"Zelazny, Roger - Amber 10 - Prince Of Chaos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

stooped, gray and red demonic form, horned and half-scaled, regarded me with
elliptically pupiled yellow eyes. Its fangs were bared in a smile.
"Uncle!" I cried as I dismounted. "Greetings!"
Gryll stretched and shook himself as Suhuy rushed forward and embraced
me--carefully.
"Merlin," he said at last, "welcome home. I regret the occasion but rejoice
in your presence. Gryll has told you...?"
"Of the passing of His Highness? Yes. I'm sorry."
He released me and stepped back a pace.
"It is not as if it were unanticipated," he said. "Just the opposite. Too
much so, in fact. Yet there is no proper time for such an event."
"True," I replied, massaging a certain stiffness out of my left shoulder
and groping in my hip pocket after a comb.
"And he had been ailing for so long that I had grown used to it," I said.
"It was almost as if he'd come to terms with the weakness."
Suhuy nodded. Then, "Are you going to transform?" he asked.
"It's been a rough day," I told him. "I'd as soon save my energy, unless
there's some demand of protocol."
"None at all, just now," he replied. "Have you eaten?"
"Not recently."
"Come then," he said. "Let's find you some nourishment."
He turned and walked toward the far wall. I followed him. There were no
doors in the room, and he had to know all the local Shadow stress points, the
Courts being opposite to Amber in this regard. While it's awfully hard to pass
through Shadow in Amber, the shadows are like frayed curtains in the
Courts--often, you can look right through into another reality without even
trying. And, sometimes, something in the other reality may be looking at you.
Care must be taken, too, not to step through into a place where you will find
yourself in the middle of the air, underwater, or in the path of a raging
torrent. The Courts were never big on tourism.
Fortunately, the stuff of Shadow is so docile at this end of reality that
it can be easily manipulated by a shadowmaster--who can stitch together their
fabrics to create a way. Shadowmasters are technicians of locally potent skill,
whose ability derives from the Logrus, though they need not be initiates. Very
few are, although all initiates are automatically members of the Shadowmaster
Guild. They're like plumbers or electricians about the Courts, and their skills
vary as much as their counterparts on the Shadow Earth--a combination of
aptitude and experience. While I'm a guild member I'd much rather follow someone
who knows the ways than feel them out for myself. I suppose I should say more
about this matter. Maybe I will sometime.
When we reached the wall, of course, it wasn't there. It just sort of grew
misty and faded away; and we passed through the space where it had been--or,
rather, a different analogous space--and we were passing down a green stairway.
Well, it wasn't exactly a stairway. It was a series of unconnected green discs,
descending in spiral fashion, proper riser and tread distance apart, sort of
floating there in the night air. They passed about the exterior of the castle,
finally stopping before a blank wall. Before we reached that wall we passed
through several moments of bright daylight, a brief flurry of blue snow, and the
apse of something like a cathedral without an altar, skeletons occupying pews at
either hand. When we finally came to the wall we passed through it, emerging in