"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 15 - The Towers of Melnon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)told of the rising sun, and patches of blue sky promised a clear day. But in the swirling grayness of the
mist, six gigantic dark shapes loomed up tall and grim. They soared up to incredible heightsтАФa mile or more, if Blade was judging their distance correctly in the mist. But even through the mist their outlines were too regular to be natural. As the mist began to lift, Blade realized that he was standing almost at the base of the seventh of the gigantic towers. The seven formed a huge circle, a good three miles in diameter. In the middle of the circle Blade could make out a sunken, cleared space about half a mile across. The sunken circle seemed as bare, flat, and featureless as a military parade ground. It was pavedтАФwith a yellowish coating that reflected more and more brightly the rising sun. Blade turned his eyes upward, to examine the tower looming over him. He had to crane his neck until it ached, to see the top. In fact, looking up at it gave him a sickening moment of vertigo. It rose so high from such a slender base that Blade almost expected it to stagger suddenly, to topple over on him and crush him into the rocks and vegetation around its base. All seven seemed to be as identical as seven automobiles of the same make and model turned out on the same assembly line, except for their colors. The one towering above Blade was a glossy dark green that reminded him of a ripe avocado. From left to right around the circle, the other six gleamed orange, dark blue, golden yellow, flaming red, somber flat black, and glossy white. Except for the black one, all seven were so highly polished that the sun blazing off their towering sides struck painfully into Blade's eyes. Each of the seven rose well over a mile from a base not more than five hundred feet square. Blade did not know very much about architecture, but he could recognize a building technology decades or centuries beyond anything known in Home Dimension. How had these seven towers come to be where they were, apparently all by themselves? The mist had almost entirely lifted now. He could see no signs of any other buildings beyond the circle of towers, or any signs that the towers themselves were inhabited. Blade looked up at the green tower above him again. As he did, his doubts about whether these or so above the ground, ran a two-story balcony, jutting out some fifty feet or so on all four sides of the towers. Dark figures were appearing on the balcony above Blade, dwarfed by the distance. Blade could not at first even tell whether he was seeing human beings or some more fanciful and perhaps much less agreeable creatures. Then one of the figures stepped to the edge of the balcony. Without stopping or hesitating, he stepped out into space. Blade suppressed a gasp and watched. He expected to see the figure plunge downward, to smash itself among the rocks and shrubs at the foot of the tower. Instead, the figure seemed to float slowly, as if it had no more weight than a soap bubble. As it descended, Blade realized that it was in fact human. The man was dressed from head to foot in the same glossy dark green as the finish of his tower. Blade thought he could also see a sword blade on the man's belt, flashing in the sun. For a moment he wondered if he should take cover and wait to see what happened. Certainly there was room to hide around the base of the tower. A belt of tumbled boulders, shrubs and small trees, long grass, and little gullies and hills extended for nearly a mile around the base of the green tower. The other six also seemed to be surrounded by such a fringe of semi-wilderness. Did these people preserve those tracts for recreational purposesтАФas parksтАФor was it that they simply didn't care? Blade remembered the Sleepers of the Dimension of Dreams, and how they had let an entire city crumble to ruins while they sank into their Dreams. Blade decided that he was trying to analyze not only ahead of the facts, but at the wrong time. The man in green was less than a hundred feet above Blade's head now, and descending steadily. He was definitely wearing a swordтАФno, two swordsтАФat his belt. On his head was a cylindrical helmet with cheek pieces and a crest from which a green plume waved. A warrior, obviously. Now Blade understood how the man was descending so effortlessly through the air. He was riding down on a kind of flying trapeze. Three stout bars of glossy green metal formed an equilateral triangle. |
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