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

"And in any case," the younger mage said after a moment, "that isn't why you're here."
The guards fell in around them as they emerged into the little gallery that bisected the Pepper-Grinder halfway up its tall interior. Spiraling iron steps looped down to the lower floor, half of which was occupied by the usual student clutter of books, crystals, dried herbs, and the endless lists that novices and Juniors had to memorize; the other half had been cleared for the practice of drawing Circles of Power. Secondor third-level Junior circles, Antryg automatically identified them, for minor spells of Summoning, drawn by a tall young woman of upper-bourgeois background from Angelshand who'd never been in love. Three steps led up to the little door; Antryg ducked his head, and his graying curls brushed the lumpish gargoyle carved upon the keystone. The guards crowded behind.
May dawn on the Wizards' Tor. More strongly than ever, the reminiscences of home. "Is old Fred still the gardener?" He looked around him at the jungle of wild grape and hardy taiga laurel that was, as usual, threatening to swallow the dozen or so little houses shared by the Citadel's Junior population. Against the gray-weathered wood and dark stone of the walls, the parakeet green of new-fledged rowan and birch stood out like fresh paint, sharply contrasting with the spruces' clotted darkness.
"No," said Daurannon. "He retired four years ago; his nephew Tom's taken over. And as usual, Bentick's not having any luck getting him help."
Antryg's boots, and the following feet of the guards, thumped hollowly on a short walkway of splintery planks across a sharp dip in the rocks to a half-dozen wooden stairs, and so up to the narrow, cobblestoned road that wound its way among the close-crowded labyrinth of buildings and trees.
Between the Juniors' houses-cellar to attic, where the hill was steep-ran a dozen little covered bridges, galleries, and staircases, all ramshackle, tiny, narrow, and needing paint. Nearly everything in the Citadel was connected. Antryg could have climbed from the pillared stateliness of the Council Hall up to the round marble observatory platform that crowned the Library's soaring bulk, six hundred feet above at the summit of the hill, without once going outside, had he cared to take a winding course through kitchen, laundry, cellars, and the bridges that linked nearly all the residences. And indeed, in the cruel months of the Sykerst winters, everyone at one time or another did precisely that.
But in spring, despite the glass-sharp chill in the air, and certainly through the short, soul-hurting magic of the muggy Sykerst summers, no one did so who had a chance to walk outside.
The little road, between its crumbling balustrades of field-stone, came clear of the trees just beyond the house called the Island of Butterflies, after a place in a fairy tale, and Antryg stopped, in spite of Daurannon's hand on his elbow pressing him on.
At this point the hillside dropped below them in a nearly sheer escarpment of granite to the pines clustering below. From here one could look directly across into the upper windows of the Polygon, the Citadel's main edifice, which rose in stately splendor from the easier southern slope: an incongruous-looking building whose lower floors and massive porch columns had been cut out of the living granite of the hill itself. The upper floors, above the columned dignity of the Council Hall, were a curious composite of later styles and materials, piled one on top of the other like a peasant wedding cake, the monolithic stonework and arcades of six centuries ago supporting garish Gothic arches and breezeways, galleries of carved wood weathered gray as pewter by the harshness of the northland winters, encrustations of jewel-like half-timbering, ornamental brickwork, and frivolous rococo turrets added by Pipin the Little, the Archmage who had immediately preceded Antryg's own master Salteris.
Turning, Antryg craned his neck to look up over the intervening walls and clusters of alder and spruce to the steep outcropping immediately above, where the foursquare bulk of the Library, the most ancient portion of the Citadel, loomed pale as old ash against the rising light. Its fortresslike slit windows had mostly been replaced by wide arches of glass, and along its eastern side, cantilevered out over the sheer granite drop of the hill, some nobleman anxious to win the wizards' favor had paid to install a conservatory, a ridiculous jeweled swallow's nest balanced on buttress and pillar, flashing in the new light of day.
Antryg smiled. As a forcing house for fruit trees, the Conservatory was absolutely useless, because it was accessible only through the Library, and hadn't been used for anything for seventy-five years, but the sight of that faceted absurdity always gave him joy.
As he and Daurannon resumed their winding course down the path, he inquired, "Does Seldes Katne still hang her stockings there to dry? Seldes Katne is still librarian, isn't she?"
Daurannon smiled a little at the thought of the stumpy, elderly woman who knew the location and contents of every scroll and grimoire that crammed those shelves. "I think she'll be librarian here when we're all dead and gone."
"There are worse fates." Antryg led the way along a raised-plank path over vine-cloaked, uneven ground to a side door of the Harlot: an enormously tall and narrow building faced on all sides with an extravaganza of multicolored ornamental brick and tile. "Chasing abominations and prodding 'round the Void on behalf of the Council with no guarantee of what I'll get out of it, for starters."
Daurannon halted in his tracks, his grip on Antryg's bare arm sudden and crushing. They stood in the doorway at the top of the Harlot's long stairwell, turn after square turn of sandstone stairs and galleries pillared in painted marble, flooded now with the first golden blast of the morning sun. High above them, the clash of feet and weaponry signaled morning sparring for sasenna and novices training under Sergeant Hathen's terrier-dog bark.
"You weren't told that!"
