"Fritz Leiber - Gather, Darkness!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

Unfair—except the priests are never, never unfair. We should not have listened. We should not
have been moved. And now we are to be blasted for our sin, for the greatest sin—to think a thought
against the Hierarchy.”
The hand of the Great God thrust downward, like a falling steeple checked in midair. The
extended index finger, thick as a tree trunk, pointed at the puffed robe Jarles had cast aside, and
which still hung two feet above the ground.
Crackling, coruscating blue light snaked from nimbus to mountainous shoulder and down the
arm, spat like lightning from the fingertip. The empty robe glowed, frizzled, puffed a little more,
then burst with a hollow pop, like a seaweed bladder in a fire.
That sound, and the spatter of red-hot fragments, thawed the frozen panic. The crowd broke,
began to race toward the narrow, dark mouths of the streets—any street, it made no difference, so
long as they got out of the square.
The crackling beam moved slowly toward the bench on
which Jarles still stood, fusing the cobblestones, leaving a red-hot trough in its wake—a sign and
mark for all times to come of the Great God’s divine wrath.
 He waited for it.
There was a swooping of blackness, a beat as of gigantic shadowy wings. And then around the
renegade priest had closed an irregular sphere—mottled with blackness, inkily smeared, so that
through it his naked body was still vaguely visible.
And the irregular sphere had the form of two great clawed hands, cupped together.
The blue beam from the Great God’s finger moved swiftly then, impinged upon the sphere,
crackled against it, showering blue sparks.
The sphere drank the beam and grew not one whit less black.
The beam thickened to a writhing pillar of blue light, turning the square to day and driving back
the air in hot waves.
And still it only spattered harmlessly against the black-streaked, irregular sphere of the cupped
hands.
It was still possible to glimpse the form of the renegade priest inside them, like an insect
miraculously alive in the heart of a flame.
Then a great, evilly mirthful voice that seemed to blow the hot air from the square in one breath,
that stopped every fleeing commoner in his tracks and turned him around to stare in paralyzed
terror at the black and flaming spectacle.
“The Lord of Evil defies the Great God!
“The Lord of Evil takes this man for his own.”
The cupped hands jerked away, upward, off and out of sight.
Then gales of satanic laughter that seemed to rock the Sanctuary itself.
 Chapter 2

“BROTHER JARLES has begun to harangue the crowd in the Great Square, your resplendent
arch-priestship.”
“Good! Send the reports in to me at the Apex Council as soon as he is finished.”
Brother Goniface, priest of the Seventh Circle, archpriest, chief voice of the Realists in the Apex
Council, smiled—but the smile was not apparent in the pale, lionlike mask of his face. He had
touched off a bomb that would blast the Apex Council out of its complacency—both the
Moderates, with their flabby compromises, and his own Realists, with their mulish conservatism.
His dangerous little experiment was running now and couldn’t very well be stopped. Let Brother
Frejeris and the rest of the Moderates yelp as much as they wanted to—afterwards.
For afterwards everything would be neatly rounded off. Brother Jarles would be dead, frizzled
by the Great God’s wrath—an instructive example for the commoners and any other dissatisfied
young priests. And Goniface would be able to explain at leisure to the Apex Council just how much