"Kay, Guy Gavriel - Fionavar Tapestry 1- The Summer Tree" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

"You think me foolish?"
"I know better than that."
The tall man turned away. His sharp gaze went across the room to where the five people his companion had indicated were sitting. One by one he focused on them, then his eyes locked on Paul Schafer's face.
Sitting between Jennifer and Dave, Paul was glancing around the hall, only half listening to the chairman's fulsome introduction of the evening's keynote speaker, when he was hit by the probe.
The light and sound in the room faded completely. He felt a great darkness. There was a forest, a corridor of whispering trees, shrouded in mist. Starlight in the space above the trees. Somehow he knew that the moon was about to rise, and when it rose. . . .
He was in it. The hall was gone. There was no wind in the darkness, but still the trees were whispering, and it was more than just a sound. The immersion was complete, and within some hidden recess Paul confronted the terrible, haunted eyes of a dog or a wolf. Then the vision fragmented, images whipping past, chaotic, myriad, too fast to hold, except for one: a tall man standing in darkness, and upon his head the great, curved antlers of a stag.
Then it broke: sharp, wildly disorienting. His eyes, scarcely able to focus, swept across the room until they found a tall, grey-bearded man on the side of the stage. A man who spoke briefly to someone next to him, and then walked smiling to the lectern amid thunderous applause.
"Set it up, Matt," the grey-bearded man had said. "We will take them if we can."

"He was good, Kim. You were right," Jennifer Lowell said. They were standing by their seats, waiting for the exiting crowd to thin. Kim Ford was flushed with excitement.
"Wasn't he?" she asked them all, rhetorically. "What a terrific speaker!"
"Your brother was quite good, I thought," Paul Schafer said to Dave quietly.
Surprised, Dave grunted noncommittally, then remembered something. "You feeling okay?"
Paul looked blank a moment, then grimaced. "You, too? I'm fine. I just needed a day's rest. I'm more or less over the mono." Dave, looking at him, wasn't so sure. None of his business, though, if Schafer wanted to kill himself playing basketball. He'd played a football game with broken ribs once. You survived.
Kim was talking again. "I'd love to meet him, you know." She looked wistfully at the knot of autograph-seekers surrounding Marcus.
"So would I, actually," said Paul softly. Kevin shot him a questioning look.
"Dave," Kim went on, "your brother couldn't get us into that reception, could he?"
Dave was beginning the obvious reply when a deep voice rode in over him.
"Excuse me, please, for intruding." A figure little more than four feet tall, with a patch over one eye, had come up beside them. "My name," he said, in an accent Dave couldn't place, "is Matt SЎren. I am Dr. Marcus's secretary. I could not help but overhear the young lady's remark. May I tell you a secret?" He paused. "Dr. Marcus has no desire at all to attend the planned reception. With all respect," he said, turning to Dave, "to your very learned brother."
Jennifer saw Kevin Laine begin to turn himself on. Performance time, she thought, and smiled to herself. Laughing, Kevin took charge. "You want us to spirit him away?"
The Dwarf blinked, then a basso chuckle reverberated in his chest. "You are quick, my friend. Yes, indeed, I think he would enjoy that very much." Kevin looked at Paul Schafer. "A plot," Jennifer whispered. "Hatch us a plot, gentlemen!"
"Easy enough," Kevin said, after some quick reflection. "As of this moment, Kim's his niece. He wants to see her. Family before functions." He waited for Paul's approval.
"Good," Matt SЎren said. "And very simple. Will you come with me then to fetch your . . . ah . . . uncle?"
"Of course I will!" Kim laughed. "Haven't seen him in ages." She walked off with the Dwarf towards the tangle of people around Lorenzo Marcus at the front of the hall.
"Well," Dave said, "I think I'll be moving along."
"Oh, Martyniuk," Kevin exploded, "don't be such a legal drip! This guy's world-famous. He's a legend. You can study for Evidence tomorrow. Look, come to my office in the afternoon and I'll dig up my old exam notes for you."
Dave froze. Kevin Laine, he knew all too well, had won the award in Evidence two years before, along with an armful of other prizes.
Jennifer, watching him hesitate, felt an impulse of sympathy. There was a lot eating this guy, she thought, and Kevin's manner didn't help. It was so hard for some people to get past the flashiness to see what was underneath. And against her will, for Jennifer had her own defences, she found herself remembering what love-making used to do to him.
"Hey, people! I want you to meet someone." Kim's voice knifed into her thoughts. She had her arm looped possessively through that of the tall lecturer, who beamed benignly down upon her. "This is my Uncle Lorenzo. Uncle, my room-mate Jennifer, Kevin and Paul, and this is Dave."
Marcus's dark eyes flashed. "I am," he said, "more pleased to meet you than you could know. You have rescued me from an exceptionally dreary evening. Will you join us for a drink at our hotel? We're at the Park Plaza, Matt and I."
"With pleasure, sir," Kevin said. He waited for a beat. "And we'll try hard not to be dreary." Marcus lifted an eyebrow.
A cluster of academics watched with intense frustration in their eyes as the seven of them swept out of the hall together and into the cool, cloudless night.
And another pair of eyes watched as well, from the deep shadows under the porch pillars of Convocation Hall. Eyes that reflected the light, and did not blink.

