"Mercedes Lackey - EM 1 - The Fire Rose" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

"My needs are peculiar, reflecting the interests of my children. This tutor must be accomplished
in ancient Latin, classical Greek, medieval French and German, and the Latin of medieval scholars.
A familiarity with ancient Egyptian or Celtic languages would be an unanticipated bonus."
The Salamander writhed, suddenly, and opened surprisingly blue eyes to stare at its master. It
opened its lipless mouth, and a thin, reedy voice emerged.
"We have narrowed the field to five candidates," it said. "One in Chicago, one in Harvard, three
in New York. The one in Chicago is the only one with a smattering of ancient tongues and some
knowledge of hieroglyphs. The others are skilled only in the European languages you required; less
qualified, but-"
"But?" he asked.
"More attractive," the Salamander hissed, its mouth open in a silent laugh.
He snorted. At one point he would have been swayed by a fairer face; now that was hardly to the
point. "Have they relatives?" he asked it.



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"The one in Chicago is recently orphaned, one of those in New York was raised by a guardian who
cares nothing for her, and her trust fund has been mismanaged as she will shortly learn. Those
that do have families, have been repudiated for their unwomanly ways," the Salamander told him.
"They are suffragettes, proponents of rights for women, and no longer welcome in their parents'
homes."
Tempting. But relatives and parents had been known to change their minds in the past, and welcome
the prodigal back into the familial fold.
"Show me the one in Chicago," he demanded. She seemed to be the best candidate thus far. The
Salamander left the vellum page and returned to its obsidian dish, where it began to spin.
As it rotated, turning faster and faster with each passing second, it became a glowing globe of
yellow-white light. A true picture formed in the heart of the globe, in the way that a false
picture formed in the heart of a Spiritualist's "crystal ball." The latter was generally
accomplished through the use of mirrors and other chicanery The former was the result of true
Magick.
When he saw the girl at last, he nearly laughed aloud at the Salamander's simplistic notion of
beauty. Granted, the girl was clad in the plainest of gowns, of the sort that a respectable
housekeeper might wear. He recognized it readily enough, from a Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog
left in his office a few years ago by a menial.
Ladies' Wash Suit, two dollars and twenty five cents. Three years out-of-mode, and worn shabby.
She wore wire-rimmed glasses, and she used no artifice to enhance her features. In all these
things, she was utterly unlike the expensive members of the silk-clad demimonde whose pleasures he
had once enjoyed. But the soft cheek needed no rouge or rice-powder; the lambent blue eyes were in
no way disguised by the thick lenses. That slender figure required no over-corseting to tame it to
a fashionable shape, and the warm golden-brown of her hair was due to no touch of chemicals to
achieve that mellow hue of sun-ripened wheat.
"She is orphaned?" he asked.
The Salamander danced its agreement. "Recently," it told him. "she is the most qualified of them
all, scholastically speaking."
"And possessed of no-inconvenient-family ties," he mused, watching the vision as it moved in the
Salamander's fire. He frowned a little at that, for her movements were not as graceful as he would
have liked, being hesitant and halting. That scarcely mattered, for he was not hiring her for an