"Sorcerer's Son" - читать интересную книгу автора (Phyllis Eisenstein)

Ringforge; space lay differently there, and travel was faster than in the human world, and invisible to mortal eyes. Every demon had a personal portal there that only it could use; Gildrum’s opened into its private dwelling, the place it had spent its time before answering the summons of the rings. To mortal perception, the place would seem a sea of blinding light, without visible boundaries, without furnishings. To Gildrum, it was comfort and quiet and the dream of freedom. The demon yearned to stop there and nevermore return to its master’s demands. There had been a time when it had not felt so, when its home had merely been a way station for its travels, a convenience. It had found fascination in the ways of humans then, and in its work for Rezhyk, even in Rezhyk himself. It had been young then, though not in human terms. Now, with a long life yet stretching before it, Gildrum felt old and weary. It wanted to rest in its home. But it could not, for Rezhyk had commanded, and though the command might be delayed, it could not be denied.

Gildrum emerged into the human world at the ruins of Ushar.

Ushar was a city from the morning of time. Its people had been the first to find ways of enslaving demons, and thereby they had become a race of mighty sorcerers. But their petty jealousies, their rivalries in love and power, their greed, undid them at last: a war erupted among them, a conflict with no sides, with every combatant for himself, brother against brother, mother against son. When it was over, their civilization lay in ruins, their wealth and knowledge buried in the rubble, and their bodies, too. A few survivors, ringless, crippled, blind, scattered to tell the tale of their lost greatness. Generations passed before a new breed of sorcerer uncovered the keys to the demon world, and by then the lost knowledge of Ushar was legend only, a myth to frighten children when thunder rolled in the skies. Ultimately, through the demons themselves, the ruins were found. But excavation proved frustratingly difficult, and few sorcerers had gleaned more for their labors than a clay tablet or two, tallying herds of sheep and goats.

Rezhyk sought something greater.

He was a methodical man, and patient. While other sorcerers had dipped into the ruins, found nothing, and lost interest, he had spent the greater part of his life studying them.

On one wall of his workshop hung a map of the city, showing squares, streets, buildings, even fountains, all located by his prying demons. He had even visited the site himself, though he had seen only the mound of grassy earth that marked it, that no demon had disturbed. A shepherd, chasing his unruly flock above the bones of Ushar, would never have suspected its existence.

Gildrum had been there many times and was responsible for large portions of the map.

The demon slipped into the earth at its usual place, where a small patch of soil was baked and cracked from its entry, as by the desert sun. Beneath the soil lay hardened lava that glowed at its passage. Beneath that was the rubble—stone blackened by fire, cracked, crushed, pillars sifted with walls and floors, as if they had never seen separate existence. Gildrum followed a trail of lava around and among the debris of Ushar; though a boulevard was filled with broken buildings like fruit in a pie, the demon traversed it as easily as a human being would cross his bedroom. Yet the map was unfinished, even after so many years, and at last Gildrum came to the end of its own and others’ explorations. Before it lay the remnants of a house, fallen pillars blocking the doorway, walls leaning inward, roof collapsed. The insignia of the resident was visible upon the brass fittings from the door, which lay upon the threshold, the wooden panel having burnt completely. Three interlocked rings marked the owner of the house as a member of the highest class of citizen, a most powerful sorcerer. As Gildrum entered through cracks the lava had filled, it wondered if this sorcerer had escaped the doom of his fellows.

Inside, the wooden floors had not survived the heat of entombment, and the roof had fallen all the way to the cellar in several pieces— Gildrum encountered that rubble there when, descending to the foundation, it began its search. In the darkness of solid rock, no eyes could see, no fingers trace the outlines of objects; the demon’s perceptions were limited to the tactile sensations of its flame, to the material warmed by it, and its progress was as slow as that of a man plowing a field without a horse. Under the debris of the roof it discovered smashed ceramic pots and bronze boxes crushed flat, their contents forever unidentifiable. It found jewelry, too—gold and silver chain distorted by melting, cabochon gems cracked by heat, lumps that must have been brooches, pendants, diadems.

And a demon-master’s ring.

It was a delicately crafted piece, the modeling of tiny leaves on the golden surface still perceptible in spite of the melting that had given the band an oval shape. There, had been a gem once, but the prongs that had held it were mere nubbins now, the gem itself lost somewhere among the many others embedded in the lava. The ring encircled a small, charred finger bone, frozen there by the stone that had replaced the flesh. The rest of the skeleton huddled about it, as if the ring had been the center of the wearer’s being, to be protected like a child in the womb. The whole skeleton lay beneath a rectangular slab of fine-grained marble that Gildrum guessed had been a tabletop.

