"Steven Piziks - Smoke and Mirrors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piziks Steven)

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Smoke and Mirrors
Steven Piziks
"I don't want to wait," Crystamel said. "I want a new body now."
Dagmar rolled her eyes at Ramdane, who simply shrugged. Overhead, the sky was a cloudless blue
and a crisp fall breeze brushed through a crazy quilt of forest leaves. The sun was sliding toward the
horizon, and Dagmar's mail shirt chafed annoyingly as she raised a rock to pound the last tent stake into
place. Ramdane had lost the stake hammer. Normally Dagmar would have made her forgetful brother put
up the tent, but that would probably mean fighting their way out of a collapsed tangle of canvas at some
point during the night. After a curious chipmunk sniffed at one of the stakes, say.
"This isn't fair," Crystamel groused from her perch on an old stump. "You two always have nice
bodies, but I have to put up with this. Look at thisтАФI'm wearing out." She shook her bedraggled brown
feathers to prove her point. Two pinions fluttered away, then plunged straight down and clattered against
the hard oak roots. Ramdane sighed and picked them up. Both had changed into solid stone. In addition
to the feather problem, Crystamel was missing an eye and her beak was chipped. She looked less like a
falcon and more like a battered stuffed toy.
"What do you think, Mar?" Ramdane reached into his backpack to pull out a small stone cat and a
hammer. "A transfer won't take a minute."
"Oooh!" said Crystamel. "I haven't been a cat in ages!"
The rock skinned Dagmar's knuckles. She yelped and shoved her fingers into her mouth. "Mofe,"
she growled. "Afomufwy mot."
"What?"
A popping noise as Dagmar freed her fingers. She was a tall, stocky woman with ash-blond hair
and a face that was pretty if the light was right and you couldn't see the scars.
"No," she repeated. "Absolutely not. It isn't safe. And gimme that hammer. You said you'd lost it."
"Aw, come on." Ramdane set the little cat next to Crystamel on the stump. He was shorter than his
sister, with a whipcord build and curly brown hair above blue eyes. Talismans clacked and clattered at
his belt, marking him a talismonger just as Dagmar's sword marked her a warrior. "The campaign's over.
The enemy guys are dead or fled. It won't take but a minute. Just stand guard, all right?"
Before Dagmar could answer, he started chanting. Crystamel stiffened. Ramdane raised the hammer
and brought it down hard on the falcon. It shattered into rocky rubble. Ramdane continued to chant. A
silver mist seeped out of the crumbled rock and tried to dissipate, but Ramdane's spell caught it and
pulled it back. The mist drifted toward the little cat. Dagmar shuddered. This part never failed to creep
her out. The mist, she knew, was a part of her younger brother's soul, and if he focused it into a
properly-prepared talisman, it would bring the talisman to life as a familiar. If Ramdane made a mistake,
however, and the soul fragment didn't make it into its new homeтАФ
Dagmar's ears caught the sound of crackling brush. Something shiny glinted in the sunlight.
"Ramdane!" she hissed, but Ramdane, caught up in his spell, didn't hear her.
The bushes abruptly parted, revealing a greasy-looking man wearing a tattered red robe and holding
a hand mirror. He spoke a single sharp word, and the silver mist was sucked away from the cat. It
vanished into the mirror. Ramdane cried out and collapsed to the ground as Dagmar whipped her knife
from its sheath. Her sword was on the other side of their camp, a fact Ramdane hadn't bothered to check
before he started his spell.
I knew it, Dagmar thought fiercely. I just knew it. Do the right thing a hundred times and nothing
happens. Do the wrong thing even once and it bites you in the ass.
 "I wouldn't throw that knife," the stranger said. He had dark hair that clung to his skull from lack of
washing, a wispy beard, and a thin, hungry face. Two bird skulls, a dried worm tied into a knot, and a
dead snake with its tail stuffed into its mouth hung from his beltтАФa paltry collection of talismans. "If I got