"Роджер Желязны. Lord of Light (Лорд Света, engl) " - читать интересную книгу автора

His cheeks and forehead bloomed scarlet as Yama's hands tightened upon
his throat. His eye seemed to leap, a green search-light sweeping the world.
Mara fell to his knees. "Enough, Lord Yama!" he gasped. "Wouldst slay
thyself?"
He changed. His features flowed, as though he lay beneath restless
waters.
Yama looked down upon his own face, saw his own red hands plucking at
his wrists.
"You grow desperate now, Mara, as the life leaves you. But Yama is no
child, that he fears breaking the mirror you have become. Try your last, or
die like a man, it is all the same in the end."
But once more there was a flowing and a change.
This time Yama hesitated, breaking his strength.
Her bronze hair fell upon his hands. Her pale eyes pleaded with him.
Caught about her throat was a necklace of ivory skulls, but slightly paler
than her flesh. Her sari was the color of blood. Her hands rested upon his
own, almost caressing. . .
"Goddess!" he hissed.
"You would not slay Kali . . . ? Durga . . . ?" she choked.
"Wrong again, Mara," he whispered. "Did you not know that each man
kills the thing he loved?" and with this his hands twisted, and there was a
sound of breaking bones.
"Tenfold be your damnation," he said, his eyes tightly closed. "There
shall be no rebirth."
His hands came open then. A tall, nobly proportioned man lay upon the
floor at his feet, his head resting upon his right shoulder.
His eye had finally closed.
Yama turned the corpse with the toe of his boot. "Build a pyre and burn
this body," he said to the monks, not turning toward them. "Spare none of
the rites. One of the highest has died this day."
Then he removed his eyes from this work of his hands, turned upon his
heel and left the room.

That evening the lightnings fled across the skies and the rain came
down like bullets from Heaven.
The four of them sat in the chamber in the high tower that rose from
the northeast corner of the monastery.
Yama paced the room, stopping at the window each time he came to it.
The others sat watching him, listening.
"They suspect," he told them, "but they do not know. They would not
ravage the monastery of a fellow god, displaying before men the division of
their ranks-- not unless they were certain. They were not certain, so they
investigated. This means that time is still with us."
They nodded.
"A Brahmin who renounced the world to find his soul passed this way,
suffered an accident, died here the real death. His body was burnt and his
ashes cast into the river that leads to the sea. This is what occurred. . .
. The wandering monks of the Enlightened One were visiting at the time. They
moved on shortly after this occurrence. Who knows where they went?"
Tak stood as nearly erect as he could.