"Glenda Larke - Heart of the Mirage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Larke Glenda)

although what was funny I could not have said. I heard the Goddess
herself whisper, chiding me for my lack of reverence. I was chastened, but
resentful nonetheless. The next moment that had any clarity was when Antonia
removed the blindfold.
I was somewhere else. I must have walked there, but had no recollection of
having moved, no memory of time passing. Vortexdamn the conniving vixen, I
thought, as a semblance of rationality seeped back. The blindfold must have
been soaked with something. She drugged me. There was an irony in that, of
course; we of the Brotherhood were not unfamiliar with such tricks, but I was
not in the mood to appreciate the parallels. Goddess, I thought, if they
expose everyone who comes here to an elixir like that, no wonder there's never
been a coherent description of the Oracle.
I was assailed by more pungent smells, a mix of odours of the kind that might
drift from an alchemist's shop along the Marketwalk. I looked around. I was in
an underground cavern. Light came only from flames burning in a bronze
container тАФ a bowl as wide as I was tall тАФ set in the stone of the floor. 'The
Eternal Flame,' Antonia murmured in my ear, 'lit by the Goddess herself at the
founding of Tyr and never extinguished since. It burns without fuel.' She
believed it, too. I nodded, but wondered if it weren't fuelled from below,
subterranean gases, perhaps. I always was a sceptical bitch.
She waved a hand at the wall of the cavern directly in front of us. 'That is
the Oracle.' She gestured again, this time at a pale young woman seated in
front of the wall. 'The words of the Oracle will be interpreted for you by
Esme, the Selected of the Oracle.'
Esme, as beautiful as a caryatid and almost as lifeless, did not look at me.
Her eyes were wide and expressionless; her body swayed slightly. Behind her
something crouched and murmured, but whether it was a living creature or just
a strange rock formation, I was not certain. The drug had left my mind fuddled
and my senses blurred. My head was beginning to ache, irritated by the
vapours. My eyes watered. The flickering of the Eternal Flame made shadows
dance and writhe. The natural indents of the rough stone of the cavern wall
behind Esme appeared to ripple. I saw in them a figure, huge, forbidding,
lion-like, maned тАФ yet with a man's features centred in the otherwise feline
head. Eyes and nostrils and mouth were depthless slits boring back into the
rock, to viscera beyond. I shook my head to clear my thoughts. Vapours wafted
through the creature's orifices, smelling of brimstone and pitch, the breath
of Acheron, from the netherworld beyond the Vortex, surely. And the being тАФ if
such it was тАФ muttered. No language I had ever heard before issued from its
throat.
I stared at Esme. She was young, though her skin had the unhealthy pallor of
the chronically ill, and her eyes remained unfocused. Her voice, when she
started to speak, was a monotone, but it oozed truth. She believed all she
said.
I assumed she was supposed to be interpreting the mumble of the Oracle behind
her as she intoned:
'Ligea will travel by land and sea and beast
To places new and far,
She will hunt the fierce hunter to the east
Who seeks our world to mar
And kills our noble emperor's time of peace.'