"Diane Duane - Wizards 1 - So You Want To Be A Wizard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

glanced up from her desk, about to say something sharp. Then she saw who was standing there and
how hard she was breathing. Mrs. Lesser frowned at Nita and then grinned. She didn't miss much.
"There's no one downstairs, " she said, nodding at the door that led to the children's library in the
single big basement room. "Keep quiet and I'll get rid of them. "
"Thanks, " Nita said, and went thumping down the cement stairs. As she reached the bottom, she
heard the bump and squeak of the front door open-ing again.
Nita paused to try to hear voices and found that she couldn't. Doubting that her pursuers could hear
her either, she walked on into the children's library, smiling slightly at the books and the bright
posters.
She still loved the place. She loved any library, big or little; there was something about all that
knowledge, all those facts waiting patiently to be found that never failed to give her a shiver.
When friends couldn't be found, the books were always waiting with something new to tell. Life
that was getting too much the same could be shaken up in a few minutes by the picture in a book
of some ancient temple newly discovered deep in a rainforest, a fuzzy photo of Uranus with its up-
and-down rings, or a prismed picture taken through the faceted eye of a bee.
And though she would rather have died than admit it—no respectable thirteen-year-old ever set
foot down there—she still loved the children's li-brary too. Nita had gone through every book in
the place when she was younger, reading everything in sight—fiction and nonfiction alike, fairy
tales,
SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD
13
science books, horse stories, dog stories, music books, art books, even the encyclopedias.
(Bookworm, ) she heard the old jeering voices go in her head, (foureyes, smartass, hide-in-the-
house-and-read. Walking encyclopedia. Think you're so hot. ) "No, " she remembered herself
answering once, "I just like to find things out!" And she sighed, feeling rueful. That time she had
found out about being punched in the stomach.
She strolled between shelves, looking at titles, smiling as she met old friends, books she had read
three times or five times or a dozen. Just a title, or an author's name, would be enough to summon
up happy images. Strange creatures like phoenixes and psammeads, moving under smoky London
day-light of a hundred years before, in company with groups of bemused children; starships and
new worlds and the limitless vistas of interstellar night, outer space challenged but never
conquered; princesses in silver and golden dresses, princes and heroes carrying swords like
sharpened lines of light, monsters rising out of weedy tarns, wild creatures that talked and tricked
one an-other....
I used to think the world would be like that when I got older. Wonderful all the time, exciting,
happy. Instead of the way it is—
Something stopped Nita's hand as it ran along the bookshelf. She looked and found that one of the
books, a little library-bound volume in shiny red buckram, had a loose thread at the top of its


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 Prologue


spine, on which her finger had caught. She pulled the finger free, glanced at the title. It was one of
those "So You Want to Be a... "books, a series on careers. So You Want to Be a Pilot there had
been, and So You Want to Be a Scientist... a Nurse... a Writer...
But this one said So You Want to Be a Wizard.
A what?
Nita pulled the book off the shelf, surprised not so much by the title as by the fact that she'd never