"Van Lustbader, Eric - Pearl 02 The Veil Of A Thousand Tears(eng)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Van Lustbader Eric)

At that moment, a shadow fell between them, and they looked out the window to see a crowned owl crossing before the full moon on huge silent brindled wings. An omen, Giyan thought, her heart constricting. Miina has sent us a sign.
And then it seemed as if the crowned owl had crashed through the window, or perhaps it was the moonslight itself that had been transmogrified to a solid column of energy. The books flew off the table, their pages ruffling like the feathers of angry birds. Others exploded off the shelves, great ranks rising in unison in response to the disturbance.
Riane herself was flung backward, skidding across the floor, trying to right herself, being shoved sideways by the unknown force. She fetched up against a heavy ammonwood chair, which had crashed over onto its side. A leg struck her rib cage painfully.
She saw Giyan, her back arched, her arms stretched upward, pulled as if by invisible cords. Drafts of air, cold as death, circled the Library, howling, so that when Riane tried to call out to Giyan her voice was swept away. Riane's heart turned over. As she watched with mounting horror, Giyan rose into the air.
An eerie glow was emanating from the chrysalides that covered Giyan's hands and forearms. They were black no longer, but had begun to turn an ash grey. As their color lightened, thin layers peeled off and, like plates of armor, whirled around and around in the vortex. Upon reaching the periphery, they were hurled like ice-white missiles, slicing through books, furniture. They lodged in the fluted columns, in the carved lintels above the doors, in the walls themselves. Riane ducked as one passed centimeters from her head. It made a sinister whistling sound as it spun away like the beveled blades of a fan.
She tried to stand and fell back in a heap. All the heat was being sucked out of the Library. A chill entered her bones, sheathing them in pearly frost, making of their marrow a dry white ash. Breath caught in her lungs, painful as a sandstorm, as if the air itself were being torn asunder, remade into something dark, dense with menace, wicked as sin.
At last, the chrysalides had let go of Giyan, the sheaths had come off, and her hands and forearms stood revealed, thick with sinuous red veins and ropey yellow arteries, standing out in convolute profusion.
Her eyes were wide and staring, their blue turned an eerie opalescent white, and in their center pinprick black pupils. Her mouth was drawn back in the rictus normally associated with death. Through her long, thickly flowing hair was now wound shards of a dark metallic substance that at once cradled the back of her head, curling up into corkscrewed points, a kind of thorned crown, living things that shifted and shimmered in the lamplight, glimmered and glistened as they wove themselves into a pattern of hideous design.
The moonlight, flooding through the rent window, was pale, insubstantial. The dust motes held in its columns shivered. Riane felt herself caught as if in a deep dream, her limbs felt like deadweights, her thoughts slow as frozen sap. As in a nightmare, she felt both terrified and helpless. She had the presence of mind to understand that her very helplessness compounded the terror, and yet that knowledge was of little use to her. Her mind was filled with an awful martial drumbeat that foretold her losing Giyan once again. She did not think that she could bear it.
But now there was no more time for thought. Giyan fixed her with her bizarre and frightening white eyes and her left arm came down, describing a shallow arc that brought her hand to point directly at Riane. Riane could see in the center of each palm a corkscrewed spike similar to the elements of the thorned crown piercing her flesh right through, though there was no blood or even any semblance of a wound. Rather, the spike seemed part of her, as, indeed, the crown seemed to have grown from the bones of her skull.
She saw the vein-wrapped forefinger unfurl, the black nail, long and gleaming, extending from it. Riane felt displaced, separated from the world around her. Her Third Eye opened in response to the horror and saw blood all around her, buckets of blood, cauldronsful, a veritable ocean of blood, life draining away down an ancient stone drain clogged with eons of blackened moss and decay, the slimy debris of time. Here was a moment she would remember all her life, a moment that would haunt her waking hours and stalk her dreams, Giyan is dead, long live . . . What? What foul beast had the Lady become?
