"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 36 - Return to Kaldak" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

 Then the green light and the wavering booth and room both vanished. Blade felt Cheeky 's weight lift
from his shoulder and heard him yeeep. He sounded more angry than frightened, but suddenly his
thoughts weren't reaching Blade.

Then Blade felt himself falling. He fell down through dreamlike cold and blackness for what seemed like
forever. It was so cold that he felt the sweat on his skin starting to freeze, and so black that even the idea
of light seemed impossible.

His thoughts still came clearly. He'd just begun to wonder if something might have gone badly wrong,
when suddenly the cold and the darkness vanished. There was blue sky overhead, damp grass under his
hands, and a cool breeze puffing against his face.

Blade sat up. He was sitting in foot-high grass on a slope which looked like the bank of a river. Between
the water's edge and the main channel lay a hundred yards of dead trees, patches of black mud, and
clumps of reeds. The reeds were a sickly yellow-green, and looked vaguely familiar.

Behind him the bank rose toward the crest of a hill. The grass gave way to scrubby bushes, and the
bushes to gnarled trees. High above the treetops, a large bird made lazy circles with hardly the flicker of
a wingtip, riding the updrafts.

There was no sign of Cheeky.

Blade controlled both his fear for Cheeky and his anger at Lord Leighton until he'd finished checking his
clothes, his equipment, and the shape of his body. He was intact, and he had everything he'd taken into
the booth-except for Cheeky. He waited a minute, for signs of either the feather-monkey or
less-welcome company. Then he pulled out his canteen and walked down to the water's edge.

The water of the river was too scummy and dark with decayed vegetable matter for drinking, but a clear
stream flowed down the bank a few yards away. Blade drank, filled both canteens and added water
purification tablets, then hooked the canteens to his belt. At last he started searching for Cheeky in
earnest, using not only his eyes and ears but his mind.

Cheeky, where are you? Cheeky, answer me. Cheeky, are you hurt?

Blade sent his thoughts out over and over again, keeping the message simple. For all the answer he got,
he might as well have been trying to explain Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

He didn't see or hear anything, either. He began to wonder if perhaps Cheeky had thought Blade was
dead or hurt and gone off in search of help. He went back to where he'd awakened and looked at the
grass. It was flattened, but not crushed as if he'd lain there for a long time. Also, if he'd been there long
enough to make Cheeky think he was dead, he'd feel chilled and stiff.

No, Cheeky was-lost. Blade would not use the word "gone," let alone the word "dead," even in his
mind. Cheeky was lost. The main problem for now was to find him again.

His anger at Lord Leighton slowly passed off. Cheeky had known what he was getting into, as well as
his mind could grasp it. He was a volunteer. And certainly the failure of one of his most cherished and
promising experiments would be its own punishment for Lord Leighton. He'd be miserably disappointed.

So was Blade. He hadn't realized until now how much he'd hoped that the problem of facing a new