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

to touch the carved ivory and shell-tint of her face and her folded hands like
doves.
Her beauty caught Kor's breath, then wrenched out a forlorn cry. Her
carmine lips were curved in a sighing smile; her raven-black hair billowed
over the satin pillow like a fan; under her delicately arched brows her eyes
slept.
Kor bent to her and kissed her with impatient reverence. He had to.
Touching her petaled cheek with his sunburned lips he pulled back with a
second cry. Princess Sena was cold. Cold as death.
 With a sob he dropped to his knees; he ached in every fiber and his
nerves were like jelly. Dry blood darkened his brown Helden body. But it
was his inner agony that defeated him. By some eldritch magic Princess
Sena was forever young and beautifulтАФbut, like the castle's servitors and
all the rest, she was dead. Dead for centuries. The Legend was that and
nothing more. Atlan was right!
He snapped shut his eyes not to see her. The beauty in her cameo of a
face, in the curve of her throat and swelling breasts, all of it was a
mockery. His dream was over.
A gibbering laugh from the tower's open window pulled him dully out of
his dizzy defeat. He turned and saw them.
There were three of them. Three Dracs. Blood-drinkers from the Vales of
Horror. Their black-mottled-with-scarlet faces grinned delightedly while they
chittered glee. Only the Dracs, with their powerful bat wings, could attain
the castle heights. But the Dracs were only quasi-human and of low
intelligence. To them the Princess meant nothing. The Drac religion was of
a different order altogether. The Dracs worshipped a strange non-dying
creature whom they called Condracu of Transalvan: it had been Condracu
who had exalted the piddling human organism into the immortal
transcendental state of Drac-hood. To the Dracs Princess Sena was a
wheyfaced nothing, without a drop of blood in her. Ugh!
But Kor. Here was something else again, something to make them
chitter thanks to Condracu the Magnificent for a rich boon. They had sniffed
him out on their morning rounds; incredible as it might seem to find a
Helden from the Purple Forests up hereтАФa muscular, huge brown creature
whose heart even now pounded up a tempest of rich red blood through his
arteries and veins!тАФhere the spoor had led them, and here he was! Why,
they could see the jugular's pulse hammering in his thick neck from where
they lingered by the arch of window, drooling!
What a natural for their blood-herds! Why, such a virile creature should
let seven pints a week! More, maybe!
Hero-taught as he was, Kor's reaction was purely involuntary. One died,
but one died fighting. He edged back and pulled out steel. The Dracs
gibbered between themselves, talons flexing, fangs adrool. Even while Kor's
look flashed to the stairway door, which he'd left open, one of the
blood-beasts anticipated him; it flapped across the chamber to cut him off
from escape down the winding stone spring. Yet Kor's intricate amalgam of
nerve and muscle responded to danger as it had been taught to by his
harsh taskmaster. His blade went out, lashing wing-membrane, when the
other two made their sudden attack.
Facing them, he saw a thousand near-deaths glittering in those