"Jack Dann - The Diamond Pit" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dann Jack)

craned my neck for one last look at the plane -- and at Joel, the poor dumb
jake who just had to see if the stories were true about a grand castle on the
mountain. Now Joel was dead, his face shot off, and I was being carried away
by giants who were speaking a dialect like none I'd ever heard; in fact, I
couldn't understand a word, although I couldn't help but think it was _some_
form of Southern English.
And we hadn't even seen a castle.
Damn you, Joel.
I blacked out, and woke up as I was being thrown this way and that in
the seat of some kind of souped-up, armored suburban; but this beast hadn't
rolled off any of Henry Ford's production lines. It was a chimerical
combination of tank and automobile. Instead of windows, the passenger cab had
thick glass portholes, and Lewis machine guns were mounted on the hood and
trunk. I could hardly hear the motor as we sped and jostled into the long
purple shadows of the mountains above, and my captors were as quiet as the
mountains.
When I woke again, after dreaming that Joel was fine and we were back
in the Moth gliding silently through the night over castles and fairy lights,
I found myself in the air indeed. The suburban was being hoisted up the sheer
face of a cliff, rising into the milky moonlight; and, startled, I bolted
forward. The two black giants beside me pulled me back into the cushioned
softness of the seat and held me there. I tried to talk to them, to ask them
what was going on, but they just shook their heads as though they couldn't
understand me.
Then with a bounce the suburban was lowered onto solid ground. Two men
and a boy were waiting beside a crane used on aircraft carriers to hoist boats
and planes; and as they removed the cables that had been attached to the
hub-guards of the huge truck-tyred wheels, they spoke to each other in that
peculiar dialect that was both familiar -- and unfamiliar.
Once again we drove, only now we were that much closer to the sky. As I
looked out through the porthole on my right, the moon looked green, radiating
its wan, sickly light through filigrees of cloud; and the road made of
tapestry brick was as straight and neat and ghostly as the fog and mist that
clung to it.
We passed a lake that could have been a dark mirror misted with breath
and reflecting the stars and bloated moon. I caught a sudden scent of pine,
and then I saw it, a chateau -- no, rather a moon-painted castle -- with
opalescent terraces, walkways, mosque-like towers, and outbuildings rising
from broad, tree-lined lawns.
But my destination, alas, would be otherwise.
--------
*Two*
"_Hell's bells, it's almost noon._"
"_Clarence, how would you know whether it was noon or what? Your
wristwatch has stopped so many times, it could be midnight._"
"_Don't call me Clarence or I'll break your legs._"
"_You an' whose army_?"
I snapped awake and looked around the room, which resolved around me.
Walls, floor, ceiling seemed to be made of a piece, a smooth, translucent
layer of opal, which glowed with light; but I could not discern the source of