"Jude Fisher - Fool's Gold 01 - Sorcery Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fisher Jude)

The terrible suspicion hardened into certainty.
Virelai abandoned the tower room and, taking the stairs three at a time, hurled himself
down into the familiar corridors of the stronghold. Such a waste, such a stupid, senseless
waste! Anger surged and flowed inside him. The old fool! The old monster! A fount of
lava bubbled under his pale skin, yet over the years he had learned to control his temper.
No trace of his fury showed in eyes as cold and pale as a squid's. Twenty-nine years:
twenty-nine years of unreasonable demands, of useless tutoring, fetching and carrying
and general humiliation; twenty-nine years of being beaten on a whim and called "boy."
And now Rahe was eradicating all those paths to magic that Virelai had been so patiently
following, eradicating them and storing them out of his reach in the blasted cat, just as he
was beginning to gain some understanding of the processes, some mastery of magic's
complex structures. It was too much to bear.
By the time he reached the chamber, both the Master and his familiar were gone.
Virelai crossed to the long table and stared down into the crucible. It did indeed appear to
contain the last remnants of the Book of Making and Unmaking. He fished out the two
hinges and weighed them in his hands. They felt lumpen, bereft of magic, useless without
the great tome it had been their purpose to enclose. He put them down again, his heart as
heavy as the cold metal.
On the floor beneath the table a couple of torn and crumpled pieces of parchment lay
abandoned. He picked them up. The first had lost its top third and started midway
through a sentence. He scanned it rapidly, recognized it as the charm for making a
charging horse dwindle to stallion's seed, and cast it down again. The second piece was
almost entire and he could remember the missing words. While he could think of no
immediate use for a spell to remove rockfalls from choked caverns, he pocketed it
anyway. The third scrap of the Book contained a rather fiendish recipe of the Master's
own devising, that and a grim description of its effects. "Most efficacious in transporting a
person into a state of deepest slumber, the death-that-is-not-death." Virelai read it
through once without much interest, then stopped.
His head came up. His eyes narrowed. He read it again. The death-that-is-not-death.
His geas forbade him from killing the Master; but a state of deepest slumber? A sweat
broke out on his brow and his heart began to thud. Clutching the parchment in his hand as
if it were his passkey from hell, he scurried to the kitchens.
***
SANCTUARY had been carved so deeply out of the ice and into the rocky bones
beneath that its walls were like the stone of unvisited caverns: dark and ungiving, ready
to chill you to the marrow. Even the torches burning in the sconces lining the dim
passageways in the heart of the stronghold seemed to make little impression on their
surfaces. They barely flickered as Virelai passed them at speed later that evening,
carrying the Master's meal on a tray. It would be the last time he did so. The chill he felt
as he walked the corridors that encircled the mage's chambers was not just a physical
temperature, for the Master's magic bore its own cold with it.
Where the ice gave way to rock strata, minerals glittered in the flickering candlelight:
feldspar and pyrites; cristobalite and tourmaline; graywacke and hornblende and
pegmatite. To Virelai, taught to respond to natural harmonics, each one bore a different
resonance to its fellows, each a different voice. He liked to think of the voices as the souls
of the earth: bound in its crystals, trapped there for millennia: and perhaps they were.
Virelai had seen the Master speak to the walls even before he had thought him mad.
Toward the heart of the labyrinth, the walls gleamed gold and silver. Virelai had
learned from his reading that although many of the minerals had little worth in the lands
beyond—the world he now knew as Elda—others were considered as "treasure"; though it