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

His eyes ached and he took off his spectacles, laid his forehead on his crossed wrists, though part of his mind protested at the folly of so tempting Sleep. And as he had feared, Sleep emerged from the shadows like an assassin with a club and took him unguarded, and he subsided like a broken and garish scarecrow into the hay.

"Can we even know how much time has passed?" Joanna asked, raising her head from Magister Magus' velvet shoulder, where it had rested in silent exhaustion for ... how long? Minutes? A year and a half? She closed her eyes, too tired now for panic or anxiety. "I mean, if this place is ... is an energy-stasis of some kind, years could pass outside. Aren't there any stories about this thing?"
"It is mentioned," the wizard said cautiously. "But then, the stories generally concern those whose friends and families did eventually get them out."
"After how long?"
"Well ... I don't remember, really," he hedged. "Most stories are about things that were simply imprisoned here for good, like the demons."
Joanna sighed. "Things I'd really like to hear are somewhere in the dark with me. Dandy. And I suppose ... " She felt a momentary stirring of the old anxiety, but it was too worn to surface. "I suppose I don't really want to know about people who were locked up here for twenty years, either, really. It's sort of like cruising your boyfriend's house to see what cars are outside when he tells you he's got work to do that evening-knowing's worse than not knowing, but you don't know that until it's too late."
In the ensuing silence Lady Irina's endless, half-heard ramblings drifted like the meaningless purl of a stream. A muscle in Joanna's jaw flinched as all the old questions crept out of the dark: How long would it take for Ruth to give up on her and stop paying her rent? For her friends to move out of L.A.? For the knowledge by which she made her living to become obsolete? What would she return to, if she spent even a year or two in this place?
STOP IT, JOANNA! It will be all right. And if it's not all right, there's not a damn thing you can do about it and unless Security National Bank collapses in the interim, you 're not going to come out of this with no place to go and no money-your account's going to pick up all that much more interest if you can spend the next fifty years here rent-free, so STOP WORRYING.
Worry's not going to help. There is nothing you can do.
She hated that.
Something, not a sound, but a feeling, like a cold dragging somewhere within her chest, made her raise her head, and beneath her shoulder she felt the Magus' rib cage stiffen.
There was silence, terrible silence, and the slow sensation of some dreadful vortex drinking at the very heat of her blood.
"The tsaeati." Sweat started on her face, on her body beneath the thin cotton of her pajamas. "It's moving this way."
It can't hurt us, she thought. If this place was an energy-stasis, it could not draw the lives from them, could not absorb either the electrochemical flickerings of their thoughts or the substance of their flesh.
But still she took Magister Magus' hand, and the two of them got to their feet and moved off silently into darkness that had no end.

"I'm sorry," the little man said in the doorway, "but you can't stay here for free, you know. We have at least four hundred applicants for the twenty-five rotating openings, and we simply can't afford to turn one of them out for a nonpayer. You understand."
Antryg sighed and nodded, though he was exhausted and, even in the dream's altered perceptions, very hungry. The wide, straight street behind him was jammed with pedestrians, who brushed the mended skirts of his tattered purple coat, and the air was thick with the peculiarly acrid smell of cheap polyester permeated by old body-sweat, mingled with the chest-burning weight of a third-stage smog alert. In spite of the smell, everything in the dream was very brightly colored and rather pretty-bright pink and yellow polyester tunics, gaily colored neoprene sneakers, green and yellow stucco and paint on the crowded walls of the buildings. Only, upon closer inspection, everything was very dirty, and whirlpools of trash eddied along the edges of the sidewalks with the scuffing of the passing feet or pooled thick and sodden in the damp gutters. The bright red-and-blue buses that rumbled among the crowds belched clouds of black diesel smoke that were barely seen, so thick was the air already with it; most of the people who moved past him, not looking up at him or at one another, didn't seem terribly healthy, coughing or sniffling or rubbing their eyes.
He said to the man in his dream, "Is there some place where I could stay for the night? Or some place where I could find work? I'm really quite respectable, you know."
"I'm sure you are," the man said, in that same half-polite inflection, still not looking at him, and shoved into his hand a stapled sheaf of papers on which a list of unreadably tiny government agencies had been printed in a language he could not have deciphered even had the list not been a sixth- or seventh-generation photocopy; the door shut in his face. In the moving mob he was alone and tired, so tired his flesh hurt on his bones and he could barely get his legs to carry him away from the shut door. In the dream he was aware that he had been alone and tired for a long time now, constantly moving, unable to find a place to rest.
The turgid swirl of people swept him on.
The dream changed and blurred, breaking into a series of impressionistic fragments: himself standing in line after line to be told that he hadn't the qualifications for anything except shaling, whatever shaling was ... or fleeing, dodging through those bright-colored, weary, unwashed crowds to escape something or someone that filled him with dread. Once, he glimpsed his own face in the grimy reflective surface of a shopwindow and saw that he was old. Dirty and ragged and unshaven and old, with a look of defeated hopelessness in his eyes. Why he didn't open a Gate and exit this world he didn't know, only that it wasn't possible-either because the Council would find him if he did, or because it was simply not possible in this world, or because he had lost the ability. Or perhaps because in his heart he knew that the next world he entered would be worse.
There was no one who would speak to him, no one who would touch him, no one who would be his friend. Struggling feebly to escape the iron weight of sleep, he sensed in his dream that he had been thus alone for years. Everything he had once known had faded behind him, like a light in a black tunnel, with no light ahead, nothing but age and blind weariness and the slow, creeping onset of pain.
In an alley he glimpsed something brown and curved behind a trash bin where men and women as old as himself were scrounging for food. They snarled at him like half-toothless dogs, warning him from their territory, and he stepped back, but not before he'd seen that behind the bin lay the broken shell of a tortoise, shattered and turning to dust.
Joanna ... he thought, wanting her more than he could ever remember wanting anything. Wanting to touch someone, to talk to someone ... it had been years since he had talked to anyone, save polite civil servants like the man in the door. But Joanna was dead. Like a leaf in the wind, graying away to rot, he moved on, an eternal prisoner of his own flight.


