"David Drake - The General 1 - The Forge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

Closer, and the light was a narrow strip along one side of the door rather than a wedge; he pressed an eye to the crack, but it was reflecting around a tongue-and-groove socket that was almost closed. The air blew from inside to him, dry and metallic and tasting of . . . old bones ? he thought.
"Maybe I can get it open," he said experimentally, trying for a grip with his hands. The crack was too narrow, but his friend slapped the octagonal steel of the pry bar into his hand as he reached around behind for it. The metal was as thick as he could comfortably grip and about a meter long; one end flattened out into a wedge, and the other into a hook. The wedge slipped in easily enough, a hand's width, and he braced one foot against the jamb of the door.
"Wait a second," Thom murmured. He pointed to a rectangular plaque beside the blank gray rectangle of the portal. "I've seen an old manuscript that describes doors like these, Annaman'sRecords of the Settlement . The inscription said'touche thi squaire, und recessed it shall by . '"
"But will it work now?" Raj said, a little sharply. A Descott squire had better things to do with his youth than pour over ancient manuscripts and parse verbs in Old Namerique, to be sure. But it was still a little irritating, when some city noble trotted out a classical quotation. At least Thom's usually have somethingto do with reality , he thought.
For answer, Thom pointed at the light that picked out the highlights of their faces, and then slapped his hand on the control. There was achink sound deep inside the wall, and the door shifted slightly. So slightly that he would not have been conscious of it, except for the tremor of metal against his palms.
"Well, let me try muscle if scholarship won't budge it," Raj continued, forcing cheerfulness into his tone. "Andhsssssssaaaa !"
There was a moment of quivering tension, and then the door began to move; in a squealing jerk for the first centimeter or so, then more rapidly. Halfway open it stuck again with a soundless authority that told him something solid had fallen across the trackway. Raj leaned head and shoulders through, squinting and blinking against a fall of dust and the dim light.
"I can see where the light's coming from," he said.
Thom crowded up beside him, craning for a look. Beyond the door was a corridor five meters across, running right into darkness; on their left was a square of brighter light, another door. And the floor was two meters down from where they stood, the sagging remains of a metal stairway offering more hindrance than help.
"If you lay and held onto my wrists, I could drop to the bottom, Thom said.
"And how in the Outer Dark would you get backup ?"Raj said dryly. "Here, let me have your belt."
The smaller man handed over the narrow dress belt of his jacket; it was rogosauroid hide traded down from the Skinner country north of Pierson's Sea, and strong enough to hold four times their combined weight; Raj's was much the same, except that it was broader and less elaborately tooled. He looked thoughtfully at the door, tapping the heel of his palm experimentally on the edge. It seemed to have stuck fast. On the other hand . . . The pry bar was just a little shorter than the width the door had opened; he laid it in the opening and stamped on it until it seated firmly, the wedge-end driven under the bottom between runway and door.
"This'll hold the belts," he said, buckling one to the other. "I'd better go first."
Raj took the leather in one hand and his pistol in the other, bracing his boots on the wall and rapelling down in three bounds. Dust spurted up under his feet and bone crunched, spurting more dust. He swore and spat, unpleasantly conscious of how long it had been since he had a drink. Then he swore again, softly, as Thom dropped down beside him and the nature of the floor he was standing on became plain.
"Bones," he whispered. Thom unshuttered his lantern and swung the beam around, brighter than the white glow from the doorway and better for picking out detail.
"Lotsof bones," his friend agreed, sounding more subdued than usual.
Not quite enough that you could not find clear space for your feet, but nearly, and the crumbled dust between them spoke of others still older.
"And look," Thom continued. "What the hell'sthat ?"Thatwas a rust-crusted weapon; Raj picked it up, and pursed his lips in a soundless whistle.
"It's a koorg-rifle," he said. "The Civil Government Armory stopped issuing them two hundred years ago."
Raj might not have been to the schools of rhetoric, but there wasnothing wrong with his grasp of military history. "Double-barreled muzzle loader with octagonal barrels."
His friend's light picked out other items of equipment; off by the other wall there was what looked like one of the ceremonial weapons the mannequins of the Audience Hall Guard carried. Raj looked closer: it was not, it was a reallaser , the ancient Holy Federation weapon. The metal men in the Hall of Audience carried non-functional replicas, but this was the real thing. The soldier's eyes narrowed as he followed the line of the muzzle; there was a deep pit to the upper right of the door, melted into the stonework, with a long dribbling icicle of lava below it. Nothing on the metal of door or frame, although the melt would have crossed it.
"Thom," Raj said briskly. "This has gone too far; this is seriously strange. We should fall back and report. Now ."
