"Katherine Kerr - Deverry 04 - Dragonspell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kerr Katherine)

necessary supplies for his various workings. (The messengers never left again, of course, at least not
alive.) When the full Council met, it did so in an image-temple out on the astral plane, not somewhere in
the hills or cities of Bardek. Yet on occasion he sincerely wished that he could travel on important
errands instead of having to trust the younger students of the dark arts to run them for him. By its very
nature, studying dark dweomer tends to make a man untrustworthy in the extreme.

Such a case was this matter of Rhodry Maelwaedd. If heтАЩd been capable of it, the Old One would
have gone to Deverry himself to supervise this crucial kidnapping and the disposition of its victim. As it
was, since heтАЩd had to entrust the job to a disciple on the one hand and hired assassins on the other, now
he fretted constantly, wondering if the job had been done right. He couldnтАЩt simply scry them out to see
because all the important actions had happened either in Deverry itself or on another island, and not even
the greatest dweomer minds in the world could scry across large bodies of open water. The exhalations
of elemental force, particularly over the ocean proper, quite simply obscured the images like a fog. If he
had tried to travel across them in the body of light, the waves and poundings of this same force would
have broken up his astral form and led to his death.

So he could only sit in his villa and wait and brood. What particularly worried him was the complexity
of the plan. If nothing else, heтАЩd learned from his days in government that the more complex any project
was, the more likely it was to fail, and this one had as many twists and turns as a bit of Deverry interlace.
If heтАЩd had a couple of years to spend, he would have thought and meditated until heтАЩd honed some
scheme as sharp and simple as a sword-blade, but time had been short and the threat too present to
allow such a luxury. Over the past decades various followers of the dark path had worked hard to
establish a secure foothold in Deverry, particularly in the court of the High King himself. Just when their
plans were maturing, Nevyn ferreted them out and in one ugly summer destroyed much of their work. In
many other ways the old man was a threat to the very existence of the dark dweomer as well as a hated
personal enemy of TondaloтАЩs. As he considered all these things, the Old One had resolved, the winter
before, that Nevyn should die.

An easy thing to resolve, of course; not so easy to execute. First of all, the Old One would have to act
mostly alone, because he quite simply couldnтАЩt trust anyone to help him. Those members of the Dark
Brotherhood who coveted his place and prestige were more than capable of betraying him to Nevyn at
the last moment simply to get rid of him. If he wanted reliable allies, he would have to pay for them in
cold cash and keep his real intent secret as well. There were highly skilled assassins available for hire in
the islands - at least to a man who knew where to find them. The summer before, the Old One had hired
a guild of these Hawks of the Brotherhood, as they were called, to carry out part - but only part - of his
plans.

Since sending a simple killer against a man of NevynтАЩs power would have been laughable, the Old
One had figured out a way to lure him to the islands, where his powers, drawn as they were from the
Deverry soul and the Deverry earth, would be greatly lessened, and he would be far from the secular aid
of such as Gwerbret Blaen. By all the laws of magic, in Bardek the Old One should be striking from the
position of strength, the mental high ground, as it were, especially since Nevyn always seemed to work
alone and thus would most likely come alone. When he looked around for bait for his trap, he fixed upon
Rhodry, who was important to the barbarian kingdomтАЩs future as well as one of NevynтАЩs personal
friends. Although his first thought was to merely kill the lad after using him to lay a false trail, he knew that
Nevyn might be able to scry on the highest mental plane and discover that Rhodry was dead. It was most
improbable that the Master of the Aethyr would come barrelling across the seas just to give the boy a
decent burial or suchlike. On the other hand, keeping him prisoner in his villa would have been
dangerous, too, once Nevyn came ferreting around on the track of the bait. The Old One had no desire
to go running - or waddling, as he wryly told himself- for his life like a badger flushed out of his hole.