"Jeffrey Lord - Blade 26 - City of the Living Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lord Jeffery)

a dull, distant ache. At that point he opened his eyes and sat up.

All around him was a dull, gray twilight. He was resting in the lee of a house-sized boulder, dark blue
with layers of red in it. Around him were strewn a number of other rocks that looked like quartz.

Straight ahead the ground rolled gently away into the distance, covered with waist-high bushes that bore
only a few tufts of brown, spikey leaves. Far away a sharp ridge cut off the horizon. Blade rose and
headed toward the ridge. It was the only break in the whole dreary landscape around him.

It turned into a race between Blade's march toward the ridge and the coming of darkness. There was
barely enough light to see by when he finally reached the top. Below him the ground plunged away into a
tortured, rugged slope of bare rock dotted here and there with stunted shrubs. The slope dropped nearly
a thousand feet to a level floor of more bare rock. Far off in the gathering darkness rose the other wall of
the valley.

A patch of silver-white among the rocks halfway down the slope at his feet caught Blade's eye. He
looked more carefully and saw a thin line of silver winding down the slope below the patch. He
scrambled down the slope toward it as fast as he dared.

In spite of his care, he twice fell hard enough to get bruised. Several times rocks came loose under his
feet and rolled off down the side of the valley, crashing and banging like small cannon. Blade ignored
everything, until at last he slide down a near-vertical pitch eight feet high and landed on hands and knees
beside the spring.

It gushed from the rock as if it were coming from a fire hose, forced up and out by the pressure
underground. It made a twenty-foot arc in the air and splashed down hard enough to throw up the cloud
of spray that Blade had seen first. Over the centuries the spring had worn a pool for itself in the rock
where it fell. Blade crawled over to the pool and began scooping the water into his mouth. It was
lukewarm and tasted faintly of minerals, but it was drinkable.

By now it was completely dark. Blade realized he might be wise to find some place where he'd be
invisible both from the ridge and from the floor of the valley. On the other hand, that would mean roaming
about among the tangled and treacherous rocks of the valley wall in the darkness. He'd probably be safer
staying where he was.

Blade found a flat spot only a few yards from the pool and lay down. The rock was not a particularly
soft bed, and he suspected that he'd have a whole crop of fresh bruises in the morning. That hardly
mattered. He'd found water, and the weather seemed tolerable.

For the moment that was quite enough-much more than he'd started with in some Dimensions, in fact.
He could seek out what else this Dimension held when there was light to see it.

Blade awoke in a chilly dawn to feel a breeze on his bare skin. He stood up and went through a series of
brisk exercises to restore his circulation and get any cramps or kinks out of his muscles. When he'd
finished, he felt about as ready to face a day's traveling as he could, considering that he still had no
clothes, footgear, food, or weapons.

He was bending down to drink when he heard a distant noise that was neither the wind, the water, nor
rocks rolling down the valley wall. He straightened up and listened. With tantalizing slowness, the sound
grew louder and took on recognizable forms. Blade heard the blare of trumpets and the thud of slowly