"C. L. Moore - The Black Gods Kiss" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

The walls had fallen away and her feet struck a sudden rubble instead of the smooth floor. But the
darkness that had bandaged her eyes was changed too, indescribably. It was no longer darkness, but
void; not an absence of light, but simple nothingness. Abysses opened around her, yet she could see
nothing. She only knew that she stood at the threshold of some immense space, and sensed nameless
things about her, and battled vainly against that nothingness which was all her straining eyes could see.
And at her throat something constricted painfully.
She lifted her hand and found the chain of her crucifix taut and vibrant around her neck. At that she
smiled a little grimly, for she began to understand. The crucifix. She found her hand shaking despite
herself, but she unfastened the chain and dropped the cross to the ground. Then she gasped.
All about her, as suddenly as the awakening from a dream, the nothingness had opened out into
undreamed-of distances. She stood high on a hilltop under a sky spangled with strange stars. Below she
caught glimpses of misty plains and valleys with mountain peaks rising far away. And at her feet a
ravening circle of small, slavering, blind things leaped with clashing teeth.
They were obscene and hard to distinguish against the darkness of the hillside, and the noise they made
was revolting. Her sword swung up of itself, almost, and slashed furiously at the little dark horrors leaping
up around her legs. They died squashily, splattering her bare thighs with unpleasantness, and after a few
had gone silent under the blade the rest fled into the dark with quick, frightened pantings, their feet
making a queer splashing on the stones.
Jirel gathered a handful of the coarse grass which grew there and wiped her legs of the obscene
splatters, looking about with quickened breath upon this land so unholy that one who bore a cross might
not even see it. Here, if anywhere, one might find a weapon such as she sought. Behind her in the hillside
was the low tunnel opening from which she had emerged. Overhead the strange stars shone. She did not
recognize a single constellation, and if the brighter sparks were planets they were strange ones, tinged
with violet and green and yellow. One was vividly crimson, like a point of fire. Far out over the rolling
land below she could discern a column of light. It did not blaze, nor illuminate the dark about. It cast no
shadows. It simply was a great pillar of luminance towering high in the night. It seemed artificial--perhaps
man-made, though she scarcely dared hope for men here.
She had half expected, despite her brave words, to come out upon the storied and familiar red-hot
pave of hell, and this pleasant, starlit land surprised her and made her more wary. The things that built the
tunnel could not have been human. She had no right to expect men here. She was a little stunned by
finding open sky so far underground, though she was intelligent enough to realize that however she had
come, she was not underground now. No cavity in the earth could contain this starry sky. She came of a
credulous age, and she accepted her surroundings without too much questioning though she was a little
disappointed, if the truth be known, in the pleasantness of the mistily starlit place. The fiery streets of hell
would have been a likelier locality in which to find a weapon against Guillaume.
When she had cleansed her sword on the grass and wiped her legs clean, she turned slowly down the
hill. The distant column beckoned her, and after a moment of indecision she turned toward it. She had no
time to waste, and this was the likeliest place to find what she sought.
The coarse grass brushed her legs and whispered round her feet. She stumbled now and then on the
rubble, for the hill was steep, but she reached the bottom without mishap, and struck out across the
meadows toward that blaze of faraway brilliance. It seemed to her that she walked more lightly,
somehow. The grass scarcely bent underfoot and she found she could take long sailing strides like one
who runs with wings on his heels. It felt like a dream. The gravity pull of the place must have been less
than she was accustomed to, but she only knew that she was skimming over the ground with amazing
speed.
Traveling so, she passed through the meadows over the strange, coarse grass, over a brook or two that
spoke endlessly to itself in a curious language that was almost speech, certainly not the usual gurgle of
earth's running water. Once she ran into a blotch of darkness, like some pocket of void in the air and
struggled through gasping and blinking outraged eyes. She was beginning to realize that the land was not
so innocently normal as it looked.