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

Behind the house the slope continued to rise. Blade walked around it along the circular drive, noting
the fallen trees that were rotting amid the grass of what had once been a neatly kept lawn. Now it grew
rank and dense, reaching Blade's knees.
Blade's mood grew sober as he surveyed the estate. He did not like this house, intact but as lifeless
as the Great Pyramid, sitting there brooding on this dark hill. The mental association of abandoned
houses filled with things dark and sinister was too deep for even Blade's trained mind to shake off. He
had never seen a better haunted house.
He would not have liked it particularly even if he had never heard of haunted houses. Country
mansions could easily be abandoned for legitimate reasons. But they could also be abandoned for more
sinister onesтАФplagues, wars, the long, slow dying of a civilization that could no longer sustain them. The
mansion was intact except for the damage inflicted by the years. That seemed to rule out war. Or did it?
Chemicals, bacteria, hard radiation, or radioactive dust could leave a house intact and its inhabitants
dying in agony. The house seemed to have been abandoned long enough for any CBR warfare agents to
have lost their deadliness. But Blade would have been happier with a Geiger counter.
There was no point in standing in the darkness, staring at the house. It only suggested the state of the
world he had fallen into, and it might be leading him completely astray. At the top of the hill he might see
anything from a farm to an entire city. He stepped away from the house, took a final look at the empty
windows, shivered at more than the rising wind, and strode off up the hill.
He pushed up the steadily steepening grade for more than a hundred yards, the grass now wet with
dew swishing past his calves and the occasional thistle plant adding scars to his ankles to match the ones
on his rear end. As the house slowly vanished in the darkness behind him, he made a mental note of his
course. If all else failed, he could go back to the mansion and try to find as much shelter from the night
wind as its dark and depressing interior might offer. He felt the ground beneath his feet leveling out, saw
another row of trees looming up, and passed between two of them.
Now the ground sloped downward. He had a vague sense of a vast, empty space in front of high,
from which the wind now moaned unbroken and uninterrupted. He was staring into the darkness, trying
to make out something recognizable, when the clouds passing overhead suddenly flared silver at their rear
edges. A full moon glowed in a sky full of stars, pouring an almost incandescent silver light over the land.
The land ahead did indeed slope down. It moved on past another row of trees, past two more
abandoned houses. Then it flowed out across miles of almost treeless plain to a broad river set deep in a
high-walled gorge. On the far side of that river stood a city.
For a moment Blade wondered if the previous thought that he might see a city out there in the
darkness was still working on his mind and making him see things. He focused all his attention on the city;
it did not vanish. In fact, the neat rows of buildings stood out more clearly than before. Some rose only
ten or twenty stories, others a quarter of a mile. Metal gleamed in the moonlight. One complex of
thousand-foot towers, set in a close square, reflected the moonlight from walls of different vividly
gleaming colorsтАФred, gold, orange, silver. Other buildings were dome-shaped, rising up five hundred
feet or more and showing their frames, gilded frames that seemed to drip liquid moonlight, through
transparent outer shells.
All thought of returning to the decaying, empty mansion to spend the night vanished from Blade's
mind as he stood absorbing the image of the city and what it meant. The city rising on the riverbank could
only be the creation of an advanced society. Was this good? Not necessarily, he reminded himself. He
thought of decadent Tharn, the strangely immortal Morphi, and the nonhuman Menel, with their
superscience, which was exceeded only by their laziness. He could not even assume that this city would
offer him safety. Bureaucrats could be as deadly foes as barbarian chiefs, and for a man who did not
understand the rules they were enforcing, ten times as dangerous. You could not simply whip out a
swordтАФassuming you had oneтАФand decapitate each officious clerk. And the deserted mansion so close
to the city suggested that the people were a cautious breed, preferring to huddle within their high walls
and pursue their lives in safety. Such a people might well be inhospitable to strangers wandering naked
out of the darkness.