"Barbara Hambly - Windrose 1 - The Silent Tower" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

prisoner, he can't work magic against you, surely?"
Salteris smiled. "Antryg is the least of my worries at the moment. No, he cannot
work magic in the Silent Tower—but then, neither can I. Once within its walls, I will
be only an old man, alone among people whose relations with the mageborn have
always been at best a guarded truce. There has been no trouble between the Church
and the Council of Wizards since Isar Challadin's time—but the Church is old. They
watch and they wait." His dark eyes warmed with wry amusement. "I should not like
to be the first one to hear of a surprise attack."
Caris looked back along the deserted, perfectly straight road and felt again how
isolated the Silent Tower was in these empty hills. Le's words of last night returned to
him—how the Church Witchfinders had wanted to burn the Dark Mage alive, and
how Salteris had refused to give them the power of life and death over any mage,
even the most evil. The Church might say that it forgave, but he knew that it never
forgot.
He tucked the lipa into the purse at his belt, and they resumed their walk up the
narrow track to the Tower compound. As they approached the gatehouse with its shut
portcullis, Caris mentally reviewed the location of every weapon from his sword and
the garrote in his sleeve to the hideout dagger in his boot. Glancing back, he saw that,
beyond the turning where that track left the straight, ancient path, the old road was
almost completely eradicated by grass. Where it passed over the crest of the next hill,
he could see that the stones along its verges still stood.
His eyes went to the old man who walked at his side, trying to picture him as he
had been twenty-five years ago, when he had led the Council against the Dark Mage.
He had been Archmage even then, for he had come young to his power and to the
leadership of the Council. His hair would have been black, Caris thought, and the
silence that coiled like a serpent within him not so deep. The lightness in him that
Caris remembered from before his grandmother's death five years ago would still
have been there; the capacity for teasing and jokes that he had loved so well had not
yet been replaced by that glint of irony in his eye.
The Bishop of Kymil met them at the gate. She was a tall woman in her fifties
who had never been pretty. Her head was shaved, after the fashion of the Church.
Heavier than she appeared at first glance, she was robed in velvet of ecclesiastical
gray with the many—handed Sun of the Sole God like a splash of blood on her
shoulder. As she held out a hand in greeting to the Archmage, she looked him over
with a fishy, blue-gray eye. "My lord Archmage."
Looking past her into the court as the gates were opened, Caris wondered how
many of the Church's sworn sasenna were stationed there. Le had said that five of the
sasenna from the House of Mages were on Tower duty at a time—Caris guessed there
were at least twenty sasenna in and around the small, dreary yard now. The two Red
Dogs he had glimpsed stood quietly behind their ecclesiastical mistress, observing
him and Salteris with cool, fanatic eyes. The Church called them hasu, the Bought
Ones—bought from Hell by the blood of the saints and the Sole God. The less refined
among the mages used the feminine form of the word hasur—which had its own
connotations.
"My lady Bishop." Salteris bowed. They touched hands, a formal contact of two
fingers quickly withdrawn.
"You wrote that you wished to see the man Antryg Windrose?"
The warriors fell in around them as they crossed toward the tower itself. The
place stank of a trap, of the crosscurrents of formality covering the resentments and
envy the Church held against the only group ever successfully to defy their law; Caris