"Philip Jose Farmer - WOT 3 - A Private Cosmos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

Kickaha hoped that the hallway was the only one the Drachelanders were using. If they had been
able to get to all the entrances to this' roomтАФno, they couldn't. The arch ahead led to a hall
which only went deeper into the mountain, as far as he knew. It could be entered by other halls,
but none of these had openings to the outside. That is, he had been told so. Perhaps his
informants were lying for some reason, or perhaps they hadn't understood his imperfect
Tishquetmoac speech.
Lied to or not, he had to take this avenue. The only trouble with it, even if it were free of
invaders, was that it would end up in the mountain.
HI
THE LIBRARY was an immense room. It had taken five hundred slaves, rubbing and drilling twenty-
four hours a day, twenty years to complete the basic work. The distance from the archway he had
just left to the one he desired was about 180 yards. Some of the invaders had time to enter the
library and take one shot at him.
Knowing this, Kickaha began to zigzag. When he neared the arch, he threw himself down and rolled
through the exit. Arrows slissed above him and kukked into the stone wall or bunged off the floor
near him. Kickaha uncoiled to his feet and raced on down the hallway; he came to the inevitable
curve, and then stopped. Two priests trotted past him. They looked at him but said nothing. They
forgot about him when shrill cries stung their ears, and they ran toward the source of noise. He
thought they would be acting more intelligently if they ran the other way, since it sounded as if
the Drachelanders might be massacring the priests in the library.
However, the two would now run into the pursuers, and might delay them for a few seconds. Too bad
about the priests, but it wasn't his fault if they were killed. Well, perhaps it was. But he did
not
A PRIVATE COSMOS
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intend to warn them if silence would help him keep ahead of the hunters.
He ran on. Just before he came to another forty-five degree bend, he heard screams behind him. He
stopped and removed a burning torch from its fixture on the wall. Holding it high, he looked
upward. Twenty feet from the top of his head was a round hole in the ceiling. It was dark, so
Kickaha supposed that the shaft bent somewhere before it joined another.
The entire mountain was pierced with thousands of these shafts. All were at least three feet in
diameter, since the slaves who had made the shafts and tunnels could not work in an area less than
this.
Kickaha considered this shaft but gave up on it. There was nothing available to help him get up to
it.
Hearing the scrape of metal against stone, he ran around the curve and then stopped. The first
archer received a blazing torch in his face, screamed, staggered back, and knocked down the archer
behind him. The conical steel helmets of both fell off and clanged on the floor.
Stooping, Kickaha ran forward, using the archer with the burned face, who had sat up, as a shield.
He pulled the archer's long sword from his sheath. The man was holding his face with both hands
and screaming that he was blind. The soldier he had knocked down stood up, thus preventing the


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bowmen who did see Kickaha from shooting at him. Kickaha rose and brought the sword down on the
unprotected head of the soldier. Then he whirled and ran, stooping,again.
Too late, some of the bowmen fired. The arrows struck the walls. He entered a large storage room.
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