"Emil Petaja - The Prism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Petaja Emil)

agate-pink eyes before the final release from the horror. Stories of the
chainings, the browsings for scant rations of a kind to make a Helden
shudder, the stocks where they were pinned down while the young got first
crack—all this flashed horridly across his mind.
He fought. His blade sang. Yet his heart was empty. Somehow what
happened to him didn't matter in the least . . . now. The Princess was
dead. There was no dream to battle for, no prize to win . . . nothing. He
lashed out, but the bat-wings were agile animal creatures and while his
sword busied itself on one—the other two were circling him about, harrying
him with their talons, taunting him with their gleeful strident squealings.
Bone-weary from the prodigious climb and his battle with the dragon,
Kor's stamina flagged. But it was despair that pinned him to the stone wall,
in the end. Cold arms like spiny rubber closed in, along with the flapping
sail-like wings. Kor's sword clattered to the floor. He had one last mocking
glimpse of Princess Sena's frozen smile of endless sleep before the floor
dropped away and then the castle itself, lost in a blur of gray fog and mist
like a winding sheet.

***

Sena sighed. She reached languidly across her vid-couch for the off
button. All at once the Dracs and the mist and the greatest of the Helden
heroes, Kor of the Purple Forest—along with the scents, the tactiles, the
chitterings and the flappings of the great black wings on the wind—all of
this was erased and gone. An opalescence moved in as the walls of the
livideo room defined themselves; they were sea-green and vaguely
translucent as a suitable presage to Vicaria when the mood for sensual
titillation came upon her and her aging parent.
Her father touched her arm fondly, indulgently. “Happy now, Sena? Your
hero is suitably dead.”
“Blissful.” Sena yawned prettily. And she was pretty, too. Her hair was
dark as a raven's wing. Her skin was palest ivory-gold with hints of roses at
the high cheekbones, and red, red lips. Her eyes were not quite green, nor
yet blue, but a lapis lazuli admixture of these and other swirling hues; they
charmed Gold Dorff, jaded as he was, when she turned them on him and
put on a girlish pout.
“But it is all such base-color nonsense, child!” Gold Dorff protested.
“I know it's base-color nonsense. But I love to see one of those
storybook types get his. The Drac-chicks will drink hearty tonight.”
Their fat guest, whose supernumerary chins and puffed eye pouches,
along with his pendulous flabby arm-flesh and his mountainous middle, was
pigmented gold, as were Sena and her father, Gold Ambon. He chuckled and
tweaked the girl's cheek.
“And, if you wish to indulge your masochistic inclinations, you can
continue to watch your hero—up to the bitter end. But, after I've gone,
please!”
Sena giggled. “Gold Dorff, you're our greatest psychiatrist, aren't you? I
mean, in the whole world?”
“I do have some reputation, I believe.”
“Of course you are, silly! But you said if I watched Kor I would be