"Eric Van Lustbader - Sunset Warrior 2 - Shallows of Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lustbader Eric van)

staggering sight at which he gazes longingly resonates in his mind with the supravivid
impact of an ecstatic dream. And for this time, the events of the recent past
mercifully dim.
For what lies before and below him, just past the beetling lip of the high ledge, is a
cyclopean sea of ice. Desolate. Limitless. Awesome and electrifying.
"An overwhelming sight," said the voice quite near and behind him. And he turned
slowly, as if in a dream, to behold Borros, the Magic Man.
"The true wonder is that we have been denied this sight for all of our lives." A thin
and weary smile curled Borros' lips.
Wind whipped loose snow against their legs as they stood atop the ice plateau,
strange creatures garbed in the one-piece foil suits they had found on the highest
Level of the Freehold before each, in his own time and his own way, breached the
last metal defense of their subterranean world, cracking the outer hatch, buried in
drifting snow. The suits were extremely light, skin tight along chest and arms, with
filled pockets of hardware and food concentrates, vacuum-sealed, immune to the
ravages of time, even a small supply of mineral-enriched fluid to refresh themselves.
These pockets ran around the suits' waists and down the outside of each leg,
somehow increasing the warmth of the garments.
Ronin stared at Borros, seeing him now as if for the first time, the focus of reality
at last forced upon him, and all the raw hate that he had held in abeyance for these
long moments flooded back on an inexorable tide. Caught in the slipstream of
sewage; shook himself, as if the motion would somehow cleanse him. He knew that
he carried now within his depths an anger and a sorrow, that thus was bound to him
irrevocably a hideous strength.
The Magic Man had misunderstood the gesture and he grasped Ronin's shoulder.
"Surely you are not cold?"
His fingers moved along the foil to a fold at the back of Ronin's neck. "Look
here." And he pulled gently upward, the metallic skin stretching to cover Ronin's
head, leaving only his eyes and mouth exposed. Borros wrestled his own hood into
place.
Borros turned to stare behind them, peering across the rubble of the frozen waste
to the hidden Freehold, the tiny access hatch leading down and down to the world
inside, a world at war now, factions struggling for desperate power.
"Do not think me a fool," the Magic Man said urgently. "But we must flee from
here at once."
Tears call to Ronin and the mountains melting as he ceases to feel the bite of the
wind at his eyes and lips. The sky colorless and the earth with no substance. His feet
leaden. His heart pounding as it hit him searingly like the aftershock of a deep
wound, the rent cauterized but the nerves still in dysfunction. At first there was no
feeling at all. Numb. The body protecting itself. But there is a limit. His
consciousness narrowed because he was struggling against it now. All his loves, all
his friends, all the people. Gone in a wink of an eye. Just a flutter of time, the space
to pull two breaths and lives are snuffed like tapers at first Spell. K'reen and Stahlig
and Nirren and G'fand and—the Salamander, the center of it all, still down there,
alive, alive…
"Now."
Slowly, it seemed to him, he became aware of a plucking at his sleeve.
"Ronin, please, we must be off." He heard the words as if from a great distance.
They hung in front of him like lamps, separate and solid, one after another, turning
on some unseen axis, their sheen…