he'd known from years ago, which he'd always privately described as Aunts Tilly, Milly, and Dilly Having Tea. As he moved off once more, northeastward toward the brighter afternoon sun beyond the pines, where the village fields lay, he held out his hand in a last futile effort to summon the star glimmer to his palm. But nothing appeared-only the sliding, illusory coin of wind-fluttered sunshine.
"Ah, well, easy come, easy go."
He heard the voices of the hunters again as he skirted through the elder thickets, haw, and horsetails that bounded the north fields: "It's laired near here-we've all seen its tracks."
"Splendid," Antryg murmured, propping his glasses on his nose and wishing he had at least enough magic to keep the mosquitoes off him. "Wolf or bear, I wonder? Or will I be really lucky and walk into the latest abomination?"
He spent the next half hour cautiously making his way through the thicker vegetation that divided the woods from the soft brown earth shawled now with a velvet of tender green. The mud in the fields would show his tracks if he cut across them; moreover, he recalled how Suraklin had sometimes put his own perceptions into the eyes of birds, as a means of looking for people-usually other mages-whom he could not track with a scrying-crystal.
Joanna at the Green King's Chapel. The pentacle on the cards: the sign of earth. A woman's voice crying. Fear-spells.
Whoever has done this to her ...

The Green King's Chapel lay silent and deserted in the dappled brightness of late-morning light. The ancient god of its dedication had been among the most popular of the old deities, and his worship had lasted long-indeed, there were places in the Sykerst where on certain nights the villagers still drove their livestock in procession down the long aisle of the witch-paths by moonlight, dragging the effigy of the Green King's sacrificed body upon a cart. The chapel itself, though long roofless, was a solid ring of stone, its eight high windows nearly obscured by the secondary wall of ivy that had grown over the original granite. Against the leathery green of last year's leaves, patches of new growth sparkled parakeet-bright; Antryg could have spread out his hand and not covered one of the larger leaves, and the twining stems were bigger around than his wrist.
There was no sound but a dove's soft mutter and the liquid reply of a cuckoo deeper in the trees.