"Emil Petaja - The Prism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Petaja Emil)

Finally the fog came to an end. He called out silent prayers to the
Princess for her boon. Her urgent reply inside his deepest brain cells gave
him the resurgence of hero-power he needed to further his nagging
self-demand.
тАЬHurry, Kor! I am waiting!тАЭ
Scrambling over a lichened hillock of rock he saw the castle, looming
close and palpable. A thrill raced through his veins. The castle was
many-turreted and large, gray and black and mauve-shadowed where turret
met forehall; it was tangled over with moss and vine. The portcullis was
down, the drawbridge drawn up from a moat so ancient and unkempt that
the water in it was a foul stagnance of green and brown slimes.
Kor sucked in deep from the altitudinal air; then, without further delay,
he dove into the brackish scum. The water was cold as ice, as cold as the
foretaste of death. He swam fast, sure-stroked from the lazy days in the
lagoons of the Forest, then sought handholds in the slimes to scramble up
rocks to the foretower's base. Hugging wall, he circled the vine-choked walk
until he reached a weedy garden of dead flowers and rampant foliage; there
was a small door, arched, where blunt entrance hall met tower, as if in days
long gone the Princess and her handmaidens had used this door for a
morning's dalliance in the flowerbeds.
The door was locked. Kor put his shoulder to it; hasps, locks,
hingesтАФoxidized by brooding centuries of disuseтАФyielded to his second
heave. The door popped inward with a noise that echoed and reechoed
down the long corridors, halls where arachnids and rodents roamed and
sullied at will. Kor waited there, heart sinking from portentous dread of
what he might find inside. The eddies of dust made him cough, stepping
across the door where motes spun and danced silent fandangos in vagrant
light beams that fingered their way through the ever-fog. Ghosts were here
and ghosts of ghosts.
He called out.
тАЬPrincess! Princess Sena!тАЭ
Echoes skittered back out of the dusty gloom. The voice in his mind was
silent. Mocked by the echoes, he moved in and past the mailed sentries in
heavy armor, toward the center of the great tower. The silence, the dark,
the closenessтАФthese were all heavy weights dragging his heels and urging
him to quit this dead place. Once he touched a helmeted figure's
breastplate to avoid a tangle of spider-web; the helmet rocked, then
toppled off to the floor with a noisy metallic clank, revealing a white skull.
Kor shivered and ran.
His footsteps were an outrage on the stillness. Staring around him at
the stony circle, he saw that the central chamber was hung with tattered
shreds of tapestries; gay hunting scenes and feasts mocked the dusty
silence, faded, moldered by relentless years.
Kor's probing eyes dug the gloom, from the high elongated slots of
window to the places where damp had encrusted the crumbled masonry
with fungus. He moved quickly to the spiral of stone stairs leading up. . . .
He found her in the small topmost chamber at the summit of the
winding stairs; her bed was four-postered silver, and the white satin of her
gossamer bedcovering lay heavy with dust like animal fur. Yet Princess
Sena herself was no skeleton; it was as though the dust-pall had not dared