"Chris Roberson - Companion to Owls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberson Chris)

Companion to Owls by Chris Roberson
Chris Roberson's first novel, There & Everywhere, was published by Pyr last year spring. In the fall, he
edited an original anthology, Adventure: Vol 1 for his small-press, MonkeyBrain Books. His next two
novels, The Voyage of Night Shining White (PS Publishing) and Paragaea: A Planetary Romance (Pyr),
will be out sometime this year. In addition, his short-fiction sales include stories to Live Without a Net,
The Many Faces of Van Helsing, FutureShocks, and Electric Velocipede. The author's new tale about a
strange expedition across the roof of an immense cathedral is his second story for Asimov's. You can
visit Chris online at www.chrisroberson.net.
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His name was Steeplejack North, the former because a steeple jack was his profession, the latter
because the northernmost Steeple of the Cathedral was his responsibility. No one knew his christening
name. It was unclear whether he knew it himself.

The Cathedral, a hulking edifice, covered thousands of square miles, dominating the western extremities
of the continent. The North Steeple, rising up above the Basilica of the Lost Matriarch, towered some
miles into the air, its highest point breaking into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, piercing the
firmament itself. When Steeplejack North was called upon to repair and maintain the highest reaches,
pressure suits and breathing apparatuses were the order of the day.

North lived on the Roof, in a shack on the leeward side of the Basilica's western cupola. From his
portico he could see the gentle slope as the Cathedral's ribs angled down towards the cornices and
gargoyles which demarked the boundary between Roof and the Northern Wall. In amongst the sculpted
grotesqueries and outcroppings fluttered the gonfalons, ensigns, and bannerets of a hundred dozen sects
and cults, but one would have to be a hagiologist to be able to identify what each represented. North's
father had been an adherent of Saint Osip, patron of Western Roofmen, while as a prentice in the
steeple-jack trade his master had been a follower of the Holy Serpentine. North, for his part, was
something of a pantheist, and if he worshiped anything, it was the sky, and the Roof, and the towering
majesty of the North Steeple.

Steeplejack North spent most of his year alone. Occasionally he would pass a chimney-sweep, or a
carilloneur, or prentice to some other steeple jack on his journeyman tour of the Roof's far reaches, but
the vast majority of his days were spent alone. Alone, that is, if one discounted the owls that roosted in
the Steeple's lower reaches, and the revenants.

Just as the architecture of the Cathedral tended to draw a supplicant's eyes and attention from their
worldly concerns--up past the buttresses and arches, up to the steeples and spires, and finally to the
heavens above, where so many gods and demiurges were said to reside--the architecture likewise had a
tendency to ensnare the attentions of the recently deceased, like glittering baubles catching the black eyes
of magpies, and as the shades of the dead drifted in their slow courses towards their eventual rewards,
some found themselves snagged on the culverts and gutters, entangled by the exotic design of masonry
and metalwork, and were caught, trapped between one world and the next, unable to go forward or
back. These unfortunates were known as revenants, and they were the bane of a Roofman's existence.

It was fortunate for the men of the Roof that, on a biennial basis, a psychopomp arrived to address the
problem. The psychopomp, conductor of the souls of the departed, followed his route through all the
districts and provinces of the Cathedral, the circuit taking him two full years. Once every eight seasons he
appeared at the outskirts of North's region of the Roof, and rid the steeple jack of the noisome
revenants.

A psychopomp was always a pietist of some stripe, a mystes inducted into the inner knowledge of some