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

A stirring of wind moved the curtain beside him, belling out around him like a pale, oatmeal-colored cloak and then felling slack again as if the mere effort had exhausted it; outside in the darkness the yellow lights twinkled-streetlamps, billboards, headlights, neon. Asphalt and hydrocarbons, the chlorine bite of the courtyard swimming pool and the sudden, nostalgic tug of charcoal smoke and chemicals as someone fired up a balcony hibachi. Somewhere in the building someone was playing "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band."
Watching the tall figure silhouetted against the jukebox glow of the city of lights-the City of Dreams-Joanna realized she had known for months, and the knowledge cut at her, that she could only distract him from his unhappiness, never wholly alleviate it.
For he was more than an exile. By the very nature of this universe, he was an artist blinded, a sensualist gelded, a singer whose tongue had been cut out. The studies he had undertaken here, the studies of physics and optics and computers and whatever details of the physical world he could get his hands on, though they delighted and fascinated him, were not enough. They would never be enough.
Her throat hurting with the wish that she didn't care so much, she said, "You'd never get away from them, Antryg. Even back in your own world, you'd never be able to work magic again. They'd track you through it, as they did before."
She saw his body relax, leaning against the doorframe as if with his breath he had exhaled the tension from his muscles, the very strength from his bones, leaving only grief behind.
She barely heard him say, "I know."
She felt the fear and the desperation in him later when they made love and, lying against his bare shoulder in the drifting aftermath, saw by the reflected glow of the driveway lights below her window the haunted look of hopelessness in his unprotected gray eyes.
"Antryg," she murmured drowsily as he got up at nine to make the late shift at Enyart's. "You won't do anything dumb, will you?"
He sighed but didn't pretend that he didn't know what she meant. "It might be best if I did."
"They'd only follow you further." She shook back the tangle of her thick blond curls, drawing on a rumpled pair of pajamas, as she watched him pull on his jeans. The beads he wore around his neck glittered against the fair, fine-grained skin of his throat. His arms were marked from elbow to wrist along the vein with a faded road map of whitening scars. They were nothing like a junkie's tracks: the flesh had been slit, torn, bitten ... he had a few on his neck and chest as well. He'd given her a long and patently untrue story about attending a vampire convention when she asked him what they were.
"You may navigate better than they do in the worlds that lie in the Void, but you know they'll find you in the end."
And you'll be lonely, she didn't say.
And I'll be lonely, too.
A wry smile touched one corner of his mouth; he leaned down to kiss her hair. "Very well," he said softly. "I promise I shall consult you before undertaking anything dumb." She heard him lock the door, and half felt, half heard the creak of his footsteps as he carried his bicycle down the stairs. At least, she thought, in the Friday-night chaos of Enyart's he was unlikely to run afoul of wizards from other universes, whatever else he might meet.

Sleeping, Joanna dreamed of the Void.
Dreamed of running through it alone, of trying to cross it; her feet touched nothing, while its cold ate at her flesh and the blackness all around her whispered with the voices of the abominable things that slipped through its cracks when the Gates between worlds were open. Her breath came in gasps, her legs hurt with exhaustion, her chest burned ... the dim speck of light she so desperately followed receded from her. She stumbled, frantic to reach it, to get out of this place before she was lost in its airless cold forever ...
And above all else, the terror of the Void itself drowned her, darkness, falling, terror beyond all conception of terror; the terror she had felt, gazing down into the wash that evening, the terror of seeing the very fabric of space and air sliver open, split into a lipless mouth spilling out darkness ...
It was coming at her, reaching to consume her, while the horrors of a cosmic wind streamed out over her flesh, to eat her unprotected bones.
She woke gasping, staring with huge eyes into the darkness of the bedroom. Antryg was gone. Somewhere in the building a faint pulse hammer of music still thumped, the lights from the driveway below still pooled their yellow reflection on the ceiling.
But they could not penetrate the vibrating darkness that had begun to grow-blotting walls, reflections, furniture, everything of the sane and normal world-like a grinning, all-consuming chasm of eternity in one corner of her room.


