"Janet Morris - Thieves World - Beyond Sanctuary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morris Janet E)

Book One :
WIZARD WEATHER




In the archmage's sumptuous purple bedroom, the woman astride him took two pins from her
silver-shot hair. It was dark—his choice; and damp with cloying shadows—his romanticism. A
conjured moon in a spellbound sky was being swallowed by effigy-clouds where the vaulted roof
indubitably yet arced, even as he shuddered under the tutored and inexorable attentions of the girl
Lastel had brought to his party. She had refused to tell him her name because he would not give his,
but had told him what she would do for him so eloquently with her eyes and her body that he'd
spent the entire evening figuring out a way the two of them might slip up here unnoticed. Not that he
feared her escort's jealousy—though the drug dealer might conceivably entertain such a
sentiment—Lastel no longer had the courage (or the contractual protective wordings) to dare a
reprisal against a Hazard-class mage.
Of all the enchanters in wizard-ridden Sanctuary, only three were archmages, nameless adepts
beyond summoning or responsibility, and this Hazard was one. In fact, he was the very strongest of
those three. When he had been young, he had had a name, but he will forget it, and everything else,
quite promptly.
The domed and spired estuary of venality which is Sanctuary, nadir of the empire called Ranke;
the unmitigated evil he had fielded for decades from his swamp-encircled mageguild fortress; the
compromises he had made to hold sway over curmudgeon, courtesan and criminal (so audacious
that even the bounds of magics and planeworlds had been eroded by his efforts, and his fellow
adepts felled on occasion by demons roused from forbidden defiles to do his bidding here at the
end of creation where no balance remains between logic and faith, law and nature, or heaven and
hell); the disingenuous methods through which his will was worked, plan by tortuous plan, upon a
town so hateful and immoral that both the flaunted gods and magicians' devils agreed that its
inhabitants deserved no less dastardly a fate—all of this, and more, will fade from him in the time it
takes a star to burn out, falling from the sky.
Now, the First Hazard glimpses her movement, though he is close to ejaculation, sputtering with
sensations that for years he has assumed he had outgrown, or forgotten how to feel. Senility creeps
upon the finest flesh when a body is maintained for millennia, and into the deepest mind, through
thousands of years. He doesn't look his age, or tend to think of it. The years are his, mandated.
Only a very special kind of enemy could defeat him, and those were few and far between. Simple
death, morbidity or the spells of his brothers were like gnats he kept away by the perfume of his
sweat: merely the proper diet, herbs and spells and consummated will, had long ago vanquished
them as far as he was concerned.
So strange to lust, to desire a particular woman; he was amused, joyous; he had not felt so good
in years. A tiny thrill of caution had horripilated his nape early on, when he noticed the silvering of
her nightblack hair, but this girl was not old enough to be—"Ahhh!" Her premeditated rippling takes
him over passion's edge, and he is falling, place and provenance forgotten, not a terrible adept
wrenching the world about to suit his whim and comfort, but just a man.
In that instant, eyes defocused, he sees but does not note the diamond sparkle of the rods
poised above him; his ears are filled with his own breathing; the song of entrapment she sings softly
has him before he thinks to think, or thinks to fear, or thinks to move.
By then, the rods, their sharp fine points touching his arched throat, owned him. He could not
move; not his body nor his soul responded; his mind could not control his tongue. Thinking bitterly
of the indignity of being frozen like a rearing stallion, he hoped his flesh would slump once life had