"Confluence - 03 - Shrine Of Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

"It's real," Pandaras said. "Now work harder and talk less. I want to be gone from here as soon as possible."
At last the pyre was finished. Pandaras and Tibor laid
Phalerus's body on top and covered it with a blanket of orange mallows and yellow irises. Tibor knew the funeral ritualsIby heart, and Pandaras followed his instructions, becoming for that short time the servant of a holy slave. They asperged the body with water and Tibor said prayers for the memory of the dead sailor before lighting the dry reeds he had woven through the lower
layers of the pyre.
When it was burning well, with Phalerus's body a shadow in the center of leaping yellow flames and white smoke bending like a banner toward the blackened ridge of the little island, Pandaras and Tibor clambered on to their raft and poled away from the devastated island with unseemly haste. It took them the rest of the day to thread a way through the stands of tall yellow reeds to the mudbanks and pioneer mangroves that lay beyond, along the margin of the shrinking river. When the water became too deep to use the pole, Tibor took up a leaf-shaped paddle he had carved from a scrap of wood.
Pandaras squatted at the raft's blunt prow, Phalerus's arbalest in his lap and his master's pack between his feet. He was more afraid than he could let the hierodule know. Tibor said that the raft was stronger than it looked, that the strips of hide would shrink in the water and bind the logs ever tighter, but Pandaras thought it a flimsy craft. The idea of traveling the length of the Great River on it, like an emmet clinging to a flake of bark, filled him with dread, but he was certain that Yama had been carried away on the flier, and he loved his master so fiercely that he would follow him beyond the edge of the world. He had smeared every bit of his exposed pelt with black mud to protect himself from the biting flies and midges which danced in dense clouds over stumps and breather roots. He was a savage in a savage land. He would go naked, cover his body with strange swirling tattoos, drink blood from freshly killed animals until he was as strong as a storm, and then he would pull down the walls of the citadel where his master was held, rescue him, and kill the








traitor who had taken him. His people would make songs about it until the end of time.
Such dreams sustained his small hope. Those, and the faint but unwavering spark trapped within the ceramic coin.
At last the raft rounded the point of a long arm of mangroves, and the wide river suddenly stretched before them, gleaming like a plain of gold in the light of the setting sun. There was so much light glittering up from the water that Pandaras could not see if it had an ending. He stood, suddenly filled with elation, and flung out an arm and pointed downriver, toward the war.
DR. DISWAS'S DISEASE
DR, DISMAS (AM[ into the big white room without ceremony, flinging open the double doors and striding straight toward Yama, scattering the machines which floated at various levels in the air. A decad of servants in various brightly colored liveries trailed behind him.
Yama had been performing some of the exercises Sergeant Rhodean had taught him, and jumped up as Dr. Dismas approached. He was barechested and barefoot, wearing only a pair of silk trews and a wide bandage wound twice around the Burns on his chest. Ever since his capture, he had wanted nothing more than to be able to command just one machine and make it fling itself into Dr. Dismas's eye and bum through his brain, but no matter how much he strained to contact the machines around him, he could not bend them to his will. The powers which he had painfully learned to master had been taken from him by the thing which had grown from seeds Dr. Dismas had, by a trick, planted in him at the beginning of his adventures. He was plagued by a fluttering of red and black at the edges of his vision, and was visited in his sleep by strange and terrible dreams which, although he utterly for-








got them upon waking, left an indelible residue of terror and loathing.
Dr. Dismas did not speak at once, but clapped his stiff hands together in an irregular rhythm and paced up and down while looking sidelong at Yama, as if trying to marshal his hectic thoughts. The servants stood in a row behind him. They were all indigens, and all mutilated. Yama scarcely noticed them. He was watching the bent-backed, black-clad apothecary as a mouse might watch a snake.
"You are awake!" Dr. Dismas said at last. "Good, good. How are you, Yamamanama? Any headaches? Any colored lights or spots floating in your vision? Your Burns are healing nicely, I see. Ali, why do you look at me that way? I am your savior!"
"You infected me with this disease, Doctor. Are you worried that it is not progressing as fast as you wish?" "It is not a disease, Yarnamanama. Do not think of it
as a disease. And do not resist it. That will make things worse for you."
"Where is this place, Doctor? Why have you brought me here? Where are the others?"
He had asked these questions many times before, and Dr. Dismas had not yet answered them. The apothecary smiled and said, "Our allies gave it to me as a reward for services rendered. A part payment, I should say, for I have only just begun. We, my dear Yamamanama, have only just begun. How much we still have to do! "
Dr. Dismas marched across the room and stood for a moment at the great window, his hands twisted behind his back. But he could not stand still for long, and whirled around and smiled at Yama. He must have recently injected himself with a dose of the drug, for he was pumped full of an energy he could not quite control, a small, sleek, perpetually agitated man in a black claw hammer frock coat that reached to his knees, the stiff planes of his brown face propped above the high collar of his white shirt. He was at once comic and malign.
Yama hated Dr. Dismas, but knew that the apothecary
had the answers to many of his questions. He said, "I am your prisoner, Doctor. What do you want from me?"
"Prisoner? No, no, no. O, no, not a prisoner," Dr. Dismas said. "We are at a delicate stage. You are as yet neither one thing or another, Yarnamanama.
A chrysalid. A larva. You think yourself a power in the world, but you are nothing to what you will become. I promise it. Come here. Stand by me. Don't be afraid."
"I am not afraid, Doctor." But it was a lie, and Yama knew that Dr. Dismas knew it. The doctor knew him too well. For no matter how much he tried to stay calm, the residue of his dreams, the flickering red and black fringes that plagued his sight, the thing growing under his skin, and the scuttling and crawling and floating machines that infested the room all conspired to keep him perpetually fearful.
Dr. Dismas began to fit a cigarette into the holder which had been, he claimed, carved from the fingerbone of a murderer. His concentration on the task was absolute; his left hand had been bent into a stiff claw by the plaques which grew beneath his skin-a symptom of his disease, the disease with which he had infected Yama. At last it was done, and he lit the cigarette and drew on it and blew two smoke rings, the second spinning through the first. He smiled at this little trick and said, "Not afraid? You should be afraid. But I am sure that there is more to it than fear. You are angry, certainly. And curious. I am sure that you are curious. Come here. Stand by me. "
Yama drew on the lessons in diplomacy which his poor dead stepfather, the Aedile of Aeolis, had so patiently taught him. Always turn any weakness into advantage by admitting it, for nothing draws out your enemy like an exposed weakness. He said, "I am afraid, Doctor. I am afraid that I might try to kill you. As you killed Tarnora." "I do not know that name."
Yama's hatred was suddenly so intense that he could hardly bear it. He said, "The cateran. My companion." "Ah. The silly woman with the little sword and the bad