"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Ethshar 2 - With a Single Spell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

 Still, shipboard life, with its crowding, hard work, and poor food, was
far from his idea of the ideal life, and Golden Gull would never be home.
On the last night of the voyage, after the ship had rounded the great
peninsula and begun beating its way northwestward up the Gulf of the East, the
entire crew was awakened by the warlock screaming as if he were being
gruesomely murdered, perhaps skinned alive, or, one imaginative crewman
suggested, eaten by rats. Tobas, as the one who had the most contact with him
and the purported magician in their midst, was selected by acclamation to go
and investigate.
The screams had stopped by the time he made his way down into the hold.
He stood at the foot of the ladder for a moment, his lantern flickering,
before he found the nerve to go on.
The candle in the lantern had not been very well lit or was perhaps
clogged with wax; he considered using Thrindle's Combustion to brighten it,
but, upon remembering the explosion in Roggit's cottage, decided against it.
Using the spell on something already burning was dangerous, and he had no
intention of blowing even this feeble flame out while he stood surrounded by
unknown horrors.
When he finally gathered his courage and made his way back to the meat
storage area, he found the warlock sitting up in his hammock, leaning back
against the bulkhead with his head in his hands. His long, thin legs thrust up
pale bare knees that gleamed white as bone in the lantern light; his elbows
rested upon his knees, and his face upon trembling fingers.
"Sir?" Tobas ventured, trying to keep his voice and hands steady despite
his terror and the unnatural chill in the air.
The warlock looked up. "My apologies if I disturbed you, child. I had an
unpleasant dream." His voice was deep and mellow, and he spoke with an accent
very slightly different from the Ethsharitic of the crew.
Tobas could not believe he had heard the warlock's words correctly. "A
dream? Just a dream?"
The warlock smiled bitterly. "Yes, just a dream. A drawback of my craft,
child, warlocks are prone to nightmares of a very special variety. They arrive
when we attempt to overextend our abilities, as I have on this journey, and
they can lead to... well, we do not know what they lead to, but warlocks for
whom the nightmares have become a regular occurrence tend to disappear. I may
well have doomed myself for the sake of fresh meat for the aristocrats of
Ethshar of the Spices. Don't let it concern you, it's not your problem. Go
back to sleep. I promise that I will not sleep, and that you need fear no
further disturbance."
This was by far the longest speech anyone on board had ever heard the
warlock make, and Tobas was almost overwhelmed by it, but curiosity stirred;
after a few seconds' hesitation he asked, "Do they always come again, these
nightmares, if you've had them once?"
"I wish I knew," the warlock replied. "This is the first time I have had
them in any strength since the Night of Madness, in 5202, when warlockry first
came to the World, before you were born, I'm sure." His smile twisted. "I
never needed an apprenticeship, child; the gods, or demons, or whatever power
it was that brought us our craft gave it to me whole, when I was a boy. Had
you been born, you might have received it yourself, even in the cradle, you
might well have been carried away by the dreams yourself by now. You were born