"Christopher Stasheff - Rogue Wizard 01 - Wizard in Absentia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stasheff Christopher)

the meadow. The Stone Egg!

lan turned to run back, but heard the keeper crash-
ing through the underbrush behind him. He whirled
again and ran towards the great stone egg, swerved
around to its far side and crouched down, heart ham-
mering, drawing in quick, deep breaths through his
open mouth. Perhaps the keeper wouldn't see him,
would think he had run back into the forest, or had
run across the clearing and into the trees on the

A WIZARD IN ABSENTIA

other side. Perhaps the keeper himself would plunge


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on across the grass, and not look back....

But the keeper called out, and was answered by an-
other shout from the far side of the clearing behind
lan. Another keeper!

lan shrank back, gathering himself into a ball,
pressing against the lower curve of the boulder, try-
ing to press himself into the stone. . . .

Something clicked.

The surface behind him gave way, and lan felt
himself tumbling, saw a flash of light, then sudden
darkness.

Two months earlier in time, and twenty light-
years away in apace, a very unusual asteroid drifted
through the asteroid belt around Sol. It didn't look
unusual—it seemed to be just an ordinary, everyday
piece of space junk: lumpy, irregular, a few craters, a
lot of raw rock, a lot bigger than most, a lot smaller
than some—but all in all, nothing special, compara-
tively speaking. And comparisons were very easy to
make at the moment, because it was in with a lot of
others of its kind. In fact, you wouldn't have noticed
it at all, if its trajectory hadn't been so different from
those around it. They were moving placidly in orbit,
just drifting along in their timeless round; but it was
barreling straight toward one of the larger asteroids
in the Belt—dodging and weaving around all the