"Charles Stross - Duat" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

curtain behind her creaked open a fraction: there was an angry hissing from behind it.
"Don't even dream about subversion. Won't tolerate it! The Duat is all mine. Mine! Won't
let the other gods spoil it! Won't let the dead souls spoil it! Won't ever let them go! Now
leave me!"

Oshi glanced over her shoulder at the vestibule; oh shit. The Goon waiting there had
spotted her. Blind terror gave her wings as she leapt to one side, past an eviscerated
woman who had withered into a leathery mass gripped between chains: she yanked the
door open and shut behind her, fumbled blindly with the cast-iron bolt, then turned and
tensed. Something snapped insider her and she ran into the guts of the castle, sobbing for
breath, cold terror coursing through her veins.

Minutes passed before sanity brought her stumbling to a halt in a corridor of hewn stone
blocks, floored in fused sandstone. The sole illumination was a glow-lamp recessed in the
ceiling: it cast shadows as sharp as a knife blade behind her. Where she was was a
mystery. Her sense of direction, normally as acute as any navigation system, had deserted
her completely somewhere in the maze of the redoubt. An acrid scent tickled her nostrils.
She had only smelt it once before, but it was enough to make her shudder.

Those monsters. He must breed them up somewhere. She shivered at the thought. He's
cracked. How in hell do I report back now? Is there some other power base I can focus
on?

She began to pace along the corridor, reflexes alert for signs of danger as she turned the
problem around in her mind. Item: Anubis is stone crazy. Why? He's on his own. If what
Year Zero Man said was halfway true, that would fit. No stimulation. A human being in
sense-dep for three days shows signs of distress; total isolation for much longer than that
produces psychotic effects, hallucinations. How much worse could it be for a being with a
thousand times the information-processing bandwidth of a human mind?

Someone, somewhere, must know ... Oshi blinked. A tickle on the back of her neck, where
there were no hairs to be disturbed. There was high-density Wisdom traffic nearby.
Flick ... her sub-cortical modifications came on-line, sucking in the signal greedily. Not
enough process-power to figure out what was going through, but enough to know that it

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2: In the Duat

was heavy. Anubis, perhaps. Oshi could feel it, sense the two-way traffic as subtle signals
pulsed back and forth. Something is very wrong. It isn't just Anubis' psychosis. Even
paranoids have enemies. I wonder why Anubis needs guards?

There was a doorway set back in the corridor wall. Corridors made Oshi nervous. Like a
burglar exploring at midnight she sought shelter, somewhere to hide. It looked promising.
She bent to listen, heard nothing. When she turned the handle and pushed, the door
creaked like a breaking neck. She avoided the poisoned spike and the other trap with ease:
they had not been placed well, or the designers had not anticipated that they might be
encountered by someone who could see in the dark. The room she found on the other side
of the hidden trapdoor was completely dark, shrouded with a carpet of dust. Oshi glanced
round, jacking her eyes down into infrared. Boxes and ... no, coffins. Oddly shaped