"Paul McAuley - The Book of Confluence 02 - Ancients of Days" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

in this part of the Department before."
"This was the main entrance, once upon a time. Now no one uses it but me. It leads to the
roof." They reached the top of the stairway and went down a long corridor. Its walls were paneled
in dark, heavily carved wood and hung with big square paintings whose pigments were so
blackened by time that it was impossible to discern what scenes or persons they might once have
depicted. A rat fled from their footsteps, pursued by a single wan firefly. It disappeared into a
hole in the paneling, and rolled the end of a broken bottle across the hole to stop it. The feeble
light of the firefly flickered behind the thick roundel of glass as the rat lay still and watched the
two men pass.
The corridor ended at a pair of round metal doors, with a metal-walled antechamber
sandwiched between them.
The inner door was open, the outer dogged shut. Syle shut the inner door behind them and
talked to the lock of the outer doorтАФYama felt its dim intelligence briefly wakenтАФthen
instructed Yama to spin a wheel and pull the door open. It moved sweetly on its counterbalanced
track, and Yama followed Syle over the high sill.
They were on the wide, flat roof of the House of the Twelve Front Rooms. It was lapped
with metal plates that fitted together like the scales of a fish. Behind it was the cavern, dark
except for a few tiny stars where people walked, attended by fireflies. The other buildings of the
Department of VaticinationтАФthe Basilica, the Hall of the Tranquil Mind, the Hall of Great
Achievements, and the Gate of Double GloryтАФwere set symmetrically around the edge of this
great hollow, dark shapes sunk deep in darkness. On the other side of the House of the Twelve
Front Rooms, beyond the looming arch of the cavern's mouth, was the night sky. A cold wind
blew past skeletal towers which jutted from the outer edge of the roof. Syle explained that in
ancient times drugged pythonesses lashed to platforms on top of these towers had searched for
intimations of the future in the patterns of clouds and the flight of birds.
Beyond the towers, a narrow walkway projected from a corner of the roof into the windy
darkness. It was along this walkway that Syle now led Yama, who clung to the single railing with
sweating hands.
The House of the Twelve Front Rooms faced toward the Great River; even at noon, only a
shallow curtain of light fell into the mouth of the cavern. Directly below the walkway, a long
steep slope of scrub and bare rock fell to the spurs and spires and towers which had accreted
around the ragged hem of the Palace, covering it as corals will cover a wreck in the warm lower
reaches of the river.
Beyond, the lights of Ys were spread along the edge of the broad river; Yama could see,
across a hundred leagues of water, the flat edge of the world itself against the empty darkness of
the night sky. Downriver, where the world narrowed to its vanishing point, was a dim red glow,
as if a fire had been kindled beneath the horizon.
In the windy dark, his mild face illuminated by his crown of fireflies, Syle said, "In a few
hours the Preservers will look upon us for the first time this year."
"I had forgotten. Will there be celebrations?"
"Amongst the rabble of the city, yes. If we stay out long enough we'll see their fireworks and
bonfires. And later, perhaps, the fires of riots, and then the flashes of the weapons of the
magistrates as they restore order."
"Ys is a strange and terrible city."
"It is a very large city, and there can only be order by suppressing any disorder at once, by
whatever force is necessary. The Department of Indigenous Affairs has raised an army to fight
the heretics; that is why they want new territory. But the magistrates are a greater army, one
which constantly strives against a greater enemy. It is because we have fallen from grace that the
people war against themselves with more hatred than against the heretics."
Yama remembered Pandaras's story of how his uncle had been trapped when magistrates had