"Zelazny, Roger - Amber 10 - Prince Of Chaos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

it was as if we sped down a gun barrel, aimed at the blue-white star.
"Anything else you're supposed to tell me?"
"Not so far as I know."
I rubbed my left wrist, feeling as if something should have been pulsing
there. Oh, yes. Frakir. Where was Frakir, anyway? Then I recalled leaving her
behind in Brand's apartment. Why had I done that? I--my mind felt cloudy, the
memory dreamlike.
This was the first time since the event that I had examined that memory.
Had I looked earlier I would have known sooner what it meant. It was the
clouding effect of glamor. I had walked into a spell back in Brand's apartment.
I'd no way of knowing whether it had been specific to me or merely something I'd
activated in poking about. It could, I supposed, even have been something more
general, enlivened by the disaster--possibly even an unintentional side effect
of something that had been disturbed. Somehow I doubted the latter, however.
For that matter, I doubted any generality about the business. It was just
too right to have been a booby-trap Brand had left lying about. It had
confounded a trained sorcerer, me. Perhaps it was only my present distancing
from the vicinity of its occurrence that had helped to clear my mind. As I
reviewed my actions from the time of exposure I could see that I had been moving
in something of a haze since then. And the more I reviewed the more I felt the
spell to have been specifically tailored to enfold me. Not understanding it, I
could not consider myself free of it with this knowledge either.
Whatever it was, it had caused me to abandon Frakir without thinking twice
about it, and it had caused me to feel--well--strange. I could not tell exactly
how it might have influenced, might still be influencing, my thoughts and my
feelings, the usual problem when one is caught up inside a spell. But I didn't
see how it could possibly have been the late Brand himself who had set the thing
up against such an unpredictable occurrence as my having rooms next to his old
ones years after his death, from which I would be prompted to enter his quarters
in the disastrous aftermath of an improbable confrontation between the Logrus
and the Pattern in an upper hall of Amber Castle. No, it seemed that someone
else had to be behind it. Jurt? Julia? It didn't seem too likely that they'd be
able to operate undetected
in the heart of Amber Castle. Who then? And could it have had anything to
do with that episode in the Hall of Mirrors? I drew blanks. Were I back there
now I might be able to come up with a spell of my own to ferret out the one
responsible. But I wasn't, and any investigation at that end of things would
have to wait.
The light ahead flashed more brightly now, winking from heavenly blue to
baleful red.
"Gryll," I said. "Do you detect a spell upon me?"
"Aye, m'Iord," he replied.
"Why didn't you mention it?"
"I thought it one of your own--for defense, perhaps."
"Can you lift it? I'm at a disadvantage, here on the inside."
"'Tis too tangled in your person. I wouldn't know where to begin."
"Can you tell me anything about it?"
"Only that it's there, m'lord. Does seem rather heavy about the head,
though."
"Could be coloring my thoughts a certain way, then?"