"Mickey Zucker Reichert - Renshai 01 - The Last Of The Renshai" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reichert Mickey Zucker)

The Eastern Wizard, Shadimar, did not know how long he had sat with his elbows propped on the table
in the Cardinal Wizards' Meeting Room and his bony chin cupped into his slender, wrinkled palms; but
his hands had gone numb and long since ceased to register the cottony cascade of his beard between his
fingers. The movements or stillness of his three colleagues had grown familiar beyond notice, and the only
true mortal in the room, the bard Davrin, sat on the floor in his usual deferential silence, his mandolin
cradled in his lap.



For the last seventy years, from the day Shadimar had become one of the four true mages, chronology
had lost all meaning for him. At one time, a bird's flight across a meadow seemed to take days while, at
another, an infant might come of age between Shadimar's breakfast and lunch. At first, these lapses had
terrified him; a mad link in the chain of Eastern Wizards might harm the system that Odin the AUFather
had created at the beginning of time and nurtured in the hundreds of centuries that followed. By his law,
each of the four Cardinal Wizards selected his time to die in a glorious ceremony that passed his
memories, and those of his predecessors, to his chosenI successor. Thus, over time, the Wizards became
stronger, more knowledgeable, and more powerful.



So far, that system had operated with reasonable precision. The original Wizards had been weak,
essentially oracles and prophets. With Odin's guidance, they shaped and studied the world and its forces,
found the best or most necessary courses of action, and created prophecies that their stronger successors
would need to fulfill. Over eons, those visions had become clearer, and the abilities of the Wizards had
grown to allow them to fulfill their own predictions. Now only the oldest and most unclear of the
prophecies remained, spouted but little understood by the first Wizards, scrawled on cave walls, passed
down in the legends of generations of mortals, or simply fun-neled through the memories of previous
Wizards.



Shadimar remained unmoving, recalling how his near-immortality had muddled his time sense, making
him fear that his contribution to the line of Eastern Wizards would be insanity. But, drawing on the
memories of his predecessors, he discovered that nearly all of them had experienced a similar period of
adjustment. Over the years, as he became more comfortable with his position as Wizard, Shadimar had
grown accustomed to the leaps and pauses in time. He had learned to focus instead on the functions of
the current Eastern and Western Wizards: to fulfill a handful of prophecies, to keep the mortal populaces
believing in the gods and Wizards without violating Odin's laws of noninterference, and spreading the
cause of neutrality by mediating between the Northern and Southern Wizards, who championed good
and evil respectively.



The Southern Wizard, Carcophan, ceased his pacing and slammed a meaty fist on the tabletop. "Enough
of this waiting. He's not coming back. I say your man has failed the Tasks."