"Van Lustbader, Eric - Pearl 01 The Ring of Five Dragons(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)
"I long for the hunt!" Kinnnus Morcha boomed. "You can understand that, eh?" He clapped Annon on the back, making him wince against Giyan's breast. Kinnnus Morcha was a monstrously large man, even by V'ornn standards. Giyan was not a short woman, and yet the top of her head barely came up to Kinnnus Morcha's breastbone. Not that you could see his breastbone. It and everything surrounding it was sheathed in an alloy armor finely worked with aspects of the forbidding countenance of Enlil. "One day I myself will take you hunting, high up in the Djenn Marre, and if luck is with us we will bring back a per-willon!"
"Thank you, Line-General."
"Ah-ha, think nothing of it, little regent!" He clapped his huge hand around Annon's shoulder with such force that the boy bit his lip in order not to cry out. "And now I think you two had better be off. The regent awaits you in his chambers."
"Would you really go with the Line-General on his hunt?" Giyan asked, as they ascended the Great Staircase up to the second story.
Annon winced a little and tried to hide it from her. "To hunt per-willon? Of course"
"Perwillon are nasty, unpredictable creatures." Giyan shook her head. "I do not think your father would permit you to hunt such a dangerous animal."
"I have had my Channeling," he said shortly. "I am not a child, you know."
She smiled and, with her warm hand on his back, whisked him down the balcony, through a secret aperture in the wall that led to the living quarters without having to go through the Great Listening Hall. They emerged onto another balcony, -fiarrower but no less filled with light. Huge skylights opened the area to the heavens, washing the walls in vivid late-afternoon light. It was only after they had passed the door to his father's quarters that he asked her where they were going.
"Did you imagine that I would bring you to Eleusis with blood all over you?"
"Don't exaggerate. I told you it was nothing."
"And did you really expect me to believe you?" But she seemed gratified that he had switched back to Kundalan.
She took him through a door half-hidden in the shadows near the far end of the balcony and into the suite of rooms Eleusis had given her. Here, all was as it had been before the V'ornn occupation. He could smell the faint olfactory aftershocks of her incense: orangesweet and mugwort. She lit some now, then she carefully peeled off his jacket and blouse, parts of which were stuck to his rent skin. She grew these odoriferous herbs and strange, ugly mushrooms, he knew, in the secret garden she had somehow cajoled his father into setting aside for her. He grew angry with her over this intimate privilege no Kundalan should ever have been allowed, in part to inure himself from the fright in her eyes as she took in the mass of dried indigo blood surrounding the wounds, the slow turquoise ooze of fresh blood from the center.
"This is what you call nothing?"
Without another word, she guided him onto an oddly designed bent-wood chair that put him in a reclining position. He was about to protest when he yelped in pain.
Giyan's face blanched as she gently spun off the blood-soaked tour- niquet Kurgan had fashioned from his blouse. "Goddess in Heaven, what have you done to yourself?" Her delicate fingertips gently explored the wounds. Annon bit his lip. "Were you in a fight?" Giyan asked. "Was Kurgan hurt as well?"
Annon turned his head away and made no comment.
She moved closer. "There is something stuck in the wound, deep down. Your side is purple and puffy. I believe it is infected."
"Fix it, then, with your sorcery," he ordered, angry at her for finding out about his wound.
She stood for a moment, hands on hips, regarding him. Then she went to a huge heartwood armoire worked with complex Kundalan patterns. She rummaged around inside until she found what she wanted. Pulling out a leather bag, she plopped it onto the floor beside him.
"Goddess knows what would have happened had I not suspected something was amiss."
"Oh, yes," he said, staring at the filigreed ceiling, "you are all-knowing and all-wise."
She knew better than to argue with him when he got into one of his moods. She took out mortar and pestle, bags of roots and vines, dried flowers and fruit unfamiliar to him. Despite his resentment he found himself captivated by the sure and deft manner in which she broke, shredded, poured, sifted, measured ingredients into the mortar. He wanted to ask her what each ingredient was and why she was using it, but a sheet of anger had formed like ice over his hearts. It was so familiar and comforting that he would not break it even to make himself feel better.
She began to grind the contents of the mortar with the pestle, then stopped. "I need fresh datura inoxia for Annon's wound," she muttered to herself, and rose. "I must run down to the garden. I will not be long." She summoned a spell of healing. "Stay still, breathe deeply and slowly until I return."
