"Richard Kadrey - Blind Shrike" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kadrey Richard)

Every creature who lived in the sea--the fish, the whales, the seals, the crabs, the squids and the
rays--met in the South Seas and beat their fins, claws and tentacles, and raised an enormous tidal
wave. The wall of water shot across the earth, drowning millions of the land and air beasts. This
is how the many rivers and oceans of the world were born.

After an eon or two of mass murder, when the surface of the Earth was a stinking slaughter
house, the lords of the different realms of life met at the ancient human city of Thulamela to see if
they could end the butchery. This wasn't all that simple, since the many different creatures of the
Earth were going to have to live on the same planet, but give each other plenty of room.

They divided the world into three Spheres, with each Sphere being invisible and out of the reach
of the others. Humans and the most numerous animals of the land, sea and air were given one
Sphere.
A second Sphere was home to the rarest creatures--the phoenix, selkies, vampires, barbegazi,
corrigans, tengus, lamias, rompos, sylphs, gorgons, volkhs, wyverns, trolls and other exotic
beasts.

The last realm was left to the most glorious and dangerous inhabitants of the planet: angels and
demons.

So it was that each of these groups lived and grew old and died in its own Sphere, inhabiting the
same time and space as all the other Spheres, but rarely touching--unless a creature was powerful
or clever enough to learn the spells of crossing over. Because the town meeting that divided the
world had taken place in a human city, cities became the places where the creatures who moved
from Sphere to Sphere would meet up to talk, joke, eat, exchange spells and news, make love or
commit the occasional genocide.

Over the next few thousand centuries, the creatures who dwelled in the second and third Spheres
struck a kind of d├йente. Unfortunately for the beasts of in the first Sphere (which included
ninety-nine percent of humanity), they forgot about the other Spheres completely and only
glimpsed them in their dreams.

Or so they thought.

Three

Strange Attractors

Later, Spyder went out the back and into the alley behind the Bardo Lounge for a quick piss.

It wasn't Spyder's habit to urinate in public, but at the best of times the Lounge's toilets were
questionable. Sometime during the day, Rubi told him, they had committed Hara kiri. "One summer
during college I was trekking in Nepal," Rubi said. "First night out we came to this little village and I
asked this lady who ran the local teahouse where the toilets were. In Nepali she said, essentially,
`Anywhere but here,' and pointed to an open field."

As Spyder unzipped in the alley, he consider the club's name and wondered if the real afterlife would be
at all like this. A tab at your favorite bar. Pretty girls to chat up. The occasional piss in an alley next to
God's own dumpster. It didn't seem like the afterlife would be too bad a place. Spyder wondered who
the bouncer in the Bardo Realm would be. The Black Bhairab, he decided. Shiva's most wrathful form.