"Linda Evans - Time Scout 2 - Wages of Sin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Evans Linda)

the way it did just before a fight, Lupus Mortiferus took his first look at
the place where the thief who'd stolen his money had taken refuge.
He swallowed once, very hard.
Where am I? Olympus?
He couldn't quite accept that explanation, despite the terrifying magic of
a hole through a wall that sometimes existed and sometimes didn't. Atlantis,
perhaps? No, that had been destroyed when the gods were young. If it had ever
existed at all. Where, then? Rome was civilization in this world, although
traders spoke of the wonders of the far, far east, from whence expensive silk
came.
Lupus didn't know the name of the cities where silk was spun into cloth,
but he didn't think this was one of them. It wasn't a proper "city" at all.
There was no open sky, no ground, no distant horizon or wind to rustle through
treetops and evaporate sweat from his skin. The place was more like an
enormous ... room. One large enough to hold the towering Egyptian obelisk on
the spine of the Circus Maximus -- with room to spare between its golden tip
and the distant ceiling. The room was large enough that he could have laid out
a half-length chariot-race course down its length, had there not been shops,
ornamental fountains and ponds, decorative seats, and odd pillars with glowing
spheres at the top scattered throughout its length, along with a riot of
colorful Saturnalia and other, unfathomable, decorations from floor to
ceiling. The delighted shrieking of young children brought home just how lost
he was: a mere child of five clearly knew more about this place than he did.
Staircases of metal everywhere climbed up to nothing, or to platforms which
served no sane purpose Lupus could divine. Signs he could not read scattered
strange letters colorfully across the walls. A few areas were fenced off,
leaving them inaccessible despite the seeming innocuous blankness of the walls
behind them. The image of the wine shop's wall opening up into a hole through
nothingness was so powerfully and recently embedded in his soul, Lupus
shuddered, wondering what lay behind those innocent-seeming stretches of wall.
People dressed as Romans mingle with others in costumes so barbaric and
foreign, Lupus could only stare.
Where am I?
And where, in all this confusion of shops, staircases, and people, was the
thief he sought? For one terrible moment, he shut his eyes and fought the urge
to charge straight up the ramp and back through the hole in the wall. He
managed to bring shuddering breaths under control only with difficulty, but he
did control himself. He was the Death Wolf of the Circus Maximus, after all,
not a milk-fed brat to fear the first strangeness life hurled his way. Lupus
forced his eyes open again.
The hole in the wall had closed.
 He was trapped here, for evil or good.
For just a second, terror overrode all other concerns. Then, slowly, Lupus
gripped the pommel of his gladius. The gods he worshipped had answered his
hourly prayers in their own mysterious fashion. He was trapped, yes.
But so was the thief.
All Lupus had to do was find a way to pass himself off as a member of this
sunless, closed-in world long enough to track the man down, then he would wait
for the next inexplicable opening of the wall and fight his way back home, if
necessary.