"David Gerrold - The Flying Sorcerers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

cuffs on the pantaloons to allow for his calf-high boots, and over his heart
was a golden badge. Around his middle he wore a wide belt, to which were
attached three or four small spell devices.
He had also set up a number of larger devices. Most of them had the blue-white
glimmer of polished metal. (There is little metal in our village -- it rusts
quickly -- but I am a man of the world and have traveled much. I am familiar
with the sight of metal, having seen it in the highlands; but nothing so
finely worked as this.)
These devices stood each on three legs so that they were always level, even
where the ground was not. As we watched, the stranger peered into one of them,
peered across the canyon at the sacred cairn of Musk-Watz, the god of the
winds, and then into his device again. Muttering constantly to himself, he
moved across the clearing and adjusted something else. Evidently this was a
long and complicated spell, though just what its purpose was neither Shoogar
nor I could fathom.
Occasionally he would refer to a large egg-shaped nest, black and regular of
shape, sitting on its wide end off to one side of the pasture. As there were
no trees in the area large enough to hang it from, he had set it on the
ground. (An unwise course, to be sure, but the shell of that nest looked like
nothing I had ever seen -- perhaps it was able to resist marauding predators.)
I wondered how he had built it over-night. His power must be formidable.
The stranger did not notice us at all, and Shoogar was fidgeting with
impatience. Just as Shoogar was about to interrupt him, the stranger
straightened and touched his device. The device responded by hurling red fire
across the canyon -- directly at the cairn of Musk-Watz!
I thought Shoogar would suffer a death-rage right then and there. The Weather
gods are hard enough to control at best, and Shoogar had spent three long
lunar configurations trying to appease Musk-Watz in an effort to forestall
another season of hurricanes. Now, the stranger had disrupted one of his most
careful spells.
Redder than ruby, eye-searing, bright and narrow, straight as the horizon of
the ocean (which I have also seen), that crimson fire speared out across the
canyon, lashing Shoogar's carefully constructed outcrop. I feared it would
never end: the fire seemed to go on and on.
And the sound of it was dreadful. There was a painful high-pitched humming
which seemed to seize my very soul, a piercing unearthly whine. Under this we
could hear the steady crackling and spattering of the cairn.
Acrid smoke billowed upward from it, and I shuddered, thinking how the
dissipating dust would affect the atmosphere. Who knew what effects it would
have on Shoogar's weather-making spells? I made a mental note to have the
wives reinforce the flooring of our nest.
Suddenly, just as abruptly as it had begun, the red fire went out. Once more
the silence and the calm descended over the mesa. Once more the blue twilight
colored the land. But across my eyes was a brilliant blue-white afterimage.
And the cairn of the wind-god still crackled angrily.
Amazingly enough, the cairn still stood. It smouldered and sputtered, and
there was an ugly scar where the red fire had touched it, but it was intact.
When Shoogar builds, he builds well.
The stranger was already readjusting his devices, muttering continuously to
himself. (I wondered if that were part of the spell.) Like a mother vole