Chapter XVII
One of the strongest supporters of wizards during the first two centuries after the Accords of Stellith was King Plugard II of Senterwing. He invited them to his court and freely endowed them with gifts, and from his own privy funds built, in their northern stronghold, the barracks of colored brick which now houses their sasenna.
When Plugard's nephew Bardelys organized a cabal of reactionary nobles and overthrew him, the exiled King appealed to the mages for support against his supplanter. To this the Archmage replied, "It is against our vows to use our powers for good or for ill in the affairs of men. We shall give you shelter among us for as long as you require it, but we cannot assist you in reclaiming your throne."
For this reason, when Plugard did rally popular support (for Bardelys was not only oppressive, but vicious and much hated among the people), he cast out of his kingdom all the mages, even such as had been his dear friends, and afterward it was many years before any wizard dared return to Senterwing.
-Gantre Silvas
Annals

Antryg was awakened, far later in the afternoon than he had intended, by the flashing scamper of a cat bounding across his shins. He moved a little and groaned, aching with the weariness of bad sleep; the light in the loft was opal-colored and diffuse, and rain drummed softly, steadily, on the thatch a short distance above his head. The crooked bones of his hands hurt from the dampness-it was the pain that had carried into his dreams.
He groped around for his glasses, finding them by memory mostly, and sat for a moment, picking the hay out of his hair and listening to the rain. The cat he identified as Fysshe, Aunt Min's big gray tom. There was, by the sound of it, one hell of a mouse hunt going on among the hay bales that filled the long, low-raftered space above the stalls.
Smiling a little, Antryg sat back, undoing all his former efforts of picking the hay off his coat. The rain smell wandered among the bales like a heartbroken ghost in search of half-forgotten memories, trailing in its wake the nostalgia of his own childhood. He had almost forgotten how much he had loved this country, with its crushing, empty silences, its cool woods and the hot, muggy, mosquito-ridden magic of its summers.
Not, he thought, leaning back into the pillowing clouds of hay, that mosquitoes would be permitted within the Citadel's bounds.
Then he sat up, frowning.
As well as mosquitoes, the Citadel bounds were, of course, spelled against mice.
So what was Fysshe after?
Suddenly deeply curious, Antryg got to his feet, hay clinging to his coat like burrs to a dog. Standing, he could see over the nearby wall of baled fodder, and realized why the cat was making so much noise. There were, in fact, four cats: Fysshe, Ru, Paddy winkle, and Littlekitty, all darting and springing among the hay in quest of ...
Tiny abominations? Antryg hooked an elbow over the nearest low rafter and watched until Paddywinkle flushed her quarry and went pelting across the floor after it.
It was the illusion of a mouse. Moreover, there was something different about this illusion: the fur was longer and softer, and the color was more like that of a black-and-white cinema film than the slatey bluish brown of a field mouse's coat. Its smell was stronger, too, a pungence of blood and mousiness and ... catnip?
He realized then that the illusion was being cast by the cats.
Paddy sprang past Antryg's booted ankles, pouncing with both forepaws ... and the phantasm-mouse vanished. The cat skidded to a halt, cocked her head, then turned back to where the other three were still leaping madly around the hay in pursuit of their illusory quarry. Her long tail lashed ... and the phantasm-mouse appeared once more, skittering wildly away-they certainly had the movement exact-with the hunter in hot and savagely joyful pursuit.
Antryg smiled, delighted, and stepping forward, held out his hand. No dancing simulacra of Fred and Ginger graced his palm; he shrugged and said aloud, "Well, it was worth a try." Evidently, in whatever reality that was the source of this field, cats could work magic and humans couldn't.
"And let's just hope there aren't side effects from this," he muttered, as he collected his shawl and last night's maps from the hay. Somewhere in the Citadel there had to be a field, however small, which would permit him to at least, very cautiously, work a scrying-stone.
He glanced through the big window at the rain pattering steadily down, drenching the maze of corrals and dairy yards into a sea of yellow mud. By the light it was midafternoon ... he should have wakened hours ago, though he felt that the uneasy slumber had done him little good.