"Hambly,.Barbara.-.Dog.Wizard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)
At a sign from Daurannon, the squad of sasenna moved back, filing soundlessly out the door and shutting it behind them; the moment Minhyrdin lifted her head, Antryg was on his feet again, striding up the room to kneel before the old lady's chair. She had a footstool, he saw, its ivory legs retaining fragments of gilt in the carvings, so that those tiny feet of hers in their plain scuffed slippers would not dangle like a child's above the floor.
"Ah," the creaky voice murmured, and one withered claw reached out to touch his bent, graying head. "It's Suraklin's boy, that gave everyone so much trouble."
And there was a shocked muttering around the table at mention of the Dark Mage's name.
"Be fair, Auntie," smiled Antryg, raising his head, and his glasses flashed in the cool, shadowless light that flooded the round white marble room. "Salteris was my master, too, and the master I chose. Surely you won't hold my raising against me?"
"Badly brought up," she sighed, shaking her head. "Badly brought up, with all the wrong ideas ... You aren't wearing yours emblem of office, the stole of the Council." Her pale eyes focused more sharply on him.
"I'm no longer on the High Council, Aunt Min," Antryg reminded her and straightened up to tower over the tiny bundle of black rags and knitting hunched in the great oak chair. His deep voice was gentle. "I was chucked off, oh, eight or nine years ago, for meddling in the quarrel between Lord Surges and the Imperial Governors ... and you aren't wearing yours either."
"That," Lady Rosamund snapped witheringly, from her seat at the old lady's right, "is scarcely your place to comment!"
"I never know where that thing gets to." The Archmage dug aimlessly in her knitting basket, spilling yarns and needles in a wry-colored cascade to the yellowed marble floor. Antryg bent to pick through the hopeless snarl and produced a very much crumpled purple satin band, which he draped tenderly around the old lady's humped, skinny shoulders.
"There," he smiled. "Now we're official and all in print."
The faded aquamarine eyes narrowed to sudden sharpness. "And you were dead, too."
"Well," Antryg admitted, "that's another story and only partially true. There isn't a chance of getting a cup of tea, is there? Bentick, would you mind fetching tea? I'd go myself except that all those guards won't fit into the kitchen. And do you think," he added, as the Steward, tight-lipped with indignation, signaled Implek-the only non-mage in the room-to order one of his warriors to comply, "that you could borrow a jacket or something from the Citadel slop chest for me? It's appallingly cold."
Lady Rosamund opened her flowerlike lips to express her opinion of dog wizards who came to their own trials as if they owned the courtroom, but Aunt Min muttered something about dressing like a heathen savage and disentangled from her workbasket a huge shawl, part-knit, part-crochet, part-macrame, in an apparently random selection of spun and unspun hanks of silk and wool. Antryg slung it around his shoulders and settled himself in Daurannon's chair at the Arch-mage's left just as the younger wizard was stepping forward to take the place himself.
"Now," he said in a cheery voice, "how long after your first experiments with the Void did the abominations start appearing?"
Had he announced his candidacy for the position of Arch-mage there could not have been a more stunned silence in the marble chamber. Daurannon's eyes blazed with suspicion; Bentick and Nandiharrow exchanged troubled glances; but it was the Starmistress who spoke, her deep voice a hoarse whisper, and she stared straight before her as if she had not heard what he'd said.
"There was a Gate," she whispered. "Voices crying out."
"When?" asked Antryg, looking across at that stern, elderly lady who had always reminded him of a short-winged hawk. "Where?"
The librarian, Seldes Katne, spoke up. "Down in the Vaults. On the seventh or eighth level." She sat with five non-Council members present, their plain, bleached-pine chairs set in the gallery formed by a ring of pillars that circled the room a few feet from its white marble wall. With the exception of Seldes Katne and Implek, they were the very powerful Senior mages, in line for Council position: Otaro the Singer, whose round, brown face curiously blended jolliness and asceticism; the black-skinned, massive Q'iin the Herbmistress; and gentle old Whitwell Simm. "But that wasn't until months after the experiments began."
"We first started raising power to open Gates in the Void in February," Lady Rosamund said. "The abominations didn't start appearing until early last month. Nothing we did at that time differed from the earlier spells."
"What prompted them?" Antryg asked, propping his chin on his hand and regarding her with bright-eyed interest.
Her head lifted a little. "The knowledge that there were worlds, universes beyond the veil of what we know as the light and air of reality. The awareness, brought by your meddling in these matters, that there was knowledge out there waiting to be found."
"I see." Down at the far end of the table, Issay and Nandiharrow moved over to make space for Daurannon at Antryg's other side. The younger mage took the vacated chair, but his eyes, still sharp with wariness, never left Antryg's face. "I don't suppose it really matters where in the Citadel you made these experiments, given the number of energy lines which cross here; you could scarcely help shunting the power this way and that."
"We worked mostly in the hall on the North Cloister," provided Bentick. "I have the complete notes of those sessions."
"Thank you. Just out of curiosity, at what point did some one of the Regent's men inquire about how you'd disposed of my mortal remains? Which," he added earnestly, forestalling Daurannon's burst of speech, "is the only logical way you'd have of finding out that it wasn't the Regent's men who'd taken me out and buried me, as you'd probably thought."