It was a short walk, and a pleasant one. Across the wide central green of the campus, then along the dark winding path known as Philosopher's Walk that twisted, with gentle slopes on either side, behind the law school, the Faculty of Music, and the massive edifice of the Royal Ontario Museum, where the dinosaur bones preserved their long silence. It was a route that Paul Schafer had been carefully avoiding for the better part of the past year.
He slowed a little, to detach himself from the others. Up ahead, in the shadows, Kevin, Kim, and Lorenzo Marcus were weaving a baroque fantasy of improbable entanglements between the clans Ford and Marcus, with a few of Kevin's remoter Russian ancestors thrown into the mix by marriage. Jennifer, on Marcus's left arm, was urging them on with her laughter, while Dave Martyniuk loped silently along on the grass beside the walkway, looking a little out of place. Matt SЎren, quietly companionable, had slowed his pace to fall into stride with Paul. Schafer, however, withdrawing, could feel the conversation and laughter sliding into background. The sensation was a familiar one of late, and after a while it was as if he were walking alone.
Which may have been why, partway along the path, he became aware of something to which the others were oblivious. It pulled him sharply out of reverie, and he walked a short distance in a different sort of silence before turning to the Dwarf beside him.
"Is there any reason," he asked, very softly, "why the two of you would be followed?"
Matt SЎren broke stride only momentarily. He took a deep breath. "Where?" he asked, in a voice equally low.
"Behind us, to the left. Slope of the hill. Is there a reason?"
"There may be. Would you keep walking, please? And say nothing for now-it may be nothing." When Paul hesitated, the Dwarf gripped his arm. "Please?" he repeated. Schafer, after a moment, nodded and quickened his pace to catch up to the group now several yards ahead. The mood by then was hilarious and very loud. Only Paul, listening for it, heard the sharp, abruptly truncated cry from the darkness behind them. He blinked, but no expression crossed his face.
Matt SЎren rejoined them just as they reached the end of the shadowed walkway and came out to the noise and bright lights of Bloor Street. Ahead lay the huge stone pile of the old Park Plaza hotel. Before they crossed the road he placed a hand again on Schafer's arm. "Thank you," said the Dwarf.

"Well," said Lorenzo Marcus, as they settled into chairs in his sixteenth-floor suite, "why don't you all tell me about yourselves? Yourselves," he repeated, raising an admonitory finger at grinning Kevin.
"Why don't you start?" Marcus went on, turning to Kim. "What are you studying?"
Kim acquiesced with some grace. "Well, I'm just finishing my interning year at-"
"Hold it, Kim."
It was Paul. Ignoring a fierce look from the Dwarf, he levelled his eyes on their host. "Sorry, Dr. Marcus. I've got some questions of my own and I need answers now, or we're all going home."
"Paul, what the-"
"No, Kev. Listen a minute." They were all staring at Schafer's pale, intense features. "Something very strange is happening here. I want to know," he said to Marcus, "why you were so anxious to cut us out of that crowd. Why you sent your friend to set it up. I want to know what you did to me in the auditorium. And I really want to know why we were followed on the way over here."