"Simon Hawke - Sorcerer 3 - The Ambivalent Magician" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

THE AMBIVALENT MAGICIAN
Copyright ┬й 1996 by Simon Hawke
ebook ver. 1.0




FOR THE SONORA WRITERS WORKSHOP,


with warm thanks to my students, Janis Gemetta, Carrie Cooper, Roser Hyland, Davis
Palmer, Misha Bumett, Phil Fleishman, Barbara McCulloush, Shiori Pluard, Dan Tuttle, Ron
Wilcox and Toby Herschler, with all the best wishes in their own writing endeavors. Also,
special thanks to Dave Foster, Margie and James Kosky, Bruce and Peggy Wiley, Bob
Powers, Sandy West, all my friends in the ECS and the SCA, and Otis Bronson and my
colleagues in the writing department at Pima Community College in Tuscon, Arizona.
Thanks for the friendship and support.



One



"At last! I've done it! After months of ceaseless scrying, spellcasting and divination, endless, patient
searching through the vast, uncharted reaches of the ethereal planes, I've finally found him!"

"Found who, Master?" the wizard's hairy little troll familiar asked, pausing in his dusting of the ancient
vellum tomes and scrolls that crammed the bookcases and were piled high on almost every available flat
surface in the sorcerer's sanctorum.

"The voice in the ether!" Warrick Morgannan replied triumphantly. "That arrogant, omniscient spirit who
calls himself ... the Narrator!"

"Oh-oh," said Teddy, picking his nose and glancing up at the ceiling apprehensively.

Oh-oh, indeed. This is rather inconvenient. Your faithful narrator wasn't ready to start working on this
book, yet. I have too many other things to do. My desk is piled high with papers from my students; I've
got to complete some revisions on another novel I've been working on; I'm finishing up work on a
graduate degree; my checkbook is hopelessly unbalanced, and the last thing I needed right now was this.

"Never mind the excuses," Warrick said, his long white hair framing his chiseled features as he bent over
the scrying crystal. Dark red eddies swirled like smoke within the pellucid ball as he concentrated on the
crystal, focusing his energies in an effort to achieve resolution of an image. "You've been hiding from me
long enough! Now I've tracked you down through the ethereal planes and the time for reckoning has
come!"

Reckoning, schmeckoning. I haven't been hiding, I've been busy. Look, I've got enough trouble with
readers pestering me about when the next book in this series is coming out without having one of my
characters start interfering with my writing process. Now get out of my computer and slither back to the