There was a momentary, stringent silence, broken by Aunt Min. "The turn of the granny-winter it was, when the groundhogs come out ... not that I've seen groundhog put his nose from his house any winter these thirty years."
The Handsome One, who still appeared far from satisfied at the patness of Antryg's deduction, said coolly, "The matter was voted on in Council."
"And if our goal was to seek you out for what you had done," her ladyship added, "do you blame us?"
He widened his deranged eyes at her from behind the thick lenses of his spectacles. "Not nearly as much as you're blaming yourself, I daresay. I mean, it wasn't my doing that the abominations started appearing."
"Nor was it ours!" snapped the Lady, rising from her chair.
"Well, only one of us was messing about with the Gates, and there was no percentage in it for me, you see."
"Was there not?" Daurannon asked softly.
"The openings were done the same way last as first," Bentick added irritably, "and there were no ill effects-none whatever. We scried very carefully along the energy lines to make sure of that. It's all here in my notes." And he shoved the thick, leather-bound notebook he'd been cradling under one arm across the table with the air of a man refuting all possible contradiction. Of course, reflected Antryg, Bentick did everything, from lecturing on sublunary physics to tying his shoes, with the air of a man refuting all possible contradiction.
"So when were there ill effects?" Antryg inquired.
"Not for six, seven weeks." Lady Rosamund took up the tale. "Then abominations were reported, foul things, evil, unknown creatures. They were seen in Kymil, in Angelshand, in the woods near the village of Wychstanes here ... and here. Monstrous things were seen in the mazes of the Vaults down below, strange mosses, vermin of other worlds. We began searching the Vaults, to see what might be the source of these evils."
"And there was a Gate." Phormion's huge eyes, rusty brown and, Antryg recalled, usually steady and calm for all their overwhelming intensity, shifted as she spoke; he had the impression she was fighting to keep herself from looking back over her shoulder for the memory of some terrible threat. "A Gate into darkness."
Phormion continued in the deep, almost masculine voice that was so startling coming from the fine-boned oval of her face, "I cannot say exactly where, now. I was searching, like the others. There were things down there, invisible as well as visible; the darkness was alive with their scurryings and shriekings, like foul ghosts. I slew one creature which came at me." She shook her head; her brows, still auburn though her hair had lost its color years ago, pinched together, with pain or memory or the attempt to make sense of something incompletely recalled.
"I heard ... voices. I think voices ... " She raised a small, slim-fingered hand briefly to her temple and shook her head again. "A great voice called something which I have forgotten. There was a sound like the beating of wings, like wind in the reed beds along the river. I turned and there was a Gate, a Gate such as we had opened in the Void when we went into that other world to take you prisoner for your sins, Antryg Windrose. But the Gate was moving."
"Moving?" Antryg said, startled. "But they don't move. They open and close, and when they do, they seem to be coming toward one, or going away."
"No," she insisted quietly, "it was not like that." In her sleeves her hands were never still, scratching, searching, like mice in a sack. "I have seen Gates now. Seen them in the Vaults, some of them little, holes only. This one ... it rushed toward me like a runaway cart in a city street. In the black maw of it, I saw moving lights, moving shapes ... voices. It came at me like an ocean wave which curls down over the head, like a mouth opening to swallow ... "
Her huge eyes snapped shut, and she turned her face away. Bentick's nervous white hand reached out to touch her wrist, and she flinched, startled, as if struck.
"I have searched the Library for any information concerning the Void," Seldes Katne said, after a time of silence. The diffuse, even light of magic that filled the windowless chamber did little to improve her round, heavy face, plain as a boiled potato; the tight braid of her hair, which lay across the black of her robe, was the color of fading iron, streaked with ashy gray. "I was in Angelshand when the manifestations started. There were riots in the dockside quarters; I think if the Regent hadn't banished all the wizards from every city in the realm we probably would have been torched out by the mob."
"Banished you?" Antryg's eyebrows shot up with comic surprise.
"From every city in the Realm," Nandiharrow said, with a touch of bitterness in his deep, slow voice. "Every worker of magic, even some of the dog wizards."
"Good Heavens, Pharos must be mellowing! A few years ago he would have arrested every wizard in sight and thrown the lot to the Inquisition. I'm pleased everyone got off so easily."
"He would not dare ... " Lady Rosamund began indignantly.
"You don't think so? I can't imagine you know him better than I do, but ... Ah, thank you." A tall, rawboned, red-haired girl of about Joanna's age appeared at his elbow with a lacquered tray bearing teapot and cup, which she proceeded almost to spill over him. He caught the edge of the tray neatly, glanced at the chalk stains on her uncallused fingers, the shape and quality of the narrow ruffle of white shift collar visible above the edge of her gray Junior's robe, and the dried leaves adhering to the mud of her shoes. "Kyra, isn't it? My temporary roommate at the Pepper-Grinder?
"Chamomile," he added, pouring out the tea. "Pothatch remembered, bless his rotund little heart. Q'iin, did you ever succeed in making a cleanser for wounds from chamomile and fairy-paintbrush? I was saving fairy-paintbrush for you in Los Angeles-it grows there under another name-but ... "
"If we might return to the matter at hand!" Bentick's rather high voice cut in like chipped obsidian, and a muscle twitched in his long, clean-shaven jaw.
"Terribly sorry." Antryg gave him his daft smile. "Would you care for tea? Kyra, my darling, we seem to be short of cups."
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