"Tad Williams - The Stanger's Hands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Tad)

The StangerтАЩs Hands
TAD WILLIAMS

Tad Williams became an international bestseller with his very first
novel, TailchaserтАЩs Song, and the high quality of his output and the
devotion of his readers has kept him on the top of the charts ever since.
His other novels include the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn series (The
Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell, To Green Angel Tower), the
Otherland series (City of Golden Shadow, River of Blue Fire, Mountain of
Black Glass, Sea of Silver Light), CalibanтАЩs Hour, Child of an Ancient City
(with Nina Kiriki Hoffman), and The War of The Flowers. He is currently
finishing the Shadowmarch series (Shadowmarch, Shadowplay, and
Shadowrise). In addi-tion to his novels, Williams writes comic books for
DC Comics (Aquaman, The Next, Factory) as well as film and television
scripts. He lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In the ingenious story that follows, he suggests that the problem
with using magic to get your HeartтАЩs Desire is that you might actually get
it. . .

****



P
EOPLE in the village had been whispering for days about the two
vagabonds in SquireтАЩs Wood, but the boy Tobias was the first to speak to
them.

Tobias was a somewhat wayward lad, and the fact that he should
have been grazing his fatherтАЩs sheep on the hill above the forest at that hour
more or less assured the sheep in question would be wandering along the
shady edges of the wood instead, with Tobias wandering right behind them.

It was not until he saw a drift of smoke twining like a gray scarf
through the trees that the boy remembered that strangers had been seen in
the wood. He felt a moment of fear: why would anyone live out of doors in
the cold nights and flurries of autumn rain if they were God-fearing folk?
Only robbers and dangerous madmen dwelt under the un-sheltered sky.
Everyone knew that.
 If he had been a fraction less headstrong, Tobias would have turned
around then and hurried back to the hillside, perhaps even remembering to
take his fatherтАЩs sheep with him, but there was a part of him, a strong part,
that hated not knowing things worse than anything. It was the part that had
once caused him to pull the leg off a frog, just to find out what it would do.
(It did very little, and died soon after with what Tobias felt guiltily certain was
an accusatory look in its bulging eyes.) It was also the reason he had
dented his fatherтАЩs best scythe when he had used it to try to cut down a
tree, and why he had dumped the contents of his motherтАЩs precious sewing
basket all over the groundтАФa search for knowledge that ended with Tobias