"Diana Wynne Jones - A Sudden Wild Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

secretly selected from the ranks of practitioners all over the
country.

This council has had to work increasingly hard this century. Its
activities have, more and more, been forced to encompass the whole
world. Most of its members agreed that this was a natural result of
improved communications. The only person who disagreed was the one man
of the Inner Ring.
His name was Mark Lister, and his actual title is a secret. He made
his living with computers. It always pleased him that he should work
at something so unrelated to witchcraft, and make good money at it too,
without more than occasionally invoking his powers as magician.

He dressed the part of a businessman, in expensive charcoal grey suits,
kept his pale face meticulously clean-shaven and his pale hair most
conservatively cut, and, since he was of average height and neither fat
nor thin, he looked almost unremarkable. This pleased him too. He
made just one concession to his secret activities: he always wore a
wide-brimmed hat as a covert allusion to the Magician in the tarot
pack. It did not worry him that, apart from the hat, most people found
him both humourless and colourless. What did worry him was certain
current trends in the world.

Thinking about these trends. Mark Lister started to feed certain data
to computers in his office. It was idly done at first, in a spare
moment, just to make him feel he was doing something to control
something that had long gone beyond anyone's control. The answers he
got back added up to something that so startled him that he set about
designing a special program of inquiry. When this was done, he stayed
in his office all night to run it.

His absence took careful planning. His wife, Paulie, was no mean witch
herself, and Mark was not at this stage prepared to trust anyone, let
alone Paulie. Halfway through the morning he phoned her with his
excuse: an unexpected conference in Birmingham. This gave him time to
set up a simulacrum of himself and send it to dine with another
colourless simulacrum in Birmingham, in case Paulie or an unknown
decided to check; and he had the rest of the day to recoup the
considerable energy it took to do that. In the evening, as soon as his
partners and staff had left, he set to work.

First he had to be spell the office so that no cleaner or security man
would be tempted to enter while he was there, and to make it seem as if
the place were empty. He had to block telephones and fax machines so
they would not distract him during the more delicate magic to come. All
simple enough stuff, but if what he feared was true, he could not
afford to put a finger wrong. By the time the office was silent and
looked to any possible observer like the usual empty space lighted by
greenish strip lights he was already shaking and sweating.