"Simon R. Green - Haven 06 - Bones of Haven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Green Simon R)

air like bitter honey. Hawk smelled dust and sulphur, so strong he could hardly breathe. And out of the
darkness, stepping slow and somber, came the Brimstone Boys.

They might have been human once, but now they were impossibly, obscenely old. Their bodies were
twisted and withered, turned in upon themselves by time, and there were gaping holes in their anatomy
where skin and bone had rotted away to dust and nothingness. Their wrinkled skin was grey and
colorless, and tore when movement stretched it. Their faces were the worst. Their lips were gone, and
their impossibly wide smiles were crammed with huge blocky teeth like bony chisels. Blood ran
constantly from their dirty yellow eyes and dropped from their awful smiles, spattering their ancient
tattered skin.

Barber shouted something incoherent, and launched himself at the nearest figure. His sword flew in a
deadly pattern, but the blade didn't even come close to touching the creature. Barber strained and
struggled, but it was as though he and the ancient figures, only a few feet apart, lived in separate
worlds, where they could see each other but not touch. Fisher drew a knife from her boot and threw it
at the other figure. The knife tumbled end over end, shrinking slowly as though crossing some
impossible distance but still not reaching its target. The withered creature looked at Fisher with its
bleeding eyes, and she cried out as she began to sink into the floor. Despite all her struggles to resist,
the flagstones sucked her down into themselves like a treacherous marsh. She struck at the floor with
her sword, and sparks flew as the steel blade hit solid stone.

Hawk ran towards her, but she seemed to recede into the distance as he ran. He pushed himself harder,
but the faster he ran, the further away she seemed to be. Somewhere between the two of them, Barber
sobbed with helpless rage as he struggled futilely to touch the Brimstone Boys with his sword. Hawk
could vaguely hear Winter shouting something, but all he could think of was Fisher. The stone floor
was lapping up around her shoulders. The light was growing dimmer. Sounds echoed strangely. And
then something gold and shining flew slowly past him, gleaming richly in the fading light, and landed
on the floor between the Brimstone Boys. They looked down at it, and despite himself, Hawk's gaze
was drawn to it too. It was a pocket watch.

He could hear it ticking in the endless quiet. Ticktocking away the seconds, turning past into present
into future. The Brimstone Boys raised their awful heads, their grinning mouths stretched wide in
soundless screams. Dust fell endlessly through golden light. The floor grew solid again, spitting out
Fisher, and the walls rushed in on either side. The ceiling fell back to its previous height. And the
Brimstone Boys crumbled into dust and blew away.

Hawk looked around him, and the corridor was just as it had always been. The silver light pushed back
the darkness, and the floor was solid and reliable under his feet. Fisher picked up the throwing knife
from the floor before her, looked at it for a moment, and then slipped it back into her boot. Barber put
away his sword and shook his head slowly, breathing heavily. Hawk turned and looked back at Winter
and the sorcerer Storm, who seemed to have completely recovered from his daze. In fact, he was
actually smiling quite smugly.

"All right," said Hawk. "What happened?"

Storm's smile widened. "It's all very simple and straightforward, really," he said airily. "The Brimstone
Boys distorted reality wherever they went, but they weren't very stable. They could play all kinds of
tricks with space and probabilities and the laws of reality, but they were still vulnerable to time. The
ordered sequence of events was anathema to their existence. It was already eroding away at them;
that's why they looked so ancient. I just speeded the process up a bit, with an augmented timepiece