"Kim Stanley Robinson - The Years Of Rice And Salt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Temur appeared high in the air, seated on a litter his carriers had already hefted on their shoulders. He
was palefaced and sweating, the whites of his eyes visible all the way around. He stared down at Psin.
'Why are you back?'

'Khan, a plague has struck the Magyars. They're all dead.'

Temur regarded his unloved general. 'Why are you back?'

'To tell you, Khan.'

Psin's voice was steady, and he met Temur's fierce gaze without fear. But Temur was not pleased. Bold
swallowed; nothing here was the same as that time he and Psin had escaped the hunters, there wasn't a
single feature of that effort that could be repeated. Only the idea that they could do it remained.

Something inside Temur snapped, Bold saw it his asura was speaking through him now, and it looked as
if it was wreaking great harm as it did so. Not an asura, perhaps, but his nafs, the spirit animal that lived
inside him. He rasped, 'They cannot get away as easily as that! They
will suffer for this, no matter how they try to escape.' He waved an arm weakly. 'Go back to your
detachment.'

Then to his guards he said in a calmer voice, 'Take these two back and kill them and their men, and their
horses. Make a bonfire and burn everything. Then move our camp two days' ride east.'

He raised up his hand.

The world burst asunder.

A bolt of lightning had exploded among them. Bold sat deaf on the ground. Looking around stunned, he
saw that all the others there had been flattened as well, that the Khan's tent was burning, Temur's litter
tipped over, his carriers scrambling, the Khan himself on one knee, clutching his chest. Some of his men
rushed to him. Again lightning blasted down among them.

Blindly Bold picked himself up and fled. He looked over his shoulder through pulsing green afterimages,
and saw Temur's black nafs fly out of his mouth into the night. TemuriLang, Iron the Lame, abandoned
by both asura and nafs. The emptied body collapsed to the ground, and rain bucketed onto it. Bold ran
into the dark to the west. We do not know which way Psin went, or what happened to him; but as for
Bold, you can find out in the next chapter.

TWO

Through the realm of hungry ghosts
A monkey wanders, lonely as a cloud.

Bold ran or walked west all that night, scrambling through the growing forest in the pouring rain, climbing
into the steepest hills he could find, to evade any horsemen who might follow. No one would be too
zealous in pursuit of a potential plague carrier, but he could be shot down from a good distance away,
and he wanted to disappear from their world as if he had never existed. If it had not been for the uncanny
storm he would certainly be dead, already embarked on another existence: now he was anyway. Gone,
gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond ...
He walked the next day and all the second night. Dawn of the second day found him hurrying back