"Liz Williams - Banner of Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Liz)

childhood: dreamfevers, feral malaises, and the modified infestations that would enable her not only to
suffer the transforma-tion when the time came, but to welcome it. She spent the endless dark of
Nightshade with the Animus crouched be-side the cot like a murmuring spider, spinning webs of words.
Transformation nearly killed her. It had been ex-plained to her by her aunt that it would make her
stronger, but she did not understand what "transformation" meant.
"What am I to be transformed into?" she had asked Elaki. But her aunt replied only, "You will see."
When the time came, Yskatarina lay, a small uncompre-hending form, in the sparkling dark of the
blacklight ma-trix as the engrams rewrote her: a process of alchemical change she was powerless to
resist.
The blacklight powered down into a gleaming cube of air. Yskatarina blinked, waking. It felt as
though she had been wrenched across a vast distance, torn through the remnants of boiling suns. There
was a smell of fire and a terrible heaviness, a weight. She tried to raise her head, but it felt too large for
her fragile neck. Someone bent over her. Yskatarina looked up, but it was several moments before the
strange shape floating before her congealed into human features.
She saw a long face, cheeks puffed out into veined pouches on either side of a thin, hooked nose.
The skin was unlined, unnaturally smooth and shiny as porcelain. The eyes were set in deep hollows,
filled with bloodshot gold. The hair was feathery: dirty-black, coiling in wispy tendrils from beneath the
high hat.
Then, Yskatarina's vision shifted and she realized that it was her aunt Elaki peering down at her. Yet
for a mo-ment it seemed that there was someone else looking out from Elaki's eyes, someone who cried
out in horror.
"You!" Elaki shrieked.
"Aunt?" Her own voice sounded faint, a thin croaking. Elaki reached down and shook her.
"It's you, isn't it? I'd know you anywhere."
"Aunt, what is wrong?" Something squirmed inside Yskatarina's head, running in turn from Elaki's
anger, tun-neling down to hide in the deep channels of her mind.
Elaki's face became thoughtful and cold, as if a crucial decision had been reached. She turned on her
heel and spoke to someone unseen, probably the Animus Isti, who followed always at her heels.
"Prepare the matrix once more. There are some fur-ther modifications to be made."
Darkness swept over Yskatarina like a wing. There was a tearing, rending sensation, a lightning bolt
through her brain. It felt as though she were being split in two, and the pain sent her squealing down into
the abyss.
She did not wake for a long time. At last, swimming up through unconsciousness, she found herself no
longer in the blacklight chamber, but in her own room. Her head felt like a great hot bag, too heavy to lift.
She put up a hand to feel her brow, but nothing happened. Alarmed, Yskata-rina tried to move her arms
and legs. There was no sensa-tion at all. She cried out for Elaki.
"Ah! You're awake," her aunt said, bustling in.
"I can't feel my arms, or my legs!"
Elaki placed a clammy hand on Yskatarina's forehead. "I fear that is because they are no longer there.
You suf-fered a rare meningeal infection after the transformation process, and your limbs were damaged
by gangrene. We were forced to remove them."
"Aunt?" Yskatarina whispered, in fright and shock.
"We will make new limbs for you," Elaki promised. Her face softened, almost imperceptibly, but there
was something behind her eyes that alarmed Yskatarina be-yond measure. "Better ones. So do not make
such a fuss."
When Elaki left, Yskatarina stared numbly up to find the Animus above her, in chrysalis form. She
reached out for him, before she remembered. He hung in a motionless silver-black shape from the ceiling
of the laboratory, de-pending from a piece of growing bone. After her own ex-periences, Yskatarina did
not expect the Animus to emerge alive, but emerge he did, gliding from the tinsel wreckage of the
chrysalis: arachnid, escorpionate, baleful.