"My dear Daur, it's obvious I'm not going to be beheaded this morning," Antryg said. "If the Council didn't have some pressing need for my services, I'd have waked up in a cell on the bottommost level of the Vaults, not in one of the spare bedrooms, and you'd have dosed me with something considerably nastier than phylax root. I know there's been something amiss with the Void for months ... "
"And how do you know that?"
"I just do. Partly, because you told me that abominations have been appearing. For how long? Just here? No, of course they've been seen in Angelshand, Parchasten, and Kymil, too, because the Citadel sits on a node of the energy-paths, and trouble here would cause faulting all along the Line. No wonder Bentick can't get villagers to cut the grass or sweep the stairs." He nodded toward the dried stains of crusted mud on the worn sandstone risers, tracks leading upward and down, some of them days old.
"And since my area of expertise is the Void, Lady Rosamund thought ... " He broke off, his mad gray eyes suddenly distant, a gangly, incongruous shape in jeans and T-shirt beside the younger mage's robed dignity.
"What is obvious to me," Daurannon said slowly, "is that you know a good deal more than you should."
"Oh, I always do," Antryg agreed cheerfully. "And in fact knowing more than we should is the business of wizards." He turned and clattered down the stairs, Daurannon and his guards hurrying to overtake his longer stride.
"Nevertheless," Daurannon said, "the summoning of abominations was in your confession."
"Was it?" Antryg glanced back over his shoulder as he swung around a marble newel. "I didn't read the thing, you know. I'm surprised at you, Daur-hasn't anyone told you you shouldn't believe everything the Inquisition talks people into signing?"
"Not everything, perhaps," Daurannon agreed. They halted at the bottom of the last flight of stairs. Before them stretched the covered wooden bridge to the Junior Parlor on one side of the Polygon's upper floors. "You also confessed to murdering my master, Salteris Solaris, the Archmage. Was that also something the Witchfinders made up?"
Antryg flinched, looking aside from the sudden naked rage, the pain of grief and loss, in those usually bland, agate-colored eyes.
"There was a reason for that."
"I've heard your reason."
Antryg started across the bridge. The hand Daur laid on his arm to stop him was trembling with anger. "Salteris was my master, my teacher, and my friend," Daurannon said. "He taught me everything I know and made me everything I am. I loved him. At one time you claimed you did, too."
Antryg sighed. Their footfalls echoed hollowly on the thick oaken planks of the bridge. Beyond it, the Junior Parlor was deserted, gray still with shadow, for it faced northwest, and filled with the smell of ashes from the unswept hearth. The crisscross patterns of its dragon-painted rafters seemed to murmur with all those conversations he and Daurannon had had there over the years, sitting up till dawn discussing spells and philosophy and the variations of plant life and insects; the notes of Salteris' porcelain flute seemed only just to have died away.
"If you've heard my reason," he said after a time, "you know why I killed him."
"As I recall it," the Handsome One said, his voice low enough to exclude the little knot of guards who trailed behind, "you claimed that your former master, the Dark Mage Suraklin, learned the secret of putting his own mind and soul into the body of another-in this case, Salteris. And for that reason you killed him. But it's an argument which cuts two ways, Antryg. And if Suraklin was capable of that, he was also capable of putting his mind and soul into your body ... another very good reason to kill Salteris. And a good reason to summon abominations to plague the wizards who destroyed your own Citadel in Kymil-if you are he-all those years ago, and broke your power."
Antryg placed a staying hand on the doorway of the stair that would lead them at last, down one final flight, to the small round chamber where the High Council met. "Is that what you think?"
"Let's say it's something which has crossed my mind. Most of the others don't believe Suraklin had that power."
"Oh, he had it." Antryg shivered, thrusting other memories from his mind. "He had it. One more question ... "
The guards had closed up behind them, pressing him on; through the open door he could feel the slow rising of warmth from the Polygon below them, the mingled odors bringing back to him all his own years as a member of the Council, sitting in that chamber at Salteris' left hand ... candlewax and incense, the frowsty odors of old wood and ground-in smoke. Even now, even though he'd strangled Salteris-Suraklin-the mindless husk that Suraklin had left of his master-with his own hands, even now he half expected the old man to be sitting in his carved blackwood chair at the head of the council table, a cup of cinnamon tea at his elbow, making some joke about Antryg being late.
"Where's Joanna?"
Daurannon hesitated, his black brows puckering slightly. Then, "The girl from the City of Dreams?"
"Yes," Antryg said quietly. "She was kidnapped from her apartment sometime after midnight-kidnapped, from the description, by a mage. And because of the strength needed to open a Gate, it has to have been a member of the Council." Behind his thick lenses his eyes, usually filled with nothing more than a kind of amiable lunacy, had grown hard.
"We had nothing to do with that," Daurannon said after a moment. "With you as our prisoner, of course the Council has no need of a hostage. Truly, if something happened to her, it wasn't one of us."
He looked up at his erstwhile friend, his hazel eyes wide and slightly puzzled with the puzzlement of innocence.
But then, thought Antryg, as he turned down the last spiral of stairs, an appearance of slightly puzzled innocence had always been Daurannon's forte.


Chapter III
Of the Master-Spells, the spells of dominance by which the Archmage holds sway over all others of that kind, great or small, it is forbidden among them to speak.
-Firtek Brennan
Dialogues Upon the Nature of Wizardry

"Well," Antryg said, breezing through the great bronze doors and into the High Council chamber, "you're probably wondering why I've called you all here."