"Lumley, Brian - Vampire World 1 - Blood Brothers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

It was as if Lardis heard him. All of the fear went out of him; a great deal of fear which, until the moment it left him, he'd scarcely realized was there at all. At least he'd never admitted it, not even to himself. Finally he straightened up and nodded. Then it seems we have no more to talk about,' he said. 'Ah -- except your father, of course.'
The Dweller's answering nod was thoughtful, deliberate. 'How goes it with him?'
Now Lardis gave a grunt and offered a frustrated shrug. 'We care for him, feed him, watch over him in his fever,' he answered. 'Everything as you instructed -but we've no knowledge of his sickness. You say that both of you were burned by your own weapons, those brilliant beams of sunlight with which you destroyed the Wamphyri. Well, and your burns were plainly visible, Dweller, their effect immediate -- it's a miracle you survived! But Harry Hell-lander was not burned, not that I ever saw.'
The Dweller had his answer ready. 'I was burned on the outside,' he said. 'My flesh was physically scorched by the sun's fire. But my father's sickness is in his blood, a slow poison, like silver or kneblasch to the Wamphyri. It causes this fever in him. But when the fever has burned itself out, he will be cured. Then I'll take him back to his own place. And then at last I'll be alone here.'
'And that's what you want?'
'It's how it has to be.' The Dweller's voice was now a low growl. He began to turn away -- then swiftly turned back, face to face with the Gypsy. And urgently, perhaps pleadingly, he said: 'Lardis, listen. I am Wamphyri! When I fought for this place, the fighting roused something up in me, in my blood. You trust me, I know. Likewise your people, and mine. But I don't know how long I may trust myself! Now do you understand?'
Lardis believed he did, and a little of his escaped fear crept back in. 'But how...how will you survive?' Unintentionally, he placed some small emphasis on the word 'will'.
Before the other could answer, an echoing chorus of howls floated down out of the hills. With long, loping strides, The Dweller took himself back to the window, again inclining his head to the heights. And to Lardis he said, 'How do they survive, the grey brotherhood?'
'They are hunters,' the Gypsy answered, quietly. 'And will you also...hunt?'
'I know what you are thinking,' The Dweller said. 'And I don't blame you. Your times have been hard. The Wamphyri have made them so. But this I vow: I shall never hunt men.'
Lardis shivered again, but he believed The Dweller's words. 'You are...a changeling creature,' he said. 'I can't pretend to understand you.'
'A changeling, it's true,' The Dweller agreed. 'I had two fathers, only one of which was a man! My human flesh is dying now, but I can feel my vampire at work in me. He remembers his former host, and has other clay to mould.'
There was that in his voice...Lardis was not afraid...but there was weirdness in the air...the moon had turned the garden yellow, with black mountains beyond, split by the deep blue V of the pass. 'I should be going,' the Gypsy said, his normal rumble of a voice little more than a whisper.
'See my hands,' said The Dweller, 'how thin they are, like paws?' He stretched out his arms, until his hands and wrists stood free of the wide cuffs. These I shall retain, as best I can -- the hands of a man -- to remind me of what I was.' And cocking his head curiously on one side, he glanced at Lardis. 'Also that you and your people shall know me, when I am...other than I am now.'
Lardis looked; The Dweller's hands were pale and slim as a girl's; but his wrists and forearms, what could be seen of them, were grey-furred! Backing towards the door, the Gypsy hissed, 'You, Dweller? A grey one?'
'When they call down from the peaks under the moon like that,' the other sighed, 'ah! -- I hear them! And I know they call for me.' He opened the door for Lardis, and the Gypsy tremblingly stepped out into the night.
'I...I knew they were your friends, of course,' he told The Dweller, where now that one stood framed in the doorway. 'But -'
'My friends?' Again that quick tilt of The Dweller's head; his eyes, gleaming now in the eye-holes of his mask, no longer red but feral in moonlight. That and more than that. My kin!'
'Yes,' Lardis gulped, nodded, backed away. 'I understand.'
