"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 28 - Wizard of Rentoro" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

A buzzing started in Blade's head, then swelled to a screaming roar. It sounded like a jet plane
winding up for takeoff, and Blade half expected the room to start vibrating savagely. It seemed unnatural
that there should be so much noise with no movement.
In the next moment the room tilted up on end, as if a giant hand were gripping it and heaving. Blade
saw Leighton and J standing frozen as the floor tilted, until they were standing at such an angle that Blade
expected them to fall down out of sight. The floor tilted still more and the whole room turned upside
down—Lord Leighton, J, the control panel, the computer consoles, Blade in his chair, everything. Now
Lord Leighton and J seemed to be hanging head downward, like bats from the ceiling of a cave. The
roaring swelled until Blade wanted to scream at the tearing agony in his eardrums.
Suddenly the noise died, and in the same moment the chair detached itself from the inverted floor and
plunged downward, carrying Blade with it. He plunged into a vast windy darkness that suddenly spread
beneath him. The darkness swallowed him, the wind howled about him, and a numbing chill began to
gnaw at his fingers and toes.
The fall through the darkness went on and on, and the cold began to work through Blade's skin into
his internal organs. Then there was no longer darkness below, A vast plain spread out in all directions, a
plain made of shimmering green light. In a hundred places vast mouths gaped open, mouths with lips of
dancing golden fire and blazing silver teeth. Now they seemed to be aware of Blade and they began
opening and shutting furiously.
 Blade tried to twist in midair, to divert his fall and plunge into the green light instead of into one of the
mouths. He failed. A mouth yawned wide directly below him, silver teeth flashed past him, he felt a
moment of searing heat as deadly as the cold before—then he no longer felt anything at all.


Chapter 2
«^»
The first thing Blade felt was rain on his bare skin and wet grass under him. He opened his eyes, then
realized with delight that his head was not throbbing with pain. There was a faint ache, rather like a mild
hangover, but nothing that would slow him down even slightly. The deep breathing—or something—had
worked.
That was pure good news, like anything else learned about Dimension X or ways of reaching it in one
piece. Exploring Dimension X often seemed like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces
missing. Now he'd just found one more piece.
Blade rose, stretched his arms and legs, and did a quick series of limbering-up exercises. When he'd
finished, he felt ready to look around him and see where he'd landed.
Overhead was a sky of featureless gray clouds, trailing cotton-wool tufts of mist all the way to the
ground. A fine rain was still falling.
Blade was standing in ankle-deep grass by the edge of a shallow drainage ditch now filled to the brim
with muddy water. On either side of him rose thick tangles of vines. The leaves were long and thin with a
white stripe down the middle. The fruit was the size and shape of grapes, but bright blue.
The vines rose ten feet high on either side of Blade and stretched away in both directions. In front of
him they seemed to go on forever, until they vanished in the rain and the mist. He turned, and saw the
vines ending fifty feet away at a waist-high wall of roughly dressed stone. He started walking toward it.
The earth underfoot was rich, black, and clinging. Judging from the smell that reached Blade's
nostrils, it had been recently manured. Along the edge of the drainage ditch the earth was turning to mud,
and several times Blade sank up to his ankles. The grass between the vines had been weeded recently
and in places showed signs of careful cutting. Blade saw nothing he could hope to use as a weapon.
He was halfway to the wall when he heard a loud metallic honk from somewhere out of sight. The
damp air distorted the sound so that it was hard to be sure where it came from.
Several more honks sounded in a ragged chorus, followed by unmistakable human voices shouting in
wordless anger and the soft squishing of hooves in mud. The sounds were coming closer. Blade went