"Karl Edward Wagner - In the Wake of the Nught" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wagner Karl Edward)

strangled you.”
Nays glanced at him, then nodded—he had been with Kethrid long enough to
follow the twisting course of his thoughts. “It would only have broken its
fangs on its shell. The material of that hull is less yielding than the rock.”
Kethrid continued to stare, entranced. The sea-wind flapped the azure cloak
about his bony frame, hung bits of spray in the tightly curled brown hair that
haloed his thin, beardless face. Solid Nays sipped brackish water from a
canteen, and passed it among the rest of their party—a dozen soldiers, eyes
wary for mermen, and Bryssla, flat face alert and unreadable. The merchant
prince waved aside the canteen and unstop-pered a small flask of wine from his
panniers.
“You can see more from up close,” Nays reminded sardonically.
“Surely,” Kethrid agreed, shrugging off the mazed spell. “Let’s be getting
there, then.”
The horses started forward, slowly covering the distance of a few miles that
separated the men from the ship. Kethrid was too stricken with wonder to
fidget with his customary impatience. On the barren shoreline the wreck had
seemed less than a mile away. More than ever the realization of the ship’s
enormous size was borne upon him.
Even then, his imagination was overwhelmed as they reached their goal and
full awareness came to them. Muttering hushed exclamations, Kethrid let his
horse slowly pick his way past the piled drift that nested against the wreck.
The tide was at ebb, and although it took a quarter of an hour, they were able
to circle the entire length of the ship.
Standing in its shadow, Kethrid’s initial impression of a beached leviathan
held true. Its hull seemed organic, streamlined—like the shape of some
impossibly huge whale. The long, black, curved hull tapered toward either end,
with its stern slightly more rounded. The ship seemed to rest on its side. The
lower sections of its hull thrust against the surf—exposing a blunt keel like
the elongated dorsal fin of a shark. At the keel’s trailing edge, a number of
evenly spaced protuberances made dull blisters many yards across. Toward its
upper sections the hull flattened, appeared to frame onto a single open deck
for most of the vessel’s great length. But much was buried in sand here on its
shore-ward face.
And here the ship had received its deathwound. A jagged tear pierced through
the canted deck, like the blow of some gigantic harpoon through the back of a
whale. It had gored a path of perhaps fifty yards along the hull, making a
cavern into the ship’s belly.
Kethrid dismounted. The lips of the wound were about ten feet apart, ragged
edges strangely fused and pitted. So the black metal could be destroyed after
all, he mused, wondering what vast energies had burned such a cleft. Kethrid
had worked with samples of this metal in his forge in Carsultyal, and even
temperatures that transmuted iron into steel had not melted the alien alloy.
Lighter, yet harder than steel, the black metal would be of untold worth to
mankind, if he could only discover how to work it. There were countless
secrets hidden in the ruins of Elder Earth. Kethrid had wrested many such
secrets from oblivion already; perhaps the black metal would be next.
He stood before the cavernous rift and peered within. He heard the slap-lap
of hidden waters, stirred by the pounding of the surf. A strong stench of
stagnant sea and rotting jetsam came from within. Sand and shells had poured