"Simon Hawke - Sorcerer 2 - The Inadequate Adept" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

massive desk, bent over his ancient vellum tomes and scrolls.

"Get on with what, Master?" asked his troll familiar, Teddy.

"I wasn't speaking to you," said Warrick.

The hairy, little troll glanced around the sorcerer's sanctorum apprehensively, noting that the two of them
seemed to be alone.

"But, Master..." he whined, plaintively, "there is no one else here!"

"Of course, there is no one else here," snapped Warrick irritably. "I was speaking to the voice in the
ether."

"The voice in the ether, Master?" said Teddy, picking his nose nervously.

"Yes, you know, the one that calls itself the narrator," Warrick replied.

Teddy swallowed hard and seemed to shrink into himself, which isn't easy to do when you're only two
feet tall. He'd heard his master speak of this narrator before, this mysterious voice in the ether that only
he could hear, and it always made him feel frightened. Now, the fact is, there's not much that frightens
trolls, because although they may be rather small, they are extremely strong and aggressive. However,
Teddy had no idea what to make of this invisible, omniscient presence that his master kept referring to. It
made him very nervous.

"What is it saying, Master?" Teddy asked.

"It's talking about your nerves now," said Warrick with a wry grimace.

"My nerves?" said Teddy, becoming increasingly more nervous.

"Yes, and wasting a great deal of time, I might add," said Warrick, frowning. "If there is one thing I
cannot stand, 'tis a storyteller who hems and haws and cannot seem to get the tale started properly."

Of course, not being a storyteller himself, Warrick was not really in a position to appreciate the difficulties
involved with beginning the second novel in a series, while at the same time trying to take into account the
reader who may not have read the first one.

"Well, why don't you simply do one of those 'in the last episode' things?" asked Warrick impatiently.
"Now do get on with it, will you? I have work to do."

Ahem... In our last episode, we met Dr. Marvin Brewster, a brilliant, if pathologically vague, American
scientist in London, in the employ of EnGulfCo International, one of those huge, multinational
conglomerates that owns companies all over the world and has lots of large buildings with bad art in their
lobbies. Brewster had what many men might call an enviable life. He was making a great deal of money
doing what he loved, working out of his own private research laboratory with virtually unlimited funding,
and he had become engaged to a highly intelligent and socially prominent British cybernetics engineer
named Dr. Pamela Fairburn, who also happened to be drop-dead gorgeous.

Pamela patiently kept trying to get her absent-minded fiance to the altar, only Brewster kept failing to