"Sharon Green - The Hidden Realms" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Sharon)

CHAPTGR OMG

t wasn't my fault. I'll be the first to admit it usually is my fault, but not
that time. It was a simple accident, and Master Haddil shouldn't have—But
maybe I ought to start from the beginning.

At first it was a perfectly ordinary day. I'd dressed to go riding right after
breakfast, but the heavy gray clouds that had been threatening since the day
before finally let loose. It wasn't exactly rain that came down, not with the
air as cold as it was. Half sleet and half snow, likely to become all one or
the other before very long, and nothing any sane person would deliberately go
out in. I'd stared at it through the diamond-paned window of my kitchen, not
very pleased.

And then I'd gotten curious. Water fell from the skies in different forms, but
it was still water. We drank it, bathed in it, washed things with it, cooked
with it—but how much experimentation had been done? If memory served there
wasn't very much, and what better day to correct that? There were ail sorts of
things to try with water, so I headed for my workshop to get started.

All right, so I didn't change out of the heavy riding clothes and boots. I
tend to keep my house on that world on the cool side; when I'm in the mood for
cold weather, I want to know it's there. Staying in those clothes shouldn't
have made any difference ...

Well, I gestured a bucket of water into being, then thought about what I
wanted to try first. A sorceress at my level is

1

SHARON

capable of quite a lot, but I didn't want to use magic to make water do
things. I wanted to investigate water, with magic just another tool. But what
was there to try . . . ?

And then I saw the single drop, shimmering at the rim of the bucket. What was
a single drop, and how much water had to be present before it became two
drops, or three, or a dozen? Some drops were smaller or bigger than others, so
where did the cutoff point come? Was it possible to extend the cutoff point,
using magic only lightly? How far beyond was it practical to go?

The questions increased to a dozen, then began multiplying. On top of that I'd
gotten an idea, which in turn suggested a test to answer the questions.
Wording my spell carefully, I used the water in the bucket to make a sphere a
foot and a half in diameter. I was able to hold the sphere in my hands without
bursting it like the soap bubble it resembled, which was one of the things the
spell had specified. I had to be careful, but 1 could hold it.

Once that was done, I brought into being nine more gallon buckets of water.