"S. M. Stirling & David Drake - The General 01 - The Forge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

it had been sliced with a razor. Raj felt a giant hand seize his
chest, squeezing, tasted bile at the back of his throat.

"Well," he said, and heard it come out as a croak. "Well, it is
still active."

Thom nodded jerkily. "Notice something about the
skeletons?" he said.

Raj looked around. "Pretty dead."

"Yes, and no marks on the bones. Looks like they fell in place,
and nothing disturbed them."

Raj Whitehall nodded. The surviving skeletons were eerily
complete, like an anatomy model; no toothmarks, nothing
disturbed by scavengers.
 "I don't think there's much point in going that way," he
answered, waving to the darkness on their right. The beam of his
lamp showed nothing but the walls of the corridor, fading to a
geometric point with distance. "That heads due east, near as I
can tell." Out from under the city and towards the hills. "If
there's anything beyond thatтАж lightтАж we might find another
shaft leading up."

Thom nodded, wiping a sleeve across his mouth. "Maybe. I
wish we'd brought some water."

Raj grinned. "I wish you hadn't said that," he said. "I really
do."
***

"Mirrors," Thom said. For the first time in Raj's memory,
there was real awe in his friend's voice. "I've never seen mirrors
like this.

"I've never seen a light like that, either," Raj said.

The room was circular, floored and roofed with mirrors, and
with a single seamless sheet of mirror for the walls. The center of
the circle was a pillar of light; white, glareless, heatless, odorless,
shining on the endless repeated figures of the two men. Raj felt
himself stagger in place, lost and splintered in fractions of
himself. It was a moment before he noticed the last, the
intolerable strangeness.

"Thom," he said urgently. "Why don't the mirrors reflect the
light?" There it was before their eyes, a column as physically real
as their own hands, a light that was all that kept this place from
being as dark as a coffin. Yet in the mirrors there was no trace of