And as he turned more fully into the garden: 'Lardis,' The Dweller called after him. 'Remember -- we shall not hunt you. Be sure that you never hunt me or mine...'

Harry Keogh tossed and turned in tortured dreams. He had been tortured, a little. What his son, The Dweller, had done to him could not have been accomplished by any other means: the Necroscope's metaphysical mind had been entered like a house in the night, its innermost vaults penetrated, its owner deprived of his treasures. The intruder had been none other than Harry Jr himself, called The Dweller, soon to be Harry Wolfson. Except he had stolen nothing, merely changed the combinations on certain locks and booby-trapped certain passageways. During the course of work such as this, inevitably there had been some 'structural' damage which, while he had kept it to a minimum, was the real cause of his father's 'fever'. It was not so much that Harry Keogh's blood was poisoned, rather that his mentality had been depleted.
Harry dreamed of the forbidden Mцbius Continuum. Trapped in its flux, he drifted useless as a ship with neither sail nor rudder, a waterlogged hulk rocked and slowly twirled by mathematical tides and algebraic whirlpools, through straits of Pure Number where he was now innumerate. And in the primal darkness of
that place beyond or between such places as men are allowed to know, he was aware of a thousand locked doors, all of them drifting with him, around him, even through him, each one of them a mystery to him, closed to him forever. For he was no longer empowered to conjure the Mцbius equations which were their keys.
They were doors, yes, to other places, even other times, but without their keys the immensity of the Mцbius Continuum might as well be the narrow confines of a dungeon...or the innermost chamber of some sunken Pharaonic tomb, lost forever in the Valley of the Kings.
Such imaginative associations were cyclic and muta-tive as the stuff of dreams has ever been. Ideas evoked fresh visions as the focus of Harry's dream now shaped itself to this Egyptian motif. So that in the next moment he wondered: Doors? But if these myriad eerily drifting shapes are doors, then why do they look so much like sarcophagi?
Sarcophagi, coffins, caskets: now they were made of glass, allowing him to see into them. And within, all of those teeming dead thousands, the Great Majority, could see out! They could see Harry drifting helplessly by, and soon commenced to shout at him. He saw their mouths working, death's-head jaws grimacing and snapping, the leather of mummied faces cracking where unnatural stress was applied to otherwise inanimate, ex-aminate tissues. They rapped on their glass lids with ivory knuckles, ogled him through empty sockets, waved X-ray hands as he went floating by.
His countless dead friends: they talked to him as of old, questioned him, begged news, items of information, this, that or the other favour. But the ex-Necroscope couldn't hear them and in any case daren't listen, and he knew that he must never ever again try to answer them. Oh, Harry wasn't afraid of the dead and never had been, but he /eared, indeed dreaded, their attempted communication with him! For his deadspeak talent had been forbidden to him, even as the most basic numbers were now unknowable. Worse, there would be a penalty to pay: such agony as might easily win him a box of his own!
He could only offer them a negative shake of his head (and even then believed he took a risk] as he bobbed heavily along where once he'd skimmed, no longer master but captive of the Mo'bius Continuum. I shouldn't even be here, he told himself. How did I get in here? How will I get out?
As if some One had answered, he saw that the coffins were doors again, one of which opened directly in his path. Offering no resistance (he had none to offer), he was drawn through into another place, another time. Drawn into time itself, but time in reverse! And so Harry began to fall into his own past.
Gathering speed, he was drawn backwards in time like a thread rewinding itself on to its bobbin. Indeed, he watched his own blue life-thread -- nothing less than the course and continuity of his fourth-dimensional existence from birth to the grave -- streaming back into him as he backtracked years already lived. And the thought occurred: I am going back to my beginnings. I will have it all to live -- all to do, all to suffer -- all over again!
That was too much. It was the difference between a dream and a nightmare. And Harry Keogh woke up -
- Drenched in his own sweat, and gasping: 'No!'

