"Dan Simmons - The rise of Endymion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

Antipope?"
"Not to you," murmured Father Dur├й and closed his eyes in prayer.
The two Swiss Guard troopers seized Father Dur├й's thin arms. The Jesuit did not resist. One of
the troopers grabbed the resurrected man by the brow and pulled his head back, stretching the thin
neck in a bow.
Cardinal Lourdusamy took a graceful half step closer. From the folds of his silken sleeve
snicked a knife blade with a horn handle. While the troopers held the still passive Dur├й, whose
Adam's apple seemed to grow more prominent as his head was forced back, Lourdusamy swept his arm
up and around in a fluid, casting-away gesture. Blood spurted from Dur├й's severed carotid artery.
Stepping back to avoid staining his robes, Lourdusamy slid the blade back into his sleeve,
raised the broad-mouthed chalice, and caught the pulsing stream of blood. When the chalice was
almost filled and the blood had ceased spurting, he nodded to the Swiss Guard trooper, who
immediately released Father Dur├й's head.
The resurrected man was a corpse once again, head lolling, eyes still shut, mouth open, the
slashed throat gapping like painted lips on a terrible, ragged grin. The two Swiss Guard troopers
arranged the body on the slab and lifted the shroud away. The naked dead man looked pale and
vulnerable -- torn throat, scarred chest, long, white fingers, pale belly, flaccid genitals,
scrawny legs. Death -- even in an age of resurrection -- leaves little or no dignity even to those
who have lived lives of sustained self-control.
While the troopers held the beautiful shroud out of harm's way, Cardinal Lourdusamy poured the
heavy chalice's blood onto the dead man's eyes, into his gaping mouth, into the raw knife wound,
and down the chest, belly, and groin of the corpse, the spreading scarlet matching and surpassing
the intensity of color in the Cardinal's robes.
"Sie aber seid nicht fleischlich, sondern geistlich," said Cardinal Lourdusamy. "You are not
made of flesh, but of spirit."
The tall man raised an eyebrow. "Bach, isn't it?"
"Of course," said the Cardinal, setting the now-empty chalice next to the corpse. He nodded to
the Swiss Guard troopers and they covered the body with the two-layered shroud. Blood immediately
soaked the beautiful fabrics.
"Jesu, meine Freunde," added Lourdusamy.
"I thought so," said the taller man. He gave the Cardinal a questioning look.
"Yes," agreed Cardinal Lourdusamy.
"Now."
The man in gray walked around the bier and stood behind the two troopers, who were completing
their tucking-in of the blood-soaked shroud. When the troopers straightened and stepped back from
the marble slab, the man in gray lifted his large hands to the back of each man's neck. The
troopers' eyes and mouths opened wide, but they had no time to cry out: within a second their open
eyes and mouths blazed with an incandescent light, their skin became translucent to the orange
flame within their bodies, and then they were gone -- volatilized, scattered to particles finer
than ash. The man in gray brushed his hands together to rid them of the thin layer of micro-ash.
"A pity, Councillor Albedo," murmured Cardinal Lourdusamy in his thick rumble of a voice.
The man in gray looked at the suggestion of airborne dust settling in the dim light and then
back at the Cardinal. His eyebrow rose once again in query.
"No, no, no," rumbled Lourdusamy, "I mean the shroud. The stains will never come out. We have
to weave a new one after every resurrection." He turned and started toward the secret panel, his
robes rustling. "Come, Albedo. We need to talk and I still have a Mass of Thanksgiving to say
before noon."
After the panel slid shut behind the two, the resurrection chamber lay silent and empty except
for the shrouded corpse and the slightest hint of gray fog in the dim light, a shifting, fading
mist suggestive of the departing souls of the more recent dead.