The demon left the ring where it was. Crushed, broken, its maker dead, the circlet no longer had any power. To a living sorcerer, Ushar could offer only knowledge of the techniques of enslavement, never the slaves themselves. And so Gildrum searched for the ancient books that dealt with that knowledge, though it felt like a traitor to its race.

In a corner of the cellar, where the flags that lined the floor had buckled, it found the vault. Once, that hiding place had been well sealed with dressed stone and mortar, contents wrapped in greased oxhide against the damp. But lava had reached it in the final cataclysm and within a jacket of stone, the oxhide was only a black and crumbly crust. With the most tenuous of fiery tendrils, Gildrum probed within the crust and found a stack of steel sheets. The folk of Ushar recorded their most important matters on demon-made steel, although to them herbals and genealogies were just as important as sorcerous lore. Still, Gildrum thought, in a home marked by three rings, a book of steel was likely to be what Rezhyk desired.

The demon withdrew from the steel and expanded to envelop the whole vault within its flame-body. It increased its heat then, till a sphere of rock containing its discovery floated free in a bed of molten lava, like a pebble in hot grease. It could cross to the demon world at that, and leave a hole, like a giant gas bubble, deep in the ruins of Ushar.

Gildrum left the sphere suspended in the brilliance of its home for a time, cooling, and when it judged that human flesh could touch the stone without damage, it delivered the dark mass to the workshop at Ringforge. Rezhyk hastened to examine the treasure while Gildrum, taking the form of the girl with blond braids, leaned against it to keep it from rolling across the polished floor.

“You could have made it a little smaller,” said Rezhyk, tapping at the surface with hammer and chisel. The sphere stood only a head shorter than he did.

“There’s a stone vault inside, with a melting point higher than lava. I was afraid the extra heat so close might damage the book beyond salvage.”

Rezhyk grunted agreement. Dark flakes sprayed about him with every stroke of the hammer, and soon he had formed a broad, flat space on the sphere. Gildrum then rolled the rock mass over to rest on that surface, took the tools from her master, and set to work in his stead. She was quicker than he, her blows harder, because she did not worry about being injured by flying fragments. When the gray of the vault began to show, though, her progress slowed, for the harder, less porous rock of the vault yielded to force more reluctantly.

Rezhyk watched for a time, and then he turned to other endeavors. Gildrum had been gone in the ruins many days, and her master had used that time for the final polishing of his new ring, and for the setting of its stone, the topaz pale as white wine that Gildrum had brought him. The ring lay on his workbench, and beside it was its larger counterpart, a plain circlet with the same metal content. Rezhyk set the large ring on the brazier, upon the coals that carried forth the low flame that had never died in Ringforge, and he set the other ring upon his own left index finger. As he began the chant that would call his new slave, the tapping of Gildrum’s hammer behind his back fell into the rhythm of his voice.

In the center of the brazier, in the center of the ring, the reddish glow of a coal turned white-hot. Rezhyk chanted on, demanding, insisting, compelling. Abruptly, a pillar of flame roared from the brazier, rising through the ring, constricted there like sheaves of wheat clutched in a fist, but billowing above into a mushroom of fire. Over the roaring, whipping blaze, a voice shouted, “No! No!”

“Take your earthly form!” said Rezhyk. “I command it!”

The flames flickered against the ceiling, and in them a thousand shapes danced that might have been men, women, animals, creatures real and fantastical, all translucent, insubstantial. Flamelets broke away, skittered about the walls like leaves fluttering in an autumn wind, like butterflies about a tree in blossom, and then they swooped back into the pillar of fire, moths seeking death.

“Take your earthly form!” Rezhyk said again. “I command you!” He held his left hand out toward the flames, showing the ring, and the firelight glanced off the stone, bursting into a thousand rainbows. A limb of fire reached out for the gem, stopped short, played above it, throwing coruscations across the walk and floor, looped, spun, then dived back into the main body.

“Three times I command you to take your earthly form!” said Rezhyk.

The blaze shrank and coalesced into a creature no larger than a cat. It settled among the glowing coals of the brazier, the loose folds of its belly skin completely engulfing the large ring that lay there. It was an ugly and ungainly chimera, part scaly, part hairy, with long snout, great ears, and too many legs. Its tail, which roved restlessly among the coals, was studded with winking eyes. Its mouth was a wide, drooling slash across the top of its head.