"Simon Hawke - Wizard 5 - The Samurai Wizard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

sacred bond between master and apprentice, a bond that he truly
felt did not apply to him, for after all, had he not proved himself to
be the master?
Twenty years to the day after he first approached Yohaku, the
master agreed that he was ready to advance to the rank of wizard.
And once again, Kanno achieved the highest scores in the exams. It
was at that point that, with a great display of false regret, he
parted from the master, expressing his desire to dedicate himself to
the lifelong mastery of the art of thaumagenetic engineering. And
once again, Yohaku had been pleased, for while there were a great
many other branches of the path that Kanno could have chosen,
paths that led to a potential for far greater profit than what Kanno
had selected, none were regarded as being more spiritual, more
demanding, more harmonious and aesthetic as the art of bringing
into being new forms of life imbued with magic. Yohaku was proud
that his pupil had not chosen the path to wealth and power, but the
spiritual way of the true artist. And yet again, he was deceived.
Power was the be-all and end-all of KannoтАЩs whole existence. And
once again, displaying the ruthlessly methodical patience he had
schooled himself in over the years, Kanno waited, biding his time,
opening a small тАЬmagenicsтАЭ shop in the Shinjuku district, with two
young apprentices of his own. He started unpretentiously, by
producing fairly common magenes such as snats, a magical hybrid
of a snail and a house cat, which resulted in a purring, affectionate
little life form with no legs that was capable of clinging to walls and
ceilings much like a snail in an aquarium, and paragriffins, a
hybrid of a parakeet and the mythical griffin, a sort of enchanted
avian cyborg with metallic-scaled wings that was capable of speech.
Only as common as those popular and well-established magenes
were, KannoтАЩs creations were truly works of art that stood head
and shoulders above all the others. His snats were derived not from
ordinary house cats, but from miniature ocelot, panther, and
Siberian tiger hybrids that he himself perfected. And his
paragriflfins were likewise based not on ordinary parakeets, but on
bonsai raptors and frigate birds, with variegated, iridescent scales
of titanium, silver, and gold, with jeweled eyes and immaculately
cut talons of emerald and amethyst. And every one of them was
engineered as painstakingly as a haiku was composed. KannoтАЩs
reputation as a thaumagenetic artist grew by leaps and bounds.
Yohaku positively beamed with pride in his former pupil.
After he was elevated to the rank of sorcerer, Kanno respectfully
declined numerous and highly lucrative offers of employment from
several large conglomerates, humbly- and politely stating his
opinion that true art could not be corporatized and produced on an
assembly line. After he took such a stance, the offers soon stopped
coming, at least from Japanese concerns, because no one wanted to
offend a master, but very soon thereafter, possession of a Kanno
magene became the ultimate of status symbols. Kanno pretended
discomfort at having to continually raise his prices, but he
apologetically gave the reason that only by doing so could he limit