"Sheri S. Tepper - The True Game 2 - Necromancer Nine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

endangerment which counted. Riddle's daughter, Tossa, had lost her life in aiding me. I could not refuse
him.
"In the morning," I begged. "Not at night."
"Certainly, in the morning," he agreed. I might just as well have done it in the dark for all the sleep I
had.
We went to the pit in the gray dawn. They had not laid Mandor with his ancestors and
predecessors in the catacombs beneath the fortress, and I was thankful of that. There the ghosts were as
thick as fleas on a lazy dog, and I had no wish to raise a host on this day. No, Mandor lay beneath the
sod in a kind of declivity a little to the north of the walls, a place fragrant and grassy, silent except for the
sigh of wind in the dark firs which bounded it. Riddle let me go into the place alone, staying well away
from me in order that his own, strange "Talent" not impede mine. . . or Dorn's. As! left him, he said, "We
need to know whence these things came. What their purpose is. By whom made. Can you ask these
things?"
I tried to explain. "Riddle, I have not heretofore questioned phantoms to know what knowledge
they may have. Those discarnate ones I raised on this land before were ancient, long past human
knowledge, only creatures of dust and hunger, fetches to my need."
"It is said that Necromancers are full of subtlety."
"I will be as subtle as I can." Though it would be Dorn being subtle, rather than Peter. I took the
little Gamesman into my hand, fingers finding it at once in the pouch as though it had struggled through the
crowd to come into my grasp. He came into me like heat, burning my skin at first, then scalding deeper
and deeper, nothing wraithy or indistinct about it, rather a man come home into a familiar place. I was not
surprised when he greeted me, "Peter."
"Dorn," I whispered. Before, I had been fearful. This time I was less so, and perhaps this accounted
for my courtesy to him, as though he were my guest. I explained what we were to do, and he became my
tutor.
"Here and here," he said. "Thus and thus." My hand reached out, but it was Dorn who pointed the
finger at the grass, Dorn who called the dust and bones within to rise. Mandor had not been long dead.
The ground cracked and horror came forth, little by little, the worms dropping from it as it rose. I heard
Riddle on the hill behind me choking back a gasp, whether awe or fear I could not tell.
"Thus and thus," Dorn went on. "So and so."
The bones became clad in flesh, the flesh in robes of state. The head became more than a skull, then
was crowned once more, until at last what had been so horrible at the end of Mandor's. life became the
beauty I had known in Schooltown, bright and lovely as the sun, graceful as grass, and looking at me
from death's eyes. From this uncanny fetch came a cry of such eerie gladness that my heart chilled.
"Whole," it cried in a spectral voice. "Oh, I am risen whole again"
I could have wept. This wholeness was not an intended gift, and yet ... it was one I would have
made him during life if I had known how. "So and so," said with Dorn within me. "You could not have
made him so or kept him so in life for any length of time."
Riddle called from the hillside, reminding me of our purpose there. So I asked it, or Dorn did, of
those strange crystalline contrivances which Riddle was so concerned about. The phantom seemed not to
understand.
"These are not things which Mandor knew. These are things of Huld. Playthings for Huld. Magicians
made them. Huld understood them, not Mandor. Oh, Mandor, whole, whole again тАж"
I heard Riddle cursing, then he called to me, "I'm sorry, Peter. Let the pathetic thing go back to its
grave."
But I was not ready to do that. I had remembered Mertyn's words concerning those who had
vanished.
'Mandor, do you speak with others where you are? Do the dead talk together?"
The fetch stared at me with dead eyes, eyes in which a brief, horrible flame flickered, a firefly
awareness, a last kindling.