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

candle or brazier—the landlord having an almost hysterical fear of fire—but, despite the
fact that the windows were closed against the bitter cold by heavy wooden shutters, the
lack of light posed little problem for wizards. Though the three men—young, middle-
aged, and old—sat in complete darkness, Rhion could see the Archmage’s square, ugly
face and coarse shock of iron-gray hair as easily as if the room were flooded with
daylight. And he saw how the pale eyes shifted at the mention of such things. “Any fool
knows about those.”
“But this is more than the Chambers of Silence,” Jaldis went on, “that lords build into
the dungeons of their palaces to hold a wizard’s power in check—more than the pheelas
root that numbs our skills, more than the spells of silence, the fields of silence, that a
powerful mage can weave to cripple his mageborn foes.” Behind sunken and shriveled
eyelids ruined muscles moved, as if his destroyed gaze could still encompass the gray-
haired old ex-soldier opposite him and the short, sturdy young man at his feet. From the
top of a stack of books beside his chair, Jaldis’ opal spectacles seemed to review the
room with a bulging, asymmetrical gaze, and the old man’s hand, deft and shapely
before arthritis had deformed it, stroked subconsciously at the talismans of power
which festooned the rosewood soundbox like queer and glittering seaweed upon a rock.
“I am speaking of a world, a universe, where magic does not exist at all, and has not
existed for many years.”
“And I’m saying such a thing’s preposterous,” Shavus retorted. “What you think you
heard… what you might have seen…” He shook his head again, angry and dismissive,
but Rhion saw the heavy, corded hand fidget uncomfortably with the snagged brown
wool of his robe.
“I know what it is that I felt.” Jaldis’ thin face hardened with a flash of angry pride,
though the monotonous voice of the soundbox did not alter. “I have opened a Dark Well
and through it have seen into the Void which lies between all the infinite number of
universes of which the Cosmos is made! And in that Void…” The sweet, shrill tones

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The Rainbow Abyss


sank. “In that Void I heard a voice crying out of a world where magic had once existed,
but now exists no more.”
“Jaldis, old friend…” Shavus leaned forward placatingly, causing the ruinous chair to
emit an alarming creak. “I’m not saying you didn’t see it, didn’t hear it. But I am asking
how, if magic has ceased to exist in some other universe, someone there could make his
voice heard in the Void? I’ve studied the Void as well, you know. I’ve opened Dark Wells
into it, to try to glimpse something of how the Cosmos is formed…”
“I’m glad someone has,” Rhion remarked, folding his arms around his knees and
huddling a little more deeply into his faded black cloak. “The other night when Jaldis
asked me to get a message to you about this was the first I’d even heard of the things.”
“Which is as it should be,” the Archmage snapped irritably. “It is not a branch of
knowledge for the young—or the light-minded.”
He turned back to face the blind man, bundled like a drying skeleton in cloak and quilts
which all but hid the tattered brown robes of the foremost Order of Wizards in the
world. His tough, seamed face softened. “Old friend, in all my studies of the Void, in all
my communications across it and through it, I’ve never encountered a world where
magic in some form didn’t exist. I’m not denying that you heard something. But one
piece of hearsay is damn little grounds to risk the hideous danger of crossing the Void