"Andrew J. Offutt - Cormac 06 - The Undying Wizard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)

the reptile, a haze formed. It spread, lengthened, billowed only slightly, and rose. Tenuous, wavering creepers
of mist shuddered on the stale air of the cavern. Luminous walls were clearly visible through the gossamer
floating haze. It was blue-grey, that ever-shifting amorphous cloudlet; the colour of human death.
Yet about it there was nothing human.
For just a moment among the fleeting motes of time, the necrotic haze seemed to coalesce, as if attempting
to form a shape: rounded at the top, pierced below by two holes, narrow and latticed belowтАФa deathтАЩs head.
But that was gone in an instant, nor were there living eyes present to have seen.
The mist floated up, free of the serpentine corpse that had spawned it. It moved, and surely there was
purpose in the flowing movement of that faint cloud of haze along the subterranean corridor.
The passage bent and twisted again and again, as though formed by a restless reptileтАФor by long-dead men
who had sought to confuse and slow possible pursuit. For though the mist-thing moved away from it, the
tunnel gave off a concealed passage in the centuries-old castle above.
The mist-thing drifted along above a dusty, ever-descending floor of packed earth. Around convoluted turnings
and twistings writhed the wraithy haze, and it touched nothing but air, this form of life from death that trailed
in eerie silence through the soundless channel beneath the earth.
Then it paused, writhing in air. It hovered above... another corpse.
The body was that of a man. Old he had been, aged enough to have died of natural causes. But there was
visible evidence to the contrary. He who had been tall and unusually thin wore a cowled robe, dark as night.
Cloth covered his reed-thin body from head to instep. He lay belly down, and in the center of the robeтАЩs back
a darker stain spread. Dried trails of it led over the fabric to the corridorтАЩs floor of packed, dust-piled earth. The
splotch and its coagulated runnels were a reddish brown, like old rust. The robed man had been stabbed from
behind and had got his death thereby.
Grey and white, forming silver, were his beard and the hair that straggled limp as corn tassels from his head
over his cheek. Grey too were his eyes, nearly white in the paleness. Though open, they saw nothing. Bony
hands with fingers like claws had not even torn at the tunnel floor; he had been dead even as he fell. Open too
was his mouth in a rictus that had been a gasp or cry.
The hovering mist lowered. Wraithy tendrils of transparent blue-grey touched the corpse, as though the
amorphous haze-thing was putting forth exploratory pseudopods.
One of them entered the open mouth of the dead man.
Swiftly then, like smoke somehow filtering into a bottle, the haze entered the corpse.
Then all was quiet and still, and none was there to measure the passage of time. Minutes, or hours, or days,
or weeks or months... they were as nothing to the dead-and to the mist-thing.
The seagreen serpent lay dead, and it began to rot. Well away along the twisting corridor beneath the earth,
the robed man lay dead. And the mist had vanished, as silently and hazily as it had appeared, from one
corpse and into another.
The body of the robed man did not swell, or rot.
Then, in that silence and motionlessness of death, there was movement.
It was fingers that twitched; the fingers of the right hand of the dead man.
They curled, clawing inward and leaving trails in the dust of the ancient cavern. Hardly more than bone, these
fingers straightened again. And curled once more.
A ripple flowed through night-dark fabric as the dead manтАЩs left leg moved, only a twitch like the rigour after
deathтАФbut he had been dead far too long for that.
Both arms bent. Both bone-lean hands moved back toward the body. They planted themselves, palms down,
at the shoulders. The head moved. Lank silver hair stirred. The hands pressed down. Buskin-shod feet
scraped.
The corpse pushed itself up from the dusty floor.
On its feet, the dead man who was not dead wavered, tottered on long-still legs. A hand swung out to slap
the earthen wall, as a brace for a body that had long lain prone. A long moaning sound issued from the thin
slash of a mouth. All through the tall form, a great shudder ran. Then, as though just remembering, the mouth
closed.