"Christopher Stasheff - Warlock 13 - Warlock's Last Ride" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stasheff Christopher)

"Oh, yes." Evanescent smiled, then remembered just in time to keep her lips closed. "Necessary on
that world, and on several others. I hid aboard their star-boat, you see, and went with them."

The little man frowned. "If you care so much for them, why did you not come down the ramp with
them, rather than sneaking off like a thief in the night?"

Evanescent caught from his mind the image of a thief and had to throttle her own anger,
remembering that to these little creatures, she was an unknown and threatening presence. "They do not
know of me," she explained. "I have kept myself hidden from them, to keep them from relying upon my
magic instead of their own cleverness."

"There is sense to that," a foot-tall woman said to Puck, and images escaped from her mind-shield,
enough to show Evanescent that these little folk hid themselves from the humans, too, though as much
from wariness as from refusal to be used.

But Puck was not so easily convinced. "You forsook your home and surely can have little hope of
returning there. What kindled within you so great a liking for my ward and his leman that you were
willing to leave all for their sake?"

"Fascination at their … efforts." Evanescent almost said "antics," but remembered in time that these
small ones were prickly and that it behooved her to choose her words carefully. "It is quite unknown
among my kind for a person to risk her welfare, to risk pain and even life for others— well, once they
are no longer kittens—and is absolutely unthinkable to care in any way for people one knows not at all,
to be concerned for them simply because they are people!"

"And thus did our Magnus?" Puck asked, frowning.

"Not simply that," Evanescent said. "He has gone from world to world, seeking out people who are
miserable, almost as though he needs to have someone to care about!"

"So he does," Puck said slowly. "So do most of his kind. Still, even if such caring was a novelty to
you, why would its attractions be so great as to make you leave your home?"


"But that is why," Evanescent explained. "Our home means little to my kind. In fact, nothing means
much to us, save food when we are hungry and mating in season and kittens when they are born."

An elf-woman shuddered. "What a dreary life!"

"So it is!" Evanescent turned to her, delighted that someone had seen the point; it would be far
easier to explain. "When you've reared a litter or two, mated a few dozen times, tasted all the different
meats our planet offers—why, you begin to grow bored and restless. We seek out more experiences,
more sensations, even growing cruel in the pursuit—but after thirty or forty years, there seems little

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point even in cruelty or power. I wished to learn your ward's secret that keeps him so interested in life,
so immune from my kind's ennui."