"John Morressy - Voice For Princess" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morressy John)

One
a matter of principle

the meeting went on and on and on. And on. Everyone, it seemed, had a report to deliver, and was determined to deliver it in the
lengthiest and most tedious manner possible.
Kedrigern heaved a desolate sigh, unfolded his arms, folded them again, shifted his weary bottom, and gazed
for-lornly out the small window at the glorious midsummer scene. Out there was where a man belonged on a morning
like this. He should be smelling the flowers, counting the clouds, work-ing small, helpful spells for jolly peasants—not
sitting through a dismal business meeting. But here he sat, feeling as if he had been imprisoned in this room since the
dawn of time, like a bubble in a stone.
Hithernils, treasurer of the guild, paused and put down the ledger from which he had been reciting dreary strings of
fig-ures. Kedrigern leaned forward. Deliverance at last, he thought. But his hopes were dashed when Hithernils took
up another ledger, cleared his throat, and began a new litany of expenditures, or collections, or projections, or some
such foolery.
Kedrigern made a soft throaty noise somewhere between a groan and a growl and abandoned his efforts at
attention. This was all nonsense, he told himself, and he was foolish to go
1


along with it. The very idea of a wizard's guild was prepos-terous. Wizards were solitary workers, like spiders. An
occa-sional get-together for purely social purposes was very nice, but formal organization, and such things as officers,
and meet-ings, and by-laws, and dues, and passwords, and secret hand-shakes, and lofty titles, were simply ridiculous.
One would think that the disastrous example of the Brotherhood of Her-mits would have taught people a lesson.
He blamed the alchemists for this notion of organizing. It was automatic with Kedrigern to blame the alchemists for any-thing
that went wrong, even the weather, but in this case he had good cause.
Alchemy was fairly new to Kedrigern's part of the world, and it had caught on quickly. It was especially popular
with the young, for reasons Kedrigern could only brood about with increasing disgust. Perhaps the attraction lay in
the pompous titles, and the jargon, and the gaudy regalia, and the endless round of windy self-celebrating meetings,
conferences, and workshops that filled the alchemical calendar; they were the sort of thing to appeal to infantile minds
of all ages. And, too, alchemists were quick to speak of the immediate and lucrative employment opportunities in their
field. No long, slow, re-warding struggle for them; they promised an immediate payoff, something attractive to far too
many people. It took time, a lot of hard work, and a considerable risk to become a really first-class wizard. One could
pick up a degree in al-chemy in a few years, with no great effort, and at once haul in whopping great fees for the most
egregious flimflammery.
No wonder the field attracted the worst and the dimmest, Kedrigern thought sourly. And they're welcome to them,
to all the castoffs, washouts, and wimps who lack the stuff of a real wizard. He recalled Jaderal, a onetime apprentice of
his, a weasely little scut who had spent his unobserved moments rooting about Kedrigern's workshop for professional
secrets and whom Kedrigern had at last ejected bodily, with great pleasure, from his service. Now, there was a man
born to alchemy: he was rotten to the core.
And yet the wretches were successful. Alchemists had quickly become serious competition for established
practi-tioners of the subtle arts. Witches and wizards, warlocks and sorcerers, found old clients deserting them, fleeing
to the fad-dish new alchemists, with their spacious laboratories and


shiny equipment. It was all flash and glitter, of course. The alchemists never accomplished anything beyond a quick
profit, and yet they somehow got away with it. And instead of taking direct and forceful action against the upstarts, his fel-low wizards had
reacted by forming a professional organiza-tion scarcely distinguishable from a typical alchemists' chapter. A craven and ultimately
self-destructive reaction, he thought. Things were falling apart. It was all downhill from here.
While Kedrigern pondered the follies of his colleagues, Hithernils brought his report to an end. Amid restrained
ap-plause, Tristaver rose, smiling his bland habitual smile at everyone. Tristaver fancied himself a diplomat, an oiler of