"Barbara Hambly - Sun-Cross 1 - The Rainbow Abyss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

breathe! Men could no more stop it from existing than they could keep the sun from
rising by shaking their fists at it.”
“To our knowledge,” the blind mage replied in his curiously sweet, toneless voice.
Huddled in his threadbare cloak at his master’s feet—the room only boasted two chairs—
Rhion could barely recall what Jaldis’ true voice had been like. He’d only heard it upon

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The Rainbow Abyss


one occasion, when he was sixteen, a few months before the old king’s troops had
arrested Lord Henak, Jaldis’ then-patron, and torn out Jaldis’ tongue and eyes to keep
him from witching them while they’d brought the traitor earl and his court mage to trial
in the High City of Nerriok. The only reason they hadn’t cut off the wizard’s hands as
well was because they’d feared he’d die of gangrene before judgment could be passed.
For the eleven years since his acquittal, Jaldis had spoken by means of a curved
rosewood box which hung strapped to his chest, a sounding-chamber filled with
intricate mechanisms of silver, reed, and gut, even as he saw—after a fashion and with
head-splitting concentration—by means of a pair of massive spectacles wrought of opal,
crystal, and gold. Charging the left lens with spells of seeing had been Rhion’s first
attempt at major magic, and he still remembered the shuddering surge of joy he’d felt
when he’d seen the lattices of the crystal’s inner structure shift and change, seen life stir
deep in the opals’ pale, fiery wells. The sense of release had been almost like the physical
breaking-open of some locked core of bone deep in his chest, the realization that all
those dreams, all those longings, all the strange madnesses which had whispered in his
mind since childhood had been real…
He remembered, too, the week of vomiting and delirium which had followed, for of
course he’d been far too young to attempt anything like the power needed for such
spells. He’d tried desperately to keep his illness hidden—it had been his parents’ first
clue to their only son’s abilities, and he’d come back to consciousness to the news that
they had published, in all the temples of the Forty Realms, the notices of his death.
Though he’d never told Jaldis, Rhion’s own extreme shortsightedness dated from the
casting of those spells.
“And yet you must admit, Shavus,” that thin, buzzing drone went on, “that there are
places in this world where there is no air—in the depths of oceans and rivers—and no
light, in caves and crevices… indeed, for half the turning of the day there is no light
anywhere. And there are places, as we all know, where magic does not exist.”
“Bah,” the Archmage grunted, and the back of his cracked and much-mended chair
creaked with the uneasy movement of his shoulders. The attic room above the Black Pig
Inn, which had served Jaldis and Rhion as lodgings for the last two and a half years, was


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The Rainbow Abyss


unheated, save for the warmth which radiated from the bricks of the kitchen chimney.
On snowy midwinter evenings like this one it saved them from freezing to death, but
when the turgid warmth of the low-plains summers held the city of Felsplex in its grip,
the room was unspeakable. There was no fireplace in the room itself, nor any kind of