Benedict Jacka - Taken
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- Название:Taken
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Taken: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация
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“They could have started late, right?” Luna said. “Like me.”
“From what I saw of Variam he’s pretty damn good for a late starter.”
Luna walked on, brow furrowed. “Does it matter?” she said. “If they were Dark apprentices before?”
“There are Dark mages and Dark mages,” I said. “From what I hear some of them treat their apprentices okay. The others. .” I shrugged. “One thing’s for sure-it’d matter to the Council. It would explain why they’re still apprentices. They’d have trouble finding anyone to sponsor them with a background like that.”
“That was what happened to you, wasn’t it?” Luna said. “You used to be a Dark apprentice, then got out.”
I didn’t answer. “Alex?” Luna said. “Could I ask you something?”
“I don’t really want to-”
“What’s the Council?”
I turned in surprise to see that Luna was looking straight at me, her blue eyes serious. The winter sun was shining down over the rooftops, picking out the waves in her light brown hair. “What do you mean?”
“I know there are people in charge and everything-” Luna stopped. “I mean, what are they-” She trailed off again and looked down at the pavement, frowning. “It’s-Okay. When you first told me about the Light Council and the Dark mages I thought the Light mages were the good guys and the Dark mages were the bad guys. Then there was what happened with Griff.” Luna’s hand crept unconsciously to her right arm. “And Levistus and Belthas. But now I’m training with them. And we keep working for Talisid.” Luna looked up at me. “Should I trust them or not?”
We walked in silence while I tried to figure out how to answer. “It’s easier to understand Dark mages than Light mages,” I said at last. “Dark mages are. . honest, I guess. Bastards, but honest bastards. They say what they believe and they live it. Light mages are more complicated.” I glanced at Luna. “You know how things were in the old times? Before the Light Council got formed?”
Luna shook her head.
“Okay. First thing to understand is that there were a lot more magical creatures back then. And I mean a lot . Think monster-of-the-week TV show. Except the heroes didn’t win as much as they do on the TV shows, and when the monsters won a lot of people died. And sometimes the mages were the monsters. There were Dark mages around back then as well, and if half the stories are true they made modern Dark mages look nice .
“Well, the Light mages grew up in opposition to that. They believed they should use their powers to protect others. Not just mages, but normal people too. They wanted a world where human beings wouldn’t have to live in fear of monsters. And that was what they worked for. Identifying the most dangerous magical creatures and learning their weaknesses. Tracking down the ones that fed off humans and destroying them. Guarding towns and cities. Stopping Dark mages from setting themselves up as tyrants. They kept doing it for hundreds of years.”
“What happened?” Luna said.
“They won,” I said simply.
Luna looked at me curiously. “I’ll give you an example,” I said. “Vampires.”
“They’re real?”
I nodded. “Not all the stories are true, but they get the basics right. Vampires were supernatural predators who fed off human life force by drinking their blood. They lived forever or until something killed them, and the older they got the stronger they got. They had powers related to mind magic-they could dominate their prey, make them willingly come back to be fed upon. And they could make more of themselves. One vampire could control a whole city, and they did. For a while they ruled most of the world.
“But then the mages got organised. It was one of only three times in history where the Light and Dark factions united. Even if they couldn’t agree on anything else, they knew they didn’t want to be vampire food. They smashed the vampire-controlled armies, and then they hunted the vampires down one by one and exterminated them. Not just some of them, all of them. They spent about a hundred years searching with a fine-tooth comb to make sure they got every last one.” I shrugged. “There aren’t any more vampires.”
Luna was silent.
“The same thing happened to most of the really nasty monsters,” I said. “Manticores, ogres, nightmares. The smart ones fled into other worlds or hid themselves away. The ones who didn’t got hunted down. Mages had seen what it was like being prey and they didn’t like it. They wanted to make sure humanity was at the top of the food chain. And that was what they did. And they did it so well that most people nowadays don’t believe those creatures ever existed.”
I fell silent and we walked to the sound of our footsteps on the pavement and the click-click-click of Luna’s bike. “This is one of those stories that doesn’t have a happy ending, isn’t it?” Luna said at last.
“Well, there aren’t monsters stalking the city every night,” I said. “But the Council-well, it sounds weird, but their problem was they succeeded. They wanted mages to protect normal humans from the magical world. But with the monsters gone, the biggest threat from the magical world was. . mages.
“The Council’s old purpose is pretty much gone these days. It’s still the biggest power in magical society but nowadays people join it because they want to be in power, not because they believe in what it does. Every now and then a monster shows up and they get rid of it, but mostly they spend their time jockeying for position.” I sighed. “I don’t think they’re actively evil. Not most of them, anyway. But they’ve made so many compromises you can’t really count on them for anything. I don’t know if there’s anything they do believe in anymore. Stability, maybe. Keeping things the same.”
Luna thought about it. “So does Talisid believe in the Council’s old mission?”
“We’ll see.”
* * *
My shop is in Camden, down a little side street and in the middle of a tangle of bridges and railway lines. It makes a small profit, though it’d make a lot more if I actually kept regular hours instead of hanging up the CLOSED sign every time I’ve got something else to do.
Inside the shop is quiet and cool, wide windows letting in lots of light from the street outside and a faint herbal smell in the air. Standing shelves hold just about every faux-magic item you can think of, from crystal balls to exotic powders, while a small unlabelled roped-off area to one side holds the stuff that really is magical. It’s not designed for high turnover, but all in all I prefer it that way.
I ate lunch with Luna and then she had to leave; she had another class with a different set of apprentices in Kilburn. I waved as she cycled off, then headed up to my flat to get started on the report Talisid had given me. My flat is just above my shop, with a nice view out over the Camden rooftops. I settled into my chair and started reading.
I’ve never had any formal training as an investigator but I’ve had a fair bit of practice, enough to figure out the basics of what works and what doesn’t. To be honest, I don’t actually think I’m all that good at it. Other people tend to assume I am and I don’t go out of my way to correct them, but the way I generally find things out is by cheating and using my divination magic. But divination doesn’t help with a written report, and so I wasn’t really expecting to find anything in Talisid’s folder that other people hadn’t spotted already. What I wanted was a feel for the facts.
I got one, and it wasn’t pretty. Since the beginning of autumn a total of three members of the Light apprentice program had vanished without a trace. The earliest disappearance had been three months ago; the most recent was less than a fortnight old. It looked like Talisid was right; there wasn’t any sign of this stopping. I picked up my phone and tapped one of the names in my address book. It rang five times before there was a click and a voice spoke from the other end. “Hello?”
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