As best she could, she cast about for a counterspell to the sorcerous transformation the chrysalides had worked on Giyan, but she knew so few spells, and none of them seemed right. You are untrained. Even with a power as great as yours you are at a grave disadvantage against your enemies without the knowledge of the ancients, Mother had told her. This is why you must exercise extreme caution. This is why you must keep your identity hidden as much as you can until your schooling in the sorcerous arts is compete.
Oh, yes, Mother was right. And so was Giyan. Her enemies had wasted no time in mounting another attack. In desperation, she spoke the words of the Old Tongue, conjuring Earth Granary, the most potent of Osoru healing spells.
At almost the same instant, she heard the quick sizzle, as of frying flesh. It made her skin crawl, her heart beat fast. And then all the breath was knocked out of her as the sorcerous spell hit her dead on. It was well that she had cast Earth Granary, for it afforded her a measure of protection, the difference between life and death.
She flickered between consciousness and unconsciousness as she crawled painfully across the Library floor, and she set all her reserves of energy into redoubling the spell, holding it close around her, so that it would not fly apart in a thousands shreds, exposing her entirely to the ferocious attack.
And, then, there it was, leaking from the suppurating ends of Giyan's fingertips: the Tzelos, writhing in its noncorporeal state as the thing that had been Giyan gave birth to the daemon from the Abyss.
The rotting cor-meat stink of the Tzelos assaulted her. It was black as steaming pitch, its twelve-legged body segmented like an insect's, its bloated thorax protected by a hard carapace. Its long flat ugly head, brown-black, shiny as obsidian, was guarded by monstrous serrated mandibles. Twelve faceted eyes, burning like garnets, fixed on her.
Riane struggled to rise as the spell dissipated, drew her dagger, preparing to defend herself. Giyan was moving, but Riane's attention was wholly taken up with the advancing Tzelos. And then she saw something out of the corner of her eye, a furry, six-limbed creature with triangular ears, a long, striped, puffy tail, and dark, intelligent eyes. Thigpen was Rappa.
"Thigpen, get back!" Riane cried.
The creature ignored her. Shaking off her dizziness, she grabbed an upended lamp, hurled it in a sidearm motion. It struck the Tzelos and passed right through it. An illusion, just like the one that had appeared when she had mistakenly killed Mother. The Tzelos rushed at her, and she instinctively steeled herself.
"Ignore it," Thigpen said. "Use your Third Eye to distinguish what is real and what is not."
Riane felt a brief chill, like ice sliding down the back of her neck. Giyan began to rise off the ground. Her arms were spread wide, her head thrust slightly back, her jaw clenched and set. Employing the sorcerous sight from her Third Eye, Riane detected another presence inside Giyan. It coiled inside her like a gigantic serpent, spiraling up her spine. With a sickening shock, Riane realized that it had entered her brain. The presence was levitating her.
Riane watched, stunned, as Giyan, her long hair writhing like a nest of bloodworms, flew toward the broken window and passed through it.
"We must not allow her to escape," Thigpen cried.
"Something has taken possession of her! I can feel it!" Riane said. "What is happening?"
"It is Malasocca," Thigpen whispered. "It means 'Dark Night of the Soul'. I do not know the way of it; I'm not sure anyone alive does. But I understand this much: piece by piece, her spirit is being replaced by that of a daemon. If we cannot stop her, if she heeds the call, if she vanishes, she will be lost to us, Riane. Lost for all time." Thigpen was scampering across the floor, ignoring the shards of glass that stuck to the pads of her slender handlike paws. "Worse, she will be replaced by our most implacable enemy."
"How do we stop that from happening?"
"If the host body is destroyed, the daemon is returned to the Abyss," Thigpen said.
"I will not kill her."
"It is the way of the Malasocca," Thigpen replied.
"There must be another way."
"I do not know of any. The daemon is still vulnerable now, but not for much longer."
"Still. I will not harm her."
