"Diane Duane - Feline Wizards 2 - Majesty's Wizardly Service" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

office buildings should have been. The traffic was gone, too. Or
rather, it was all replaced by carriages, carriages pulled by horses,
their hooves making a strangled wet clopping noise as they pounded
through the mud, up and down Great Tower Street. Patel staggered,
changed the bag mechanically from the right hand to the left, and
took a few more steps forward, looking away from the traffic, don't
want to see that, doesn't make sense, and across to the Tower.

It at least was still there: the great square outer walls defining
the contours of Tower Hill stood up unchanged, the lesser corner
towers reached upward as always, "the windvanes on them wheeling and
whirling in the gusts of wind off the river -- the wind that bore the
stink forcefully into Patel's nostrils and the rain, now falling a
little harder, into his face, cold and insistent. That wind got into
his hair and tried to find its way under his jacket collar; and
around him, the few trees sprouting from the unseen pavement rocked
in the wind, their bare branches rubbing and ratcheting together.
Bare. That was wrong. It was September. And other things were moving,
rocking too --

Momentarily distracted by the motion, he looked past the Tower, down
toward Lower Thames Street and the great bend of the river which
began there. A forest, he thought at first, and then rejected the
thought as idiotic. No trees would be so straight and bare, with no
branches but one or two sets each, wide crosspieces set well up the
trunk: nor would trees be crowded so close together, or rock together
so unnervingly, practically from the root. The "trees" were masts ...
masts of ships, fifty or seventy or a hundred of them all anchored
there together, the wind and the water pushing at the ships from
which the masts grew; and the bare shapes silhouetted against the
morning gray were all rocking, rocking slightly out of phase, making
faint uneasy groaning noises that he could hear even at this
distance, for they were perhaps a quarter of a mile down the river
from where he stood. From that direction too came a mutter of human
voices, people shouting, going about their business, the sound muted
by the wind that rose around him and rocked the groaning masts
together --

That groan got down inside Patel, went up in pitch and began to shake
him until he rocked like the masts, staggering, falling, the world
receding from him. The bag fell from Patel's hand, unnoticed.

A man came round the corner right in front of Patel and looked at
him, then opened his mouth to say something.

Patel jumped, meaning to run away: but his raw nerves misfired and
sent him blundering straight into the man. As Patel came at him, the
strangely dressed man staggered hurriedly backward, panic-stricken,
tripped and fell -- then scrambled himself up out of the mud with an
unintelligible shout and ran crazily away. Patel, too, turned to