"Hal Duncan - Vellum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Hal)

Hal Duncan
Vellum
The Book of All Hours: 1

To my Dad, for the quirks and convictions
To my Mum, for the food parcels and forbearance
And above all, to Ewan
Forever

VOLUME ONE
The Lost Deus of Sumer
PROLOGUE
The Road of All Dust
The Journals of Reynard Carter ┬п Day Zero

┬п A burning map. Every epic, my friend Jack used to say, should start with a burning map. Like in the
movies. Fucking flames burning the world away; that's the best thing about all those old films, he said
┬п when you see this old parchment map just... getting darker and darker in the centre, crisping, crinkling
until suddenly it just ... fwoom.
That was Jack for you; if you asked him what he wanted for his birthday, he'd tell you he wanted an
explosion. Jack was crazy, but as I flicked forward through the Book, faster and faster as each page fed
in me a growing sense of horror and awe, I thought of what he'd said. I thought of gods and tragedies,
legends and histories, and movies that opened with scrolling tales of ancient times. The vellum pages
beneath my hand flickered under a light that wasn't fire, however, but rather the pale blue of the
underground vault's fluores-cent lights; and if there was a burning it was in my head, a fire of realisation,
of revelation. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling that at any second the world around me would be torn
away in flames and ashes, stripped back to reveal a scene of carnage choreographed as in some lurid
Hollywood flick, and soundtracked with a crashing, clashing music over screams and sounds of war.

The Book. I slammed the thing closed, checking a suspicion. Its outward, leather, cracked and
weathered carapace was thick and dark, embossed with strange sigils ┬п an eye-like design, a circle
within an ellipse, but with four smaller semicircles on its outer edge at three o'clock and nine o'clock, and
at five and eleven; overlapping this but offset was a rectangle. The framework of embossing around it
looked, for all the world, like the stolen architectural plans that lay aban-doned on the floor, and with a
glance around the vault my suspicion was confirmed ┬п it matched. The long, rectangular room with the
doorway in the bottom right-hand corner; the left-hand wall thicker, as it should be, a supporting wall for
the building above; the two blocks of wall on either side jutting out a foot or so into the room two-thirds
of the way up, as if the original end wall had been knocked through at some point, extended into a
forgotten recess; the tiny alcove at the far end which I'd found hidden behind a tall glass-panelled
bookcase and which was barely legible on the stolen plans, drawn in pencil where the rest was marked in
ink.

I felt a bit guilty, looking at the piles of Aristotle and Nostradamus and Moli├иre and who knows what
else, lying on the floor where I'd put them so I could heave the solid bookcase out from its place. Fragile,
priceless artefacts of the university's Special Collection, books a student would sign for, with his tutor's
name and research subject, and have brought to him by the curator, in the Reading Room upstairs, lain
gently on the desk before him on foam supports, their brittle pages to be turned so delicately, so
tentatively in case they crumbled to dust between unthinking fingers. And I'd treated them like
paperbacks dumped on the floor by someone rearranging furni-ture. But they were worthless in
comparison to the Book; they were already dust.