Alone, he continued to stare at the ceiling, wondering why he should be angry at her. Perhaps she was overprotective of him, but that was clearly the mission his father had given her. And as for his wound, well, it did pain him more than slightly. He would be glad to have it healed. Resolving to be kinder to her when she returned, he moved stiffly and expelled a tiny groan.
Slowly, stiffly, painfully he got out of the bentwood chair. Bare-chested, he padded silently across the room and out the door. On the narrow balcony, he looked this way and that. It was deserted. On the other hand, the odor of bitterroot was stronger.
He looked around. The setting sun caused shafts of light the color of pomegranates to penetrate the lower quarter of the skylights. They hung in the air like tapestries, burnishing the fluted ammonwood handrails, staining the swath of carpet that ran the length of the balcony, firing a thin sliver of the wall.
Curious, Annon padded down to the very end of the balcony. Sunlight dazzled a small strip of metal he had never noticed before. Here, the wall was not flat; the reflective metal jutted out perhaps a millimeter or two. He grasped it and pulled, almost ripping a nail clean off as his fingers slid off the slick surface. He got a better hold of the metal strip, applied a steady pressure, and felt it move. A wedge of the wall swiveled silently out. A'hidden doorway opened up, like the one Giyan and he had used to get to the living wing of the palace. Except this one was unknown to him. Sucking on his torn nail, he poked his head into the aperture. Velvet darkness engulfed the interior, but the odor of bitterroot was almost nauseating in its intensity. He took a deep breath of the fresher air on the balcony and stepped through into the darkness.
He stretched out his arms and encountered solid objects: walls. From this evidence, he deduced that he was in a narrow corridor. He moved forward cautiously, but still he tripped down the first three steps and only a desperate grasp at the thin, cold metal handrail saved him from plunging headfirst into the abyss. The staircase spiraled down like the inside of a muodd shell. The pitch-black air was chill, acrid as silicon, laced as it was by the bitterroot smell.
He continued his descent until he came to a minuscule triangular landing. From here, the staircase branched off in three directions. He squatted down, felt around. The treads were of equal width; there was nothing to distinguish one from the other. Lacking a definitive clue as to which way to head, he chose the right branch. He could scent the bitterroot and was congratulating himself on his luck when something made him stop dead in his tracks.
He felt something, though he could not say what. The skin of his tender parts prickled in warning.
A strange pulse had been set off inside him. Somewhere, not far below him, something waited, something dark, vast, rippling. Terrifying. He stood very still, his hearts hammering in his chest.
He could not say why, but he knew he could not continue. The sense of danger was overwhelming. He began to back up, almost cried out as the back of his ankle struck the tread just above. He bit his lip. That strange pulse returned, stronger than ever. It was localized now beneath his ribs—from the very spot where the gyreagle had embedded its talon in his flesh. It felt as if the talon were on fire, pulsing to a rhythm far faster than his own double pulse.
He moved back up the stairs, careful to lift his feet high enough to reach the succession of ascending treads. All the while, his eyes frantically tried to part the heavy curtain of darkness.
Then he had regained the small landing. He was panting, sweat poured off him, but oddly his wound—or, more accurately, the embedded gyreagle talon—had ceased its frantic pulsing. Without thought, he plunged down the central staircase as fast as his legs would pump. A faint patch of dark grey seemed to wash the outer wall of the staircase, one moment real, the next seeming illusory.
Perhaps it was his haste that caused him to miss the last tread. He went over the edge, his hands grasped for the handrail that was not there, and he found himself hurtling down a spiral chute. He tried to scream, but the sound stuck in his throat like a milk-nettle. The grey patch of light grew in volume and intensity until it filled the chute with a blinding glare. Then, all at once, Annon was spat from the chute. He fell through the air for a space of perhaps three meters, only to land on a dank and musty stone floor.
As he rubbed his aches and bruises, he sat up and took a look around. He was in what appeared to be one of several interlinked caverns hewn out of the bedrock below the palace. At regular intervals around the rough rock walls, he saw beautifully fluted metal holders for pitch torches. A few held the remnants of such torches, but none was lit. Nevertheless, light fell upon him from high above. He craned his neck and saw an enormous oculus—a thick-paned window of an odd crystal in the shape of an eye which, Giyan had told him, had been made eons ago in a sorcerous fashion.
