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

itself, as you’re asking me to do…”
“Not asking, Shavus,” the old man said softly. “Begging. Someone must go there.
Someone must help them. Don’t you see that…”
Heavy footsteps on the narrow wooden spiral of the stairs made the whole building
shudder. The Black Pig rose four floors above the common rooms and kitchens, a
rickety inverted ziggurat of ever-protruding balconies and upper floors seemingly
supported by a mystifying web of clotheslines and makeshift bridges over the streets
and by the surrounding buildings against which it leaned. Rhion frequently wondered
what would happen if any of the overcrowded tenements, taverns, countinghouses or
gimcrack temples of unpronounceable foreign gods that made up the river quays
quarter of Felsplex were to disappear. Beyond a doubt the entire district would come
crashing down like a house of cards.


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Hambly,%20Barbara%20-%2...Book%201]%20-%20The%20Rainbow%20Abyss%20v2.0.html (10 of 255)22-12-2006 20:43:55
The Rainbow Abyss


It was the landlord. Rhion recognized the tread. Pulling his cloak tighter about him, he
got to his feet and navigated delicately among the few pieces of furniture which
cluttered even that tiny chamber, summoning a blue-burning shred of magelight to
flicker like will-o‘-the-wisp above his head. The wavery gleam only served to make the
room appear dingier, its moving, shadows outlining with pitiless emphasis the cracks in
the plaster of the walls, the stained beams from which bunches of winter mallow and
stork grass hung drying, the chipped cups and water-vessels, and the precious books
and scrolls arranged neatly along the table’s rear edge. Darkness would have been less
depressing, but Rhion had long ago learned that those who were not mageborn found
wizards’ ability to see without light disproportionately unnerving.
“Lady to see you,” the landlord grunted, scratching his crotch.


“Are you—er—a wizard?”
Rhion was awfully tired of the question and of the dubious look that invariably
accompanied it. He’d grown his beard as soon as he was old enough to do so, but the
short-clipped, scruffy brown tangle evidently did nothing to dispel the boyishness of his
face nor the way his wide-set blue eyes were magnified by the lenses of his spectacles.
Short, unobtrusive, and of the compact, sturdy build which slips so easily into
chubbiness, even without a wizard’s ability to move unobserved he would have been the
last person anyone noticed in a crowd.
The lady who was waiting for him in the smallest of the inn’s private parlors had
obviously been expecting someone a little more impressive.
He considered responding with Are you—er—a lady? but suppressed the impulse. He
and Jaldis needed the rent. Instead he smiled genially and said, “We come in all shapes
and sizes, mistress. Would you trust me more if I had horns and a tail?”
She let out an unsteady titter and her eyes, above a concealing veil of purple-
embroidered silk, strayed to the hem of his robe as if she really expected to see the
jointed tail of a scorpion-grim peeking out.
Inwardly, Rhion sighed. Gold pieces to barleycorns she wants a love-potion…
“And how may I serve you?” he asked, still with a smile and the reflection that asking