Thigpen's whiskers were twitching, a sure sign of her acute distress. "I love Giyan as much as you do, Dar Sala-at, but terrible forces have been unleashed. Before this is over, you may very well wish you had killed her while you had the chance."
Riane, gaining the windowsill, balanced precariously for a moment, gathering equilibrium and momentum before launching herself upward with outstretched arms, grabbing Giyan around the ankles. Thigpen, just behind her, shrieked a warning as she leapt to the ground.
Giyan glared down, her unholy eyes alight, and cold fire sprang from her fingertips. Riane cried out and released her grip, falling two meters into the sere grass just outside the shattered window. Above, the pale fire traveled across her back until it reached the image of the Tzelos. There, it seemed to be sucked up into the daemon's outline, filling it out, causing it to pulse and glow. A nasty rustling arose, as of an army of insects ominously on the march.
The Tzelos swiveled its flat triangular head. A kind of crusty substance bubbled out of a series of palpitating apertures behind its faceted eyes. Its wicked-looking mandibles clicked together. Riane could see Rekkk and Eleana, weapons raised, approaching the daemon. But surely it was the sight of Giyan so hideously transformed that caused the look of consternation on their faces.
"Lady-" Eleana began before she choked on her words.
"Giyan, what the N'Luuura has befallen you?" Rekkk's face was white and strained.
"The chrysalides have broken open," Riane said.
"We must help her." Thigpen regarded them each in turn with her dark intelligent eyes. "Mercy, yes, we must help her now or all is lost."
Rekkk leapt over the wreckage of the broken window. Fearless, Eleana was just behind him. The Tzelos reared up on three sets of hind legs. Its upper appendages lashed out, trailing glistening cilia behind them. A wedge of mouth opened just as Rekkk swung his shock-sword and the Tzelos vomited up a gout of a yellow sticky substance that clung to the blades. The pitch of their vibration altered, causing a blow-back pulse that sent a wave of agonizing pain up Rekkk's arm.
Eleana was following in his wake, her shock-sword drawn back. Riane could see the tension in her arm, saw her concentrated completely on the daemon, saw what she failed to see, Giyan's right arm sweeping downward and, with it, a shower of crystalline sparks. A terrified gimnopede, frightened out of its nest, launched upward. Caught in the spiral band of the sparks, it turned black and rigid, plummeting like a rock to the ground.
The spirals were almost at Eleana's height when Riane threw herself forward. Eleana skittered, her booted foot slipping, and, as she toppled over, the scythes of crystalline sparks passed centimeters above her. Riane caught her, cradled her, aware in one all-encompassing instant that Eleana's heat and warmth, her scent, wound around her, binding her.
Just above where they lay, the air was sizzling, momentarily drained of heat. Then Eleana, the entire world, dropped away down a well. Riane felt the dislocation that came when she shed her corporeal body, crossed over into Ayame, the deep trance-state of Osoru.
In Otherwhere, she confronted a horrible sight: the great bird Ras Shamra, Giyan's sorcerous Avatar, was caged, its powerful wings pinioned at its side. The image of the real Giyan was imprisoned by some unknown wicked force. Ras Shamra saw her, uttered a soul-shattering cry that shook the very foundations of the sorcerous realm. When Riane tried to approach the cage, Ras Shamra became frantic, shrieking over and over, throwing its body against the bars until it bled in many places.
"Stop! Stop!" Riane cried. "I only want to help you!"
But Ras Shamra would not stop. If anything, as Riane approached, the Avatar become even more frantic.
Riane began the ritual for the Star of Evermore, the spell she had used to free Mother, to try to break the bars of the sorcerous cage. But as she did so, a shadow fell over Otherwhere. She looked up, the incantation frozen in her throat. A great Eye was opening, the Eye of Ajbal, and now she knew why Ras Shamra was shrieking. It was trying to warn her. She knew she was no match for this powerful spell. Indeed, it had once almost undone Giyan herself.
"Don't give up," she said to the image of Giyan. "I will come back for you, no matter how long it takes,"