He scrambled up. Dead ahead of him was a cyclopean door, but one unlike any he had ever seen before. For one thing, it appeared to be made of solid rock. For another, it was perfectly round. In its center was a circular medallion with a wave motif into which was carved the mysterious figure of a dragon, just like the one upstairs he used to play with. He remembered putting his hand into its carven mouth. This one was curled into a circle, its head facing outward, its jaws hinged open. He stared at this terrifying and beautiful creature, powerfully drawn to it in some way he could not understand. He put his hands out, feeling its surfaces, tracing the intricate patterns of runes that covered it. He wished Giyan was there to translate for him. But perhaps she wouldn't. These looked like sorcerous symbols, similar to the ones in her cor-hide book, the one he had glanced through from time to time. Not that it had done him any good, he had no idea of the meaning of even a single rune since they were not Kundalan. And yet he kept coming back to the book, sneaking peeks at it whenever he was certain that he would not get caught. His fingers kept following the engraved lines like a blind person learning to read.
All at once, the round door rolled back into a previously hidden niche. It happened so swiftly, so silently he had no time to react. The light the oculus let in did not extend beyond the door. It was as if the darkness beyond was aqueous, the air swirling with thick eddies that smelled of the sea. A stirring from within, something huge, grotesque, monstrous. He felt a pulsing beneath his ribs at the point where the talon was lodged, but it was of a wholly different nature than when he had felt it on the stairs above. The moment the pulsing began, the angle of the light penetrating the oculus seemed to shift, sending a shaft of pearly light through the doorway. Annon felt it strike the back of his head with a kind of heat. Then it had shot beyond him, illuminating the thing that stood just inside the open door.
Annon had a quick glimpse of a floor littered with bones, skulls, tatters of Kundalan clothing. Then his gaze was riveted on the creature. It was so alien, his brain could scarcely take it in: it appeared to be six-legged, with a long, tapering, reptilian skull, horns that whirled like waterspouts, huge, sinuous sea-green body, long coral talons, gleaming teeth of pearl that protruded out beyond the silhouette of its head. Its powerful uppermost appendages were attached along their upper surfaces to a thin-veined membrane, triangular as a sail, moving like spindrift, gleaming prismatically. A long tail whipped back and forth like surf against a rocky shore.
These were brief but vivid impressions, taken in during the instant before one of the uppermost appendages reached out, grabbed him around the waist, and drew him quickly over the threshold into the inner cavern. In the wink of an eye, the door rolled shut, they were engulfed in the darkness, and Annon lost consciousness.
Starlight, Starbright
The only good Kundalan is a dead Kundalan." Having thus delivered this precis defining his core philosophy, Prime Factor Sto-gggul beckoned the Khagggun into his office suite. Though it was housed in a building of Kundalan manufacture, the interior space was wholly V'ornn. There were few windows, and those that did exist were fitted with a dark brown composite of silicon crystal with fiber-optic cables running through the panes.
The space was lighted at regular intervals by the cool bluish glow of teardrop fusion-lamps that illuminated not only the contents of the rooms but also a side to the Prime Factor's personality. Every geometric chair, desk, carpet, silicon case was arranged at right angles to one another. There was a severe and uncompromising symmetry: two of everything so that one-half of each room was the mirror image of the opposite half. The spines of each silicon wafer that contained books, charts, account ledgers, as well as plays, historical and philosophical texts were aligned just so. And there was another revelation illuminated: none of the rooms contained a knickknack, curio, memento, holoimage, or the like, nothing insofar as any visitor could see of his private life. It was as if his rank was on display as the sum and substance of Wennn Stogggul.
The Khagggun stood still as a sentry in a pool of shadow between fusion lamps.
Stogggul looked up from the holomap of Kundala that hung in the air above his massive copper-and-chronosteel desk. Blue, green, amber, black geometric shapes delineated continents, oceans, mountains, rivers, forests, swamps, deserts, cities. "Lead-Major"—he snapped his fingers in an irritated fashion—"what is your name again?"
"Frawn, Prime Factor," said the Haaar-kyut who had screened Giyan just hours ago.
"Ah, yes, Frawn," Stogggul said in a tone of voice that conferred his distaste for the name. "Have you a fear of being close to me?"
"No, Prime Factor."
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |