"Tamora Pierce - Circle Opens 4 - Shatterglass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pierce Tamora)

particularly strong.

Suddenly she felt a twist in the air. Most of her breezes, all of the ones she had acquired in recent months,
fled. Only those she had brought from Winding Circle stayed, though she felt them struggle against some
powerful call. The escaping breezes whipped around the corner of a nearby workshop: Touchstone
Glass, according to the sign.

The breezes weren’t the only things on the move. Power from every charm and spell within twenty metres
of the shop streamed past Tris to round the corner in silvery ribbons: protection magic, fire-damping
magic, health magic, wards for luck and prosperity, it didn’t seem to matter. Something flexed in the air a
second time. Without stopping to ask if she did the wisest thing, she pelted around the corner into the rear
yard of Touchstone Glass.

She plunged into a stream of magic. All of it poured through the open doors of a workshop set apart from
the main building. It swirled around a man who toiled in front of a furnace. He stood sidelong to the door,
a glassmaker’s blowpipe to his lips as he tried to give form to an orange blob of molten glass. Twirling
the pipe with one hand, he shaped the base of his creation with a mould clasped in the other.

For a moment Tris thought all was well. Then she realized that despite the glassblower’s twirling of the
pipe and the steady stream of air he forced into it, the orange blob wriggled, bulged, then sank like a
burlap sack with a cat inside. She had never seen glass do that before. Magic flooded into the man, sliding
under his leather apron, squirming into short blond hair cropped close to his blocky head, tugging at his

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sleeves, then merging where his lips met the pipe. Down its length the magic streamed, disappearing into
the molten glass.

The man thrust the glass back into the open furnace, waited a moment, then brought the pipe back to his
lips. He cupped the base of the glass with his mould and blew into the pipe. The material at its end
bulged, twisted, and thrust about even harder, plainly fighting him. It grew longer and snake-like, with big
lumps on top and underneath. Magic gleamed, as if the glass were shot through with silver threads as it
stretched away from the pipe. As it pulled free, its connection to the blowpipe stretched thinner and
thinner. Only a thread connected it to the pipe.

Tris shook her head. The man had obviously lost control of his magical working. “You’d better let it go,”
she informed him. “And what possessed you, that you didn’t draw a protective circle?”

The man jerked and yanked the pipe from his lips. The glass wriggled, spiralled, and broke free, tumbling
in the air as it flew madly around the room. Little Bear yelped and fled into the yard.

“Why didn’t you undo it?” Tris demanded. She ducked as writhing glass zoomed over her head.

“Didn’t they teach you, the more power you throw into magic gone awry, the more it will fight your
control? Forget reusing the glass. It’s so full of magic now you’ll have real trouble if you try to make it
into anything else.”

The glass thing – she couldn’t tell what it was – landed on the man’s skull. Smoke and the stench of