"Diana Wynne Jones - The Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

he shouted after the comet. “Are you OK, Hayley?”
“Perfectly, thanks.” Hayley stood up, shaking her icy hand, and
stared scornfully after the comet as it roared away. Grandad had
told her about comets. “He’s got it all wrong,” she said. “Comets go
tail first . Not like rockets.”
Troy laughed as if he couldn’t help it. “So much for you, Tollie!”
he said. “Come on. We’re nearly there.”
He was right. They laboured up round another slithery curve,
which took them through a copse of silvery trees that rattled as
they passed, and then brought them out into black night filled with
stars. Everything was made of stars there. Over to the right, a
huge lion prowled away from them, shaking a mane that was all
stars, pacing on great starry paws, and twitching a long tail of
stars. Much nearer to the left, an enormous woman stood still as a
statue—except for her hair, which was trails of blowing stars—and
stared at them with huge, disapproving star eyes.
Unfortunately, Hayley was still remembering the things Grandad
had taught her. “We oughtn’t to be able to breathe here!” she cried
out. “There’s no air!” Her lungs heaved in and out, but nothing
happened. She knew she was suffocating.
Troy shook her arm. “Don’t be silly! This is the mythosphere. I
told you we both belong to it! Of course you can breathe!”
Hayley was rather ashamed to find that he was quite right. As
soon as Troy spoke, she stood there breathing in a perfectly normal
way. “What do we do now?” she asked, a little sulkily, because she
felt stupid.
“Wait for the dragon to arrive, I suppose,” Troy said. “I’ve never
been here either.”
He looked over to the left, beyond the starry woman, where a
huge set of weighing scales was just coming into view. Hayley
looked right, towards the lion, hoping it would go on walking away
and not notice them. And something swam slowly towards her from
beyond the lion. It was a bulky, complicated mass of stars, but, as
the lion swung its huge head round to look at it, it uncoiled a little
and produced a long spiky tail, like a lashing river of stars, and
seemed to be warning the lion not to mess with it. The lion lashed
its own tail contemptuously and went pacing on, and the dragon
floated onwards. It was surrounded in fiery flakes now, like burning
snow, that its movements seemed to have dislodged from its tail.
“It’s coming,” Hayley said, nudging Troy. “It’s going the other
way.”
Troy whirled round, just as the dragon floated level with them. It
was coming surprisingly fast, in spite of being all coiled up. It was
made of stars fitted together like a mosaic or a jigsaw puzzle and
quite blindingly bright. It looked at them as it glided by, out of an
eye that was like a small sun deep inside a glass ball.
“Er—hallo?” Troy said.
The dragon went on looking and did not answer. But then the
huge starry woman noticed it. Slow icy anger came into her remote
face and she waved an arm the way a human woman might try to