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

mystery faith or another. The psychopomp who had visited North Steeple in his courses, these long
years, was a follower of the Cult of the Nameless--an ill-defined deity, the prayers to which were so
general as to serve in virtually all circumstances. What induced the psychopomp to adhere to what was
regarded as a distasteful faith, North never knew, nor did he care to ask. He and the psychopomp,
though they had seen each other once every other year for over a decade, had never progressed beyond
the most perfunctory of pleasantries. North fed the psychopomp from his own larder, and housed him
within his shack, as custom demanded, and all he asked in return was that the howling, stinking shades be
flushed out and away. The North Steeple would be left in silence for a season or two, at least until the
concentration of revenants, eidolons, and ghosts of the dead ensnared by the architecture grew too dense
again, and then North would soldier through in bitter silence until the psychopomp again appeared.

For some of the shades, though, the prayers to the Nameless were insufficient. These persistent revenants
were usually thought to be the shades of adherents to forgotten faiths, or those who worshiped
discredited gods, or who in one way or another practiced singular rites. Whatever the reason, in those
instances, a specialist was needed.
****
It was just past the Winter Solstice, some weeks since the psychopomp last made his way to the North
Steeple on his annual rounds. The psychopomp had taken only a fortnight to clear out the shades of the
dead, ushering them on their way to whatever rewards awaited them, towards whatever sphere or plane
or ancestral abode their faith promised them. After the psychopomp had gone, though, there were still
revenants remaining. At least half a dozen, clinging tenaciously to this mortal sphere, refusing to relinquish
their hold on the Steeple. One of the lingering revenants was the shade of a young woman. She had
haunted this region of the Roof for nearly two years, and she disquieted Steeplejack North in ways he'd
not before imagined.

North had caught a few glimpses of her, since the psychopomp departed. All of the other shades were
noisome, foul creatures, rotting corpses hovering between solid and incorporeal states, trailing noxious
odors, and howling their disquieting songs. The revenant of the young woman, though, seemed a shade of
a different type. In her visitations, she appeared well formed and whole, and while the scent of her
passing had the musty smell of mould and rot, it was nothing so offensive as that of the others. North had
seen her most often in the upper reaches of the steeple, wrapped in veils that drifted around her like
wispy cirrus clouds around the moon. She didn't howl like the others, but hummed some forgotten tune
that North thought he might once have known, long before, when he was a babe in arms and bore
another man's name.

In his small shack, on the leeward side of the western cupola, he sometimes dreamt about the young
woman, and in his dreams her gauzy vestments were blown away by some ethereal wind, and she was
left standing before him, unadorned and unblemished. Steeplejack North, who had never known the
touch of a woman, or of a man for that matter, woke from these dreams with his undergarments
cemented to his belly with seminal fluid, sticky like caulk or thin glue.

In his darker moments, his stomach full of quivers and his tongue thick in his mouth, North thought he
wouldn't mind if the shade of the young woman were to tarry in his region, if only for the fleeting glimpses
he was granted of her beauty. But the other half-dozen lingering revenants were the foulest that he'd yet
encountered, shrieking fiends that came upon him while he dangled from a tether in the higher altitudes, or
while he crept along a narrow ledge with trowel in hand, or was down on his hands and knees clearing a
griffin's nest out of a storm drain. That he had so far escaped primarily unscathed from these encounters,
and had not tumbled down to a messy death, thousands of feet below, could only be attributed to blind
luck, or to the providence of some unknown god who took pity on the Lenten Roofman. But North
could not count on luck, or the felicity of unknown gods, for much longer. He would need to call in a