"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 18 - Warlords of Gaikon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

The dense forest and the swirling gray mist cut off his vision close at hand—sometimes to only a few
yards. But he could see enough to gather that he was in rugged, heavily forested country. It looked like
uninhabited, almost virgin wilderness.
It was pointless to try to tell the time of day as long as the mist cut off the view. But if it was this raw
and cold by day, Blade had no intention of staying out here to face the night in the forest, naked and
alone. He was tough enough to do it if he had to, but exhaustion from exposure could leave him less able
to fight or run. Much better to find whoever lived in this dimension, get fed, get warm, and start learning
his way around. If anybody lived in this dimension. So far he had never landed in a totally uninhabited
dimension, but there was always a first time for—
This dimension would not be it. Before Blade could complete the thought, an unmistakably artificial
sound came floating down to his ears. Somewhere, apparently close upwind, someone was beating a
large gong. Blade listened more carefully. A very large gong. Its notes had a deep, booming quality, and
went on and on and on, fading away only gradually. Each note had barely time to die away before
another followed on its heels.
The gong seemed to be somewhere farther up the hill. Blade peered as intently as he could at the
forest above, but the trees grew so thickly that it was like trying to peer through a brick wall. Blade gave
up the effort and struck off uphill, letting the sound of the gong guide him over the rough ground.
The gong fell silent before Blade had covered more than two hundred yards. But barely fifty yards
farther on, he saw a double line of white stones gleaming ahead in the twilight. He froze until he was
reasonably sure there was no one within sight or earshot. Then he slipped forward to stand by the nearer
line of stones.
As he had suspected, the stones marked out a path of bare earth, beaten almost rock-hard by the
passage of many feet over many years. The path ran up and down the hill, rapidly losing itself in the mist
and shadows under the trees in either direction. Blade looked toward the top of the hill and thought he
could see a dark mass looming through the trees, a dark mass too regular in shape to be a natural feature.
So he headed uphill, following the line of the path but far enough from it so that the white stones were
barely visible. He didn't want to unexpectedly meet whoever used the path.
The slope soon became noticeably steeper and the undergrowth not only more tangled, but thorny.
By the time Blade reached the top, he was sweating heavily in spite of the chill. Blood from dozens of
places where the thorns had jabbed him ran down his legs, arms, and chest. He stripped a handful of wet
leaves off a nearby bush and used them to wipe off his body while he looked at the building on top of the
hill.
It rose a good sixty feet above the wall that surrounded it on three sides and had a distinctly Oriental
flavor. It looked like a mass of heavily tiled overhanging roofs, heavy beams carved in elaborate floral
designs, gilded dragons' heads, and small windows with even more elaborately carved shutters. The
protecting wall was eight feet high, overgrown with thorny vines and creepers, and surmounted with a
double row of foot-long iron spikes. On one side of the building a rather rickety-looking mass of
scaffolding rose halfway to the top floor, but there was nobody on it.
 In fact, there was nobody in sight around the entire building. The fourth side of the enclosure was
wide open except for a solid wooden hut about twenty feet square blocking off part of it. Blade could
see almost the entire space within the walls. Most of it was laid out with delicately pruned shrubs
between white gravel paths and small pools, but there was nobody in it. The building—a temple,
probably—seemed deserted.
That was obviously impossible. Behind the hut stood a bronze gong at least nine feet in diameter,
hanging on a heavy frame of blackish brown wood. Somebody had been beating that gong not more than
twenty minutes ago. Where had they gone? Perhaps there was only a caretaker in the hut, who beat the
gong at regular intervals for some religious reason and had now gone back into the hut to get out of the
weather.
That seemed likely enough. Blade decided to explore further. He was going to need to get out of the
weather himself, sooner or later. So he headed straight in, walking carefully so that his bare feet made no