"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 11 - Dimension of Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

sensation in some of the more remote particles, as though they had fallen into ice water and been engulfed
altogether in its numbing chill. His brainтАФwas it functioning more slowly now that it was dispersed along
with the rest of him?тАФtried to send out pulses to those remote particles. But they were dispersed and
chilled beyond his ability to reach them. And he continued to spread across space with more and more of
his particles being enveloped by the chill..
What had been his limbs were gone now; the chill was spreading inward. It no longer lay passively
waiting for him to drift into it but reached out for his body and mind. He felt the cold gulp up half his body
in an instant. It was a living and hungry thing now, seeking to devour him.
The rest of his body went in the next instant. Now only his mind remained, neither sending nor
receiving messages. There was nothing sending or receiving out there in the blackness around himтАФonly
the cold, the hungry cold. It crept up on him still further; he felt a tangible pulse of icy wind. Then cold
and complete blackness swallowed him, swallowed all sensation.


Chapter Three
┬л^┬╗
The pain in his head told Blade that consciousness was coming back to him. Then an equally sharp pain
in his naked bottom made him yelp and leap to his feet in spite of his throbbing head. Looking down, he
saw that he had landed on his rear in the middle of a large patch of thistlelike plants with springy, woody
stems, thin purple leaves, and spectacularly long and pointed stickers. Under his feet was moss-grown
stone; he lay down on it until the headache had vanished and his exploring fingers had removed all the
prickers. Then he rose to his feet again and cautiously looked around him.
He realized that the moss-grown stone he had been lying on showed a pattern of cracks too regular
to be natural, with great clumps of purple thistles growing out of them. Blade saw the stone stretching off
in an unnaturally straight line on either side. It was flanked by trees set at roughly thirty-foot intervals and
rising so high that Blade had to crane his neck up toward the graying sky to see their bushy tops. Their
trunks were massive and at first glance appeared to be covered with green scales. Closer examination
revealed a choking tangle of vines and weeds clinging to the bark. A chill breeze blew past, making Bade
shiver and the glossy green leaves of the vines and the dull purple ones of the thistles dance.
Obviously, he had landed in the middle of a road. Or of what had been a road. Some of the thistles
sprouting from the cracks between the blocks in the road were three feet high. More than one entire
block had been heaved completely out of position by winter frosts, spring thaws, and the slow, steady
work of the plants. No one had used this road or cared whether it was usable for many years.
But all roads tend to lead somewhere. From the way the light was rapidly fading from the sky, Blade
guessed it was almost sundown. The chill already in the air suggested that the coming night would be
uncomfortably cold for a naked man to spend in the open. Blade looked along the road and noticed that
to the right it sloped down and to the left it rose. In both cases it rapidly vanished into the twilight, but it
seemed to Blade that going up made more sense than going down. At the very least, the higher he got the
more he could see when morning came. He turned off to the left and set off up the road, eyes moving
ceaselessly from side to side, looking for possible dangers and for anything that might be converted into a
weapon to meet those dangers.
The climb up into the gathering darkness lasted so long that Blade was beginning to wonder if he was
climbing a mountain. Then abruptly the row of trees on either side vanished, and the road divided and
swung out on either side to form a circular drive. Directly ahead a flight of stairsтАФovergrown and
crumbling like the roadтАФled up to a vast sprawling house that seemed to cover the whole top of the hill.
For a moment Blade's anticipation rose. Then it fell back again as he examined the house. He noted dead
and living vines encrusting the once white walls, windows gaping like the eye sockets of a skull, and
leaf-clogged gutters oozing dirty water. No one had come along the road for a long time, and no one had
lived in this house or cared whether it was even livable for an equally long time. Whoever had raised the
mansion there was long gone.