"Richard Kadrey - Butcher Bird" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kadrey Richard)

тАЬStupid bitch,тАЭ she said, and dropped the butt into the womanтАЩs empty wine glass.
 TWO
THE GREAT DIVIDE


The Earth was born in a furnace. When the world grew strong enough, it crawled into the dark void
to cool and heal itself. Soon, however, it grew too cold and shivered with ice.
The Earth looked around and found a small star to warm it up. Deciding it liked the
neighborhood and the climate, there the Earth stayed.
Life appeared across the Earth, splashed in the water and glided on thermals through the sky. It
didnтАЩt take life long to grow so abundant that it began preying on itself.
Crows, bats and eagles, the lords of the air, scooped up fish from the seas and dumped them in
the desert until the dry lands were piled high with their bones. These carcasses became the
EarthтАЩs first mountains.
Other animals learned to climb the trees and attack the birds as they hunted for food. The land
dwellers decorated the bare trees with the birdsтАЩ feathers and painted the ground with their blood.
The gray earth suddenly had color.
Every creature who lived in the seaтАФthe fish, the whales, the seals, the crabs, the squids and
the raysтАФmet 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
slaughterhouse, 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 wasnтАЩt 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 creaturesтАФthe 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 touchingтАФunless 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├йtente. Unfortunately for the beasts 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.