"Mercedes Lackey - The Wizard of Karres" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

Also by Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint & Dave Freer:
The Shadow of the Lion
This Rough Magic
 CHAPTER 1
The shrill screaming from inside made Captain Pausert open the cabin door with
some caution. Not that screaming was necessarily unusual around his present companyтАФ
just that it was a good idea to meet screaming with due care.
He ducked reflexively as something went whizzing past his head. Vermilion
splattered all over the wall of the Venture's second-best stateroom. It didn't make things
look much worse. The eggshell blue paint that Goth had picked out with such care during
their refit on Uldune was scarred and splattered with mute testimony to the savageness of
the battle that was going on inside.
In the center of what had once been an ankle-deep pale cream carpet was the
perpetrator of the ghastly destruction.
The Leewit, the younger of the two witch girls of Karres aboard the ship, stopped
drumming her heels on the floor, sat up and glared at him. "What are you doing here,
stupid?" she demanded, weighing the next paint bottle in her hands.
Like the sound of sunlight, like seeing a scent, he was aware of the insubstantial thing
somewhere in the room: a thumb-sized vatch, filling Pausert's head with tinkling vatch-
giggles. Then he saw it. Around the light, a sheet of paper dragged by that tiny piece of
impossible blackness fluttered like a demented moth.
Throw it at the Big Dream Thing! squeaked the vatch, inside his head, its silvery
eyes wide with delight. Throw, throw!
"Shan't!" said the Leewit, changing her mind.
Spoilsport! Throw at me again, then! The vatch swooped down at her, fluttering
what had obviously been the Leewit's artistic endeavor inches from the Leewit's nose.
The Leewit snatched at it furiously, nearly dropping the paint bottle. "Mine! Give it!"
The vatch and the picture twitched away from her fingers, and then disappeared, and
then reappearedтАФin four different localities at the same time.
Life with vatches was interesting. So was life with Karres witches. Life with both was
. . . complicated.
Captain Pausert's life had been very, very complicated for some time now.
The Leewit impotently threatened the dancing vatch quartet with the paint bottle.
Then she turned on the captain. "You! You can even handle a giant vatch. Get my picture
back from the stinkin' little thing!"
 "Seeing as you asked so nicely, child, I will." Captain Pausert was careful to keep a
straight face. It amused him to see the Leewit persecuted, for a change, since the Leewit
was ever so capable of doing a fair amount of persecuting herself.
Still, vatches were too capable of creating havoc for him to leave one on the loose
here. Forming hooks of the invisible stuff that was klatha force, Pausert began to reach
with them for the tiny vatch . . . or vatches.
There were four of them and they all looked the sameтАФless than an inch of blackness
and a pair of slitty silver eyes. They all seemed to have the Leewit's picture, too. That
was confusing. But vatches did odd things to time and space in human dimensions. He'd
just try each one in turn.
He did. To no avail.
"It's doing a light-shift, Captain." That observation came from the Leewit's older
sister, Goth, from where she lounged in a formfit chair on the far side of the room.
"Splitting its image. Neat trick. Hadn't thought of that," she said, rubbing her sharp chin.
Pausert stared at the four. "So where is it actually?" Light-shifts were one of Goth's