"Tepper, Sheri S - A Plague Of Angels - plangel4" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tepper Sherri)

Hunagor. Werra. Seoca.
Visions came to him, rising out of those words: Forests become deserts, the bloated bellies of starvation, the scorched earth of bombed cities, thc hideous faces of IDDIs. Famine. Death. Plague. Earth itself endangered by man. Man himself a plague, to be attacked like a plague, to be killed by
whatever means the thrones could find. Hunagor. Werra. Seoca. Hunger! War! Sickness!
His breath caught in his throat. He felt himself grow cold.
"Go, now," said the old man, looking from Abasio to Arakny and the Griffin and back again to Abasio. "Go, my boy."


A PLAGUE OF ANGELS
409
Abasio's breath left him explosively.
Arakny took him by the shoulder and drew him back toward the pillars. Before them, the Griffin was bent into a profound obeisance. The thrones hummed. The Griffin turned and came after them, a wild amber light burning in its eyes. A wavering effulgence gathered around the thrones, and those sitting there began to melt into the stone, joining that throng of others who had melted into those thrones throughout aeons of time.
Abasio was chill and rigid with protest. He did not believe. He would not believe. He was not thinking. He had willfully turned his mind off. He did not wish to think of anything, particularly not of this.
They fled, following the Griffin out among the pillars, out into the corridor. Behind them the low humming intensified, a sound growing slowly and steadily in volume. The Griffin thrust the great door closed with one push of a mighty wing.
"We are friends, Abasio Cermit," said the Griffin. "For her ake. Abasio choked on the words. "For her sake." s " "Go that way, swiftly! I have my own way out." The Griffin pointed with one wingtip, then went away itself, down the long corridor to the right, striding like a lion, wings folded behind it.
The great engine noise had abated, though not the vibration they could feel through the soles of their feet. They ran in the direction the Griffin had indicated, coming to the open lift they had used to descend. They leaped inside it, felt it lunge upward, fidgeted impatiently as it rose up and up and
up into the more familiar purlieus of Gaddi House."What's happening?" mumbled Abasio.
"I'm not certain," Arakny muttered as the engine noise from below increased, grew to a steady mutter, then to a subdued roar that made the walls shake. "But the librarian in me says we've probably reached the end of one book and the beginning of another."
The doors opened, and they staggered together along the familiar corridor
to His Wisdom's quarters, where they found the others crouched along walls or clinging to doorframes, trying to stand or sit while the entire structure shuddered around them. The tremors went on and on, a constant vibration that made their teeth chatter and their muscles rebel, ripping them away from their holdfasts and tumbling them about on the floor like rocks in an avalanche among a clutter of furniture and broken crockery.
Until all at once, without diminution or aftershock, the noise and shaking simply stopped, absolutely and utterly. They lay in an enormous silence, for a moment without even the sound of breathing, then gasped as they realized they'd been holding their breaths.
Tom Fuelry heaved air into his lungs and demanded, 'Where is His Wisdom?" ,


410 Sheri S. Tepper

"Where?" cried Nimwes, sounding both angry and afraid, her question echoed by others of the Gaddirs.
"Below," said Abasio. "With his friends."
"I'll go," said Tom, rushing out. "You shouldn't have left him." Nimwes ran after him. Arakny started to follow, but Oracle caught at her shoulder, shaking her head. "Let them see. They'll need to see for themselves."
Arakny turned, patting her pockets, muttering.
"What is it?" Oracle asked.
"I just remembered! Oily took my library. I forgot to get it back from her. i wanted to record, to make note~ to~"
Outside the room, Tom ran toward one of the secret lifts, one he had used a thousand times. He bumped himself against an unfamiliar panel and stood back, rubbing his head. Where the self-opening door should have been was only blank wall. He shook his head, baffled, angry, frightened, while Nimwes cried from behind him. Well, there was another one not far away, where this corridor crossed another beside a ramp.
He ran. She ran. The crossing was there. The ramp was there. The door wasn't. The lift wasn't.
There was a door, one of the big doors, down two levels! He flung himself at the ramp, Nimwes still pursuing, stumbling two levels down, almost falling in his haste. The door was gone. The whole door, the entire, huge, complicated door. Where it had stood was only blank wall! Wall! Everywhere walls !
All the ways were closed. All the routes he had used all the years of his life were gone. The ways his father had shown him. Portals he had opened time after time were gone, nothing remaining to show where they had been. Lifts he had ridden in were gone. Corridors he had traversed to get from this point to that ended now in different places, against different barriers. Gaddi House was no longer as it had been.
When they returned, there was blood upon their fingertips where they had pressed again and again at unyielding stone. From the adjacent room, the others heard their voices raised in a long, confused lament, while Nimwes cried heartbrokenly. "He didn't tell me good-bye!"
Qualary, not understanding anything that had happened, cried, "When Ellel gets back--when she gets back, she'll lind all her walkers gone. She'll find things changed. She hates that. She'll be so angry."
Oracle put her arm around the woman. "Don't worry about that, Qualary. Really, you don't have to worry about that."
Qualary sniffed, dried her eyes. "She told me you said the stars were Ellel's. Two Families, you said."


A PLAGUE OF ANGELs

411 Oracle only patted her shoulder and did not reply. Her eyes were fixed
upon Berkli's, and his Upon hers with dawning awareness.
Tom's sorrow had reminded Abasio of his own. "I think of her out there," he cried to Oracle. "Going on and on, forever. Hungry. Tired. Maybe in pain." .
"No," said Oracle. el~eve me, Abasio, my Orphan's not in pain. She'll never be hungry, or tired, or in pain." She lOOked away from him, her face set and grim.
He would not let the subject alone. "Do you think Olly's life well spent'?" he demanded angrily. "You sent her here. Was it right'?"
"You're referring to her so-called seventh question?" Oracle asked fiercely, returning his glare.
"What do you mean, so-called?',