Reluctantly, the other man nodded. AndЧ
CRANG. The door above their heads slammed shut so quickly that the huge musical note of the pry bar breaking was almost lost in the thunder-slam of its closing. A fragment of the steel bar cannoned across the corridor and ricocheted back, falling at Raj's feet. He bent to touch it, and stopped when his skin felt a glow from the torsion-heat of breakage. Thom was standing and examining the linked belts; the buckle that had fastened them to the bar was missing, and the tough reptile hide cut as neatly as if it had been sliced with a razor. Raj felt a giant hand seize his chest, squeezing, tasted bile at the back of his throat.
"Well," he said, and heard it come out as a croak. "Well, itis still active."
Thom nodded jerkily. "Notice something about the skeletons?" he said.
Raj looked around. "Pretty dead."
"Yes, and no marks on the bones. Looks like they fell in place, and nothing disturbed them ."
Raj Whitehall nodded. The surviving skeletons were eerily complete, like an anatomy model; no toothmarks, nothing disturbed by scavengers.
"I don't think there's much point in going that way," he answered, waving to the darkness on their right. The beam of his lamp showed nothing but the walls of the corridor, fading to a geometric point with distance. "That heads due east, near as I can tell." Out from under the city and towards the hills. "If there's anything beyond that . . . light . . . we might find another shaft leading up."
Thom nodded, wiping a sleeve across his mouth. "Maybe. I wish we'd brought some water."
Raj grinned. "I wish you hadn't said that," he said. "I really do."
-=0=-***-=0=-
"Mirrors," Thom said. For the first time in Raj's memory, there was real awe in his friend's voice. "I've neverseen mirrors like this.
"I've never seen alight like that, either," Raj said.
The room was circular, floored and roofed with mirrors, and with a single seamless sheet of mirror for the walls. The center of the circle was a pillar of light; white, glareless, heatless, odorless, shining on the endless repeated figures of the two men. Raj felt himself stagger in place, lost and splintered in fractions of himself. It was a moment before he noticed the last, the intolerable strangeness.
"Thom," he said urgently. "Why don't the mirrors reflect the light?"There it was before their eyes, a column as physically real as their own hands, a light that was all that kept this place from being as dark as a coffin. Yet in the mirrors there was no trace of it, only the two men and their equipment.
Thom blinked for an instant; then his eyes widened and he turned to run. Did run, one single step before freezing in place as if turned to stone. Even his expression froze, and Raj could see that his pupils shared the paralysis. The doorway that had been Thom's goal had . . . not closed, simply vanished; only the direction of the living statue that had been his friend enabled Raj to tell it from any other part of the smooth mirror curve. The light-pillar in the center of the room blazed higher.
Raj fired, with his second finger on the trigger and the index pointing along the barrel, the way the armsman had taught him: at close range, you just pointed and pulled. The five shots rang out almost as one, the orange muzzle flashes and smoke dazzling his eyes. Almost as loud was thebang-whinnnng of the soft lead bullets ricocheting and spattering off the diamond hard surfaces of the room; they left no mark at all. Something struck Raj in the foot with sledgehammer force, a bullet tearing off the heel of one boot. A long tear appeared in the floppy tweed of Thom's breeches . . . Then nothing, nothing except an acrid cloud of dirty-white powder smoke that made Raj cough reflexively.
Raj's muscles seized halfway through the motion of reloading. A voice spoke: not in his ears, but in his mind. Spoke with an inhuman detachment that had a flavor of hard-edged crispness:
yes. yes, you will do very well.
Chapter two
The floor had vanished, and the pillar of light. There was nothing beneath him, although he could feel the pressure of weight under his feet. The off-white haze of powder smoke cleared rapidly, as if the air was being circulated without a detectable breeze. Thom hung suspended also, still in the first motion of flight, as if this was the Outer Dark where those who rejected the Spirit of Man fell frozen forever.
He heard his throat trying to whimper, and that brought him back to himself. He was a Whitehall of Hillchapel, and a soldier, and a man grown. The worst this whatever-it-was could do was kill him, and a paving stone in the riots could have done that. Or a scropied in his boot on a hunting trip, or a Colonist bullet or a Brigade bayonet. His soul only the Spirit could damn or save.
yes. excellent.
"Who the Dark are you?" Raj said, trying for the tone his lather had used on machinery-salesmen back at Hillchapel. Hillchapel, sweet wild scent of the silverpine blowing down from the heights, the sound of a blacksmith's hammer on ironЧ
I am Sector Command and Control Unit AZ12-b14-c000 Mk. XIV.
Awe struck the human; he tried to genuflect, found himself still immobile. "Are you . . . acomputer ?"he asked incredulously.
yes. although not in the sense you use the term.
"What do you mean?"