"John DeChancie - Castle 05 - Castle Murders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dechancie John)

for instance. What nationality is it? English, via Anglo-Norman? French? Anglicized Italian? The name
is very possibly a pseudonym. And who are the individuals whose fawning endorsements are bruited on
and about the cover? Presumably approving critics or admiring colleagues of the author, and we would
be forced to conclude one or the other or both, were it not for the fact that no trace can be found of these
people either. Phantoms all! Then there is the matter of the cover тАЬart.тАЭ What sort of deranged soul could
тАж? But let us set these relatively trivial matters aside.)

What, then, are we to make of all this? The only conjecture to acquire any currency has it that The
Eidolons originated in a world that is a variant of Earth and one in which the castle is a fiction, not the
reality we know. Here we tread disputed ground, for some hold that there are more than 144,000
universes. In fact, there may be an infinite number of them, of which the assortment provided by the
castle is only a random and constantly shifting sample. Be that as it may, the conjecture that these books
were generated in some backwater universe does not explain how they came to the castle, nor how they
were written. Indeed, it makes the issue all the more obscure, for how could a stranger to the castle, a
stranger even to the universe in which the castle exists, have produced these highly romanticized but
essentially accurate accounts, even to describing the intimate thoughts and sometimes inexplicable
actions of the master of Castle Perilous, Incarnadine, King by the grace of the gods and Lord of the
Western Pale?


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 Castle MurdersJohn DeChanciee-reads2002Texttext/html0-7592-6266-7en-usen-usCopyright ┬й 1994 by John DeChancie{59FFE082-6408-11


We can dismiss out of hand the notion that His Majesty penned The Eidolons, for he has categorically
denied it.

Who then? A Guest? If so, why the secrecy? What is he (or she) hiding?

I have no answers to these questions, but, as Royal Librarian, I can here offer a somewhat different
explanation for the origin of The Eidolons.

The castleтАЩs library is an enigma in itself. Not a day goes by when the library staff is not surprised by
finding some new wonder on its shelves, books that were not even suspected to exist. Marvelous books,
strange books тАФ even dangerous books. (One such describes the construction of a weapon so terrible
that I cannot bring myself to describe its intended effects. Another provides schematics for an infernal
device which, from what can be made of it, is intended for the express purpose of trapping a god. Which
deity is to be bagged is not specified. Needless to say, these and other dismaying oddities have been
sequestered in the Closed Stacks, where, if I have anything to say in the matter, they will remain
indefinitely.) Where do these books come from? Not even Lord Incarnadine can say. He himself has
added very few books to the collection. Thus, I am not beyond imagining that the library itself has
magically generated The Eidolons. How? I know not. Why has it chosen to do so in such a peculiar
idiom? I cannot fathom it. But the works exist, and that is enough for me. Their significance and
importance cannot be questioned.

You hold in your hand a new edition of The Eidolons, painstakingly set in movable type from the
originals, printed on vellum stock, and bound in fine-grained leather with gilt lettering and filigree. The
text is faithfully reproduced without editorial emendation or gloss.

Read The Eidolons and wonder, taking with a grain of salt its melodramatic excesses. Written in an