"Coldheart Canyon (preview edition)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive - Coldheart Canyon)

Zeffer took a moment, when the man was gone, to close his eyes and let his
thoughts grow a little more orderly. Though Sandru spoke slowly enough, there was
something mildly chaotic about his thought processes. One minute he was talking
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Barker, Clive - Coldheart Canyon
about furniture, the next about the mad Duke and his hunter's habits, the next about
the fact that they couldn't make a hospital here because the Devil's wife had cursed
the place.
When he opened his eyes his gaze moved back and forth over the furniture and
the boxes without lingering on anything in particular. The bare bulbs were stark, of
course, and their lights far from flattering, but even taking that fact into account
there was nothing in the room that caught Zeffer's eye. There were some
finely-wrought things, no question; but nothing extraordinary.
And then, as he stood there, waiting for Sandru to return, his gaze moved
beyond the objects that filled the chamber, and came to rest instead on the walls
beyond.
The chamber was not, he saw, made of bare stone. It was covered with tile.
In every sense, this was an understatement, for these were no ordinary tiles. Even
by so ungenerous a light as the bare bulbs threw upon them, and viewed by Zeffer's
weary eyes, it was clear they were of incredible sophistication and beauty.
He didn't wait for Father Sandru to return; rather, he began to push through
the piles of furniture towards the designs that covered the walls. They covered the
floor, too, he saw, and ceiling. In fact, the chamber was a single masterpiece of
tile; every single inch of it decorated.
In all his years of traveling and collecting he'd never seen anything quite
like this. Careless of the dirt and dust laden webs which covered every surface, he
pushed on through until he reached the nearest wall. It was filthy, of course, but
he pulled a large silk handkerchief out of his pocket, and used it to scrub away
some of the filth on the tile. It had been plain even from a distance that the tiles
were elaborately designed, but now, as he cleared a swathe across four or five, he
realized that this was not an abstract pattern but a representation. There was part
of a tree there, on one of the tiles, and on another, adjacent to it, a man on a
white horse. The detail was astonishing. The horse was so finely painted, it looked
about ready to prance off around the room.
"It's a hunt."
Sandru's voice startled him; Willem jerked back from the wall, so suddenly
that it was as though he'd had his face in a vacuum, and was pulling it free. He
felt a drop of moisture plucked from the rim of his eye; saw it flying towards the
cleaned tile, defying gravity as it broke on the flank of the painted horse.
It was a strange moment; an illusion surely. It took him a little time to
shake off the oddness of it. When he looked round at Sandru, the man was slightly
out of focus. He stared at the Father's shape until his eyes corrected the problem.
When they did he saw that Sandru had the brandy bottle back in his hand. Apparently
its contents had been more potent than Zeffer had thought. The alcohol, along with
the intensity of his stare, had left him feeling strangely dislocated; as though the
world he'd been looking atуthe painted man on his painted horse, riding past a
painted treeуwas more real than the old priest standing there in the doorway.
"A hunt?" he asked at last. "What kind of hunt?"
"Oh, every kind," Sandru replied. "Pigs, dragons, womenу"
"Women?"