"Tim Lebbon - Dusk 02 - Dawn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lebbon Tim)

book. Would it cause a whole wall to tumble down upon her? Would it start a fall throughout the library,
burying her and re-sorting history into a random mixture of old books and new, good and bad? Would it
destroy order?

She thought not. And dwelling on this she realized that therewas no order around her, only assembled
chaos. The books were not sorted into sections; they were random. There were occasional
groupingsтАФsuch as those applying to the owners of the grave markersтАФbut as Alishia fingered her way
along the assembled spines, these soon blended into other areas, other times. A kiss became a turning
wheel became the one-hundred-and-seventeen-thousandth stolen thought of a skull hawkтАЩs life. This was
history built as it had been made, like a collection of random thoughts in a mind too huge to contemplate.

And they were coming to life. Alishia had known this for a whileтАФin the confused memory of her walk
through this place, the exact instant of knowing was obscuredтАФbut it did not frighten her, and it did not
surprise her. All her life she had known that books were living things, not just a convergence of concept
and ink, intellect and paper. They did not breathe or think, but they grew and gave a sense of potential so
much larger than whatever was written on their pages. She had often lain awake in her room at the edge
of Noreela City and tried to imagine one book in her own darkened library, what it looked like at that
moment with no one there to view it, how the words read with no one there to read them. Its pages
would be closed and the spaces between leaves dark and inscrutable, but the words were still there,
telling their truths and hinting at so much more. Sometimes she believed that true magic could only take
place with no one there to see it. Her own interaction with a book would change it, and someone else
reading it would alter it yet again. That idea had always disturbed her, yet she kept it alive. Like a person,
only a book could ever really know itself.

She walked past a wall of books with instants in time on their spines, illustrated with hastily drawn
pictures from a childтАЩs hand. The books seemed to shift in her view, as if rearranging themselves every
time she blinked, though the spines always told the same story. She could feel the history behind the
books, and she wondered whether she could remove one from the shelves and peer through the gap into
a time she had never known. But in all this dreaming she had yet to open a one, and she felt that there
was a special moment ahead. A special moment, and a special book.

Alishia moved on, and the books began to turn into something more. Their power spilled around them,
exuding potential like slicks of light, hazing the air and causing Alishia to wave her hands before her face
to find her way through. Her hands and arms disturbed drifting moments of history, and she suddenly
knew them: a Mourner, chanting down the wraiths of a whole village and fearing something that lived in a
hole in the ground; a man and woman journeying into the depths, passing through new cities and entering
older places; a young boy standing on a cliff somewhere in the west and looking out at the forest of masts
spiking the seaтАЩs horizon. Each image was imbued with the emotion of the moment, and Alishia went
from fear to excitement to angst in the space of several seconds. She closed her eyes and ran.

She crossed her arms and held her hands beneath her armpits, but experiencing these spilled moments
was nothing to do with touch.

Alishia stopped then, dropping to the worn timber floor, realizing suddenly where she was: this was a
dream, and she was floating in NoreelaтАЩs rich and varied history. She was awash with it. She could walk
forever, but she would find no walls. She could try to climb the stacks, but she would not find their
summits, because they probably rose endlessly. Every truth lay here, every event, every lie and deceit
and murder and rape, every meaningless moment and whispered oath lost to the winds of time, and if she
wandered forever, perhaps she would know it all. History tumbled down around her and became the air
of this dream library, and each time she breathed in she knew something more.