"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 14 - The Temples of Ayocan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

For many hundreds of yards back from the water's edge, the shore of the lake was heavily
overgrown with low-slung black-green bushes. These bore large yellow flowers that looked somewhat
like sunflowers except that the mass of seeds in the middle of the blossom was bright red instead of
brownish. Blade wondered if the red seeds were as edible as sunflower seeds. If they were, he was in no
danger of starving either.
But he was in danger of getting very cold very quickly. The thin air of the high plain was rapidly losing
its heat now that the sun was gone. A chill breeze crept down from the distant mountains, blowing across
his bare skin and bit by bit robbing his body of its heat. He bent down and took hold of one of the
bushes, trying to break it off or pull it up out of the ground. A layer of leafy branches under him and
another over him might not make the most comfortable bed for a good night's sleep, but they would at
least be something between his bare skin and the cold.
The bushes were tough and their bark scraped at his fingers, which were red and sore by the time he
had broken off half a dozen branches. The broken ends dripped a sticky lemon-yellow sap. Blade bent
down and sniffed at it. A strong vegetable smell, but underneath it something else, tantalizingly faint, so
faint he couldn't define or describe it. But definitely appealing. He sniffed at the sap more vigorously, then
suddenly pulled himself to a stop and threw the branch down on the ground.
That faint, underlying element in the smell of the sap was somethingтАФBlade didn't know
whatтАФinsidiously attractive. He had been within seconds of smearing the sap over his nostrils, to absorb
more and still more of the odor. And then what? What would a massive dose of whatever lurked in the
sap have done to him? He didn't know and he didn't want to find out, at least not here and now. All he
needed now was an overdose of narcotics while he was fighting to survive and keep warm on the lonely
shores of this lake. He continued breaking off branches, but he was very careful now to keep them away
from his face. He even tried to keep the sap from getting on his skin. He had no way of knowing whether
or not it could be absorbed into his body through the skin.
By the time Blade had piled on the ground what he hoped would be enough branches, it was almost
completely dark. Only the faintest orange glimmer beyond the mountains gave him any sense of direction.
The lake stretched out endlessly away into the darkness, featureless and now black instead of blue. The
wind had died, and even the faint splashing of little waves on the gravel of the beach had died away with
it. For the moment, this was a dimension of total loneliness, almost total darkness, and silence except for
the sound of his own breathing and footsteps.
Blade was getting ready to burrow down into his bed of branches when he suddenly realized that
there was no longer total darkness out on the lake. Lights had suddenly appeared, faint, distant, and
wavering, but unmistakable. Blade counted nine of them, stretched out in a long line across the lake. They
shone a pale yellow-orange, and slowly but steadily they were coming closer. Their approach was too
steady, too purposeful, for anything natural.
The line spread out wider and wider, until it seemed to stretch halfway across the lake horizon. Blade
realized that if the line kept on all the way to the shore, he would end up almost in the middle of it. Slowly
and cautiously, he rose to a crouching position, and moved away from his piled branches. He would have
liked to scatter them so that they gave no sign of his presence, but there was no time for that. The lights
were coming on faster now. Blade could hear a distant but fast-swelling chant as they did so.
He slipped up the slope from the beach, taking care to avoid softer patches of ground where he
might leave footprints. Fifty yards up the slope, he came to a particularly thick patch of the bushes, some
of them eight feet high. The close-grown rough branches were hard to push apart and painful to slip
through. But when he had done so, he could crouch almost invisible to anyone on the beach.
 The chant coming out of the darkness was definitely getting louder now. With relief Blade recognized
human voicesтАФat least forty or fifty of them, all chanting together to a beat set by two deep-toned
drums. He had encountered a fair number of nonhuman or semihuman beings in his Dimension X travels,
but he always preferred to at least start by dealing with human beings. Not that human beings were
necessarily that much more predictable than nonhumans, or less likely to shoot first and ask questions
afterward. It was more a question of what contributed most to his own peace of mind.