Chapter II
It is said that in the days of the Twenty Kings, the wizard Treegard Galsek had a house in the northern forests, on a great granite hill called Wizards' Tor. He gathered about him other wizards, and priests of strange faiths, and they would kidnap travelers, and enchant their minds so that, believing themselves to be moles, or asses, or beasts of burden, they labored for them, raising high walls and digging tunnels deep within the rock.
-Firtek Brennan
Dialogues Upon the Nature of Wizardry

"Antryg ... " Jim Hasselart waved from the inconspicuous, lighted doorway at the far end of the bar. Antryg dropped maraschino cherries into the two banana daiquiris he'd been concocting, handed them to the Beautiful Kevin to deliver to table customers, and edged his way past the young waiter's tightly Jordached and much-admired behind to join his manager in the narrow galley among the crates of Corona and St. Pauli Girl. "Telephone."
It could only be Ruth, thought Antryg, with a glance at the clock. It was shortly before closing time, the sixth or seventh hour of the night-he'd just begun to get used to the time conversion in this world when daylight saving time had come along. There were, of course, talismans by which one could actually save daylight, but that didn't seem to be what these people meant.
"This is me," he said.
"Antryg?" It was Ruth, shaken and scared and nearly in tears. The Spell of Tongues by which wizards could understand and be understood-and which he had long ago extended to cover Joanna-didn't work through electronic media, but in four months he'd mastered sufficient English to follow telephone conversations and most movie dialogue. "Joanna ... she's disappeared."
Antryg closed his eyes as rage went through him like a wave of heat, smothering thought for a moment and leaving only cold behind.
For a moment the yammering of a thousand inebriated conversations beyond the door, the clink of glassware and the sweet, wailing song of what sounded like a male castrato faded from his awareness. They had dared. They had dared ...
It had been years since he'd felt this angry, angry enough to take every member of the High Council of Mages by their scrawny necks and ...
The aftermath was just as swift, an ebb wave of horror and dread.
What had they done to her?
Ruth's voice rattled swiftly on, speaking of a scream, of darkness fading away in a corner of the room, of something retreating along that darkness ... a black cloak ...
Or, he thought with a curious, terrible calm, the black robe of a mage.
They had taken Joanna.
He felt no real surprise. He had been waiting only to hear this, from the moment he had knelt to see the wizards' marks written on the concrete of the wash. In a way, he had been waiting for this since the first night he and Joanna had lain together in her apartment, she drifting off to sleep in the gladness that he wasn't dead, that against all odds he had come to her here in this bizarre City of Dreams.
And he, a little bemused that, all things considered, he was alive at all.
But all these four months he had spent here, he had kept an eye on the Void. And almost twenty-four hours ago he had sensed the Void's opening into this world, jolting him awake with a queer, oblique flash of awareness that had dissolved immediately; it was not until nearly noon that he had remembered the small-hours vision of Joanna walking down the dry riverbed, something seen as distant and very far away.
Ruth had had the vision. And Joanna. And Zylima and Jemal's mother, Luann. And Antryg was perfectly well aware that those visions, those dreams, were not merely to tell him, Come to this place ...
We cannot summon you, but we can certainly summon your friends.
"It has something to do with that ... that dream about the Tujunga Wash, doesn't it?" Ruth was saying, the frightened determination in her voice pulling his mind back from its lightning jumble of anger, thought, memory. "Do you know what's going on? How to find her, how to help her ... ?"
"It's all right," said Antryg quietly. "I'll go down there."
"Do you ... ?" She hesitated, torn between her loyalty to Joanna and her quite understandable terror of her dream. "Do you need help? Either just me, or I can get the two guys who live next door to Joanna ... "
"No." Enough people, thought Antryg, had suffered through proximity to him in his run-ins with the Council-he still had periodic nightmares about the outcome of the Mellidane Revolts, that final piece of meddling which had gotten him imprisoned by his erstwhile colleagues." But thank you," he added, realizing how harsh his voice had sounded in that one bitter word. "I know what's going on, and I should be able to take care of it."
"Trouble?"