'Don't!' she told him at once, her voice almost as startled and frightened as his own, but less hoarse. 'You're hurting me.'
'Brenda!' Harry croaked, almost sobbed her name, while at the same time doubting that it was her name, but hoping anyway. Praying that it had all been a dream -- and not just this part but all of it, everything -- and a moment later knowing that it had not. No, for her fierce breasts, where now on impulse she suddenly hugged his face against them, weren't Brenda's; she didn't smell like Brenda; and anyway he remembered now that the Brenda he'd called out to had been many long years and an entirely different world ago.
'Brenda?' she repeated him, her accent husky, Szgany, as he relaxed his grip on her arms and flopped back into his damp bed. 'Were you dreaming, Harry Dweller-sire?' She leaned over him, supported his head with a cool hand, stroked his brow.
'Dreaming?' He looked up at her, tried to focus on her. It wasn't easy; he felt weak as a kitten, drained. And that last word -- coupled with what she'd called him, Dwellersire -- was a trigger which released more memories. No, not drained, merely depleted. Robbed. By his own son, The Dweller. And none of it had been a dream, or only the last part. And even that had been so close to reality as to make no difference.
He turned his head, looked around the small, stone-built, whitewashed, electric-lamplit room. A crude dwelling, little more than a cave. But luxury to some. Certainly to Travellers, who hadn't known what a permanent home was before The Dweller and his garden. And Harry's voice turned as sour as the fur lining his clammy mouth as he mumbled, 'Starside?'
She nodded, 'Yes, Starside, the garden. And your fever has broken.' She smiled at him. 'You're going to be well again.'
'My...fever?' His eyes went back to her face. It looked very lovely in the soft, uneven yellow flow of the lamplight; most of the electricity from The Dweller's generators went to the greenhouses. 'Yes, my "fever",' Harry said again, nodding wrily. No fever, he knew. Just his shattered mind, gradually pulling its bits together again. 'How long have I been lying here?'
This is the second sundown,' she told him. She withdrew her hand from under his head, replaced it with a bundled fur for a pillow. Then she stood up from her stool and said, 'I'll prepare soup for you. After you have eaten, The Dweller will want to know that -'
'No!' he cut her short, his anxiety very tangible. 'Not...yet, awhile. He doesn't need to know yet. I want a little time to myself, to get my thoughts in order.'
And she wondered: Is he afraid of his own son? Then perhaps we all should be.
Harry looked at her standing there, a frown on her attractive if careworn face. She was small, amply proportioned, with dark eyes slightly aslant, a small nose for a Gypsy, and hair glossy black where it fell to her shoulders. Passionate as all her race -- dressed in soft, supple leather -- even motionless there was something animal, sinuous, sensual about her.
Still frowning, she crossed to a fireplace built into the virgin rock of the innermost wall and hung a prepared pot from a tripod. Prodding the fire's embers to glowing life, and aware that Harry's eyes followed her every movement, she finally told him, 'But The Dweller's instructions were very clear: Lardis's people are to tend your needs as best possible until such time as you recover, upon which -- and immediately -- he is to be informed.'
'My needs are that I'm not to be disturbed,' Harry's wits were a little sharper now. 'I'm not to be excited. You mustn't...mustn't argue with me.' All of this thinking, all of these words, were a big effort. Wearied,
he lay back and wondered why he felt only half here. No, he knew why: it was because he was only half here. He had lost, been deprived of, several of his senses -like losing touch and taste. Which left him feeling numb, and life flavourless.
The Gypsy woman smiled and slowly nodded, as if the sharpness of Harry's words had confirmed some unspoken thing. 'You are wilful,' she said what was on her mind. 'All of you hell-landers are alike, wild and wilful. Zekintha, called Zek, and Jazz Simmons: they were the same. If only they had stayed here. Their hot blood -- their children -- would be welcome among the Travellers. We would be the stronger for it.' It was a Szgany compliment.
'Szgany blood is hot enough,' Harry answered, also a compliment. 'So...will you report my awakening? What's your name, anyway?'