"Debra Doyle & James MacDonald - Mageworlds 07 - A Working of Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doyle Debra)

dream, or had he just ended it? He couldn't remember; but somewhere outside the chamber, an alarm
began to sound.
He picked up his staff in his right hand and got to his feet. Outside the chamber, the alarm bell continued
its steady, pulse-note chime. He found the door and opened it, and stepped through—not into the harsh
illumination of a star-ship's passageway, but into the Old Hall at Demaizen, and the warm golden light of
an autumn afternoon.

Garrod syn-Aigal sus-Demaizen—great Magelord, Void-walker, and finder of worlds—had taken the
land and fortune that were his inheritance, and had used them to build a Circle strong enough and
dedicated enough to carry out the greatest of great workings: to bring together the two parts of the
sundered galaxy, crossing the interstellar gap and healing a rift that had existed since the unimaginably
long ago. Arekhon had left the sus-Peledaen fleet and his family altars to become a part of Lord Garrod's
Circle, and when the working demanded it of him he had left his native world as well.

He had walked through the Old Hall in dreams often enough since then, in the years after the Demaizen
Mage-Circle had split apart in fire and blood, but never as now, with the weight of knowledge bearing
down hard upon him. In these rooms, he had grown from a sus-Peledaen fleet-apprentice with a knack
for seeing the eiran and making luck to a working Mage in Lord Garrod's Circle—and now he came
back to them with the sound of the Daughter's alarm bell following him wherever he went.

Sometimes in his dreams he saw the Mages of Demaizen as he had known them before. On those nights
he sparred with Delath or Serazao in the long gallery, or talked of space and stars with Kiefen Diasul,
though in the waking world both Del and 'Zao were dead, and Kief had betrayed all of them years ago.
Tonight, though, was different. Instead of Delath or Serazao, the dream gave him Lulan Vai.

Vai—the last-come member of the Circle, who had brought Night's-Beautiful-Daughter from her
employers, the sus-Radal, to save the Demaizen Mages from utter destruction, and who had stayed
behind on Eraasi in order to repay the debt. Arekhon found her in the long gallery, with its tall,
westward-facing windows and its racks of exercise mats and limber practice staves. She hadn't altered
her appearance since the last time he saw her in the flesh. Under the touch of the afternoon sun, her dark
hair still glinted with rusty-brown highlights, and she still clothed her compact frame in tunic and leggings
of ordinary black.

"Lule," he said—though she had always refused the forms of affection, even with those who might have
had a claim to use them. "What are you doing here?"

"Looking for you. Did you think you could go away forever?"

"I didn't think I had a choice."

"You didn't," she told him. "Not then. But everything changes, and we have to change with it."

As she spoke, the light from the westering sun struck the windowpanes at a new and sudden angle,
dazzling his eyes for a moment. When the glare died, he wasn't seeing Lulan Vai any longer. Another
woman looked at him in her place: an older woman, whose thick black hair was shot through with wide
streaks of iron-grey, and whose skin was the color of burnished copper. Not Vai, though like Vai she
wore plain black and carried a Mage's staff, and not anyone else he recognized.

"Do I know you?" he asked her.