"Tad Williams - Otherland 1 - City of Golden Shadows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Tad)

no worse than standing on a mattress.
He began to walk.
The castle grew larger as he approached. If Paul had retained any doubts that he was in a
story and not a real place, the ever-clearer view of his destination would have dispelled them. It
was clearly something that someone had made up.
It was real, of course, and quite solid--although what did that mean to a man walking across
the clouds? But it was real in the way of things long believed-in but never seen. It had the shape
of a castle--it was as much a _castle_ as something could ever be--but it was no more a medieval
fortress than it was a chair or a glass of beer. It was an _idea_ of a castle, Paul realized, a
sort of Platonic ideal unrelated to the grubby realities of motte-and-bailey architecture or
feudal warfare.
Platonic ideal? He had no idea where that had come from. Memories were swimming just below the
surface of his conscious mind, closer than ever, but still as strangely unfocused as the many-


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towered vision before him.
He walked on beneath the unmoving sun, wisps of cloud rising from his heels like smoke.
The gate was open but did not seem welcoming. For all the diffuse glimmer of the towers, the
entranceway itself was deep, black, and empty. Paul stood before the looming hole for some time,
his blood lively in his veins, his self-protective reflexes urging him to turn back even though he
knew he must enter. At last, feeling even more naked than he had beneath the hail of shellfire
which had begun the whole mad dream, he took a breath and stepped through.
The vast stone chamber beyond the door was curiously stark, the only decoration a single great
banner, red embroidered with black and gold, that hung on the far wall. It bore a vase or chalice
out of which grew two twining roses, with a crown floating above the flowers. Below the picture
was the legend _"Ad Aeternum."_
As he stepped forward to examine it, his footsteps reverberated through the empty chamber, so
loud after the muffling cloud-carpet that it startled him. He thought that someone would surely
come to see who had entered, but the doors at either end of the chamber remained shut and no other
sound joined the dying echoes.
It was hard to stare at the banner for long. Each individual thread of black and gold seemed
to move, so that the whole picture swam blurrily before his eyes. It was only when he stepped back
almost to the entrance that he could see the picture clearly again, but it still told him nothing
of this place or who might live here.
Paul looked at the doors at either end. There seemed little to choose between them, so he
turned toward the one on the left. Though it seemed only a score or so of paces away, it took him
a surprisingly long time to reach it. Paul looked back. The far portal was now only a dark spot a
great distance away, and the antechamber itself seemed to be filling with mist, as though clouds
were beginning to drift in from outside. He turned and found that the door he had sought now
loomed before him. It swung open easily at his touch, so he stepped through.
And found himself in a jungle.
But it was not quite that, he realized a moment later. Vegetation grew thickly everywhere, but
he could see shadowy walls through the looping vines and long leaves; arched windows set high on
those walls looked out on a sky busy with dark storm clouds--quite a different sky than the shield
of pure blue he had left beyond the front gate. The jungle was everywhere, but he was still
_inside,_ even though the outside was not his own.
This chamber was larger even than the huge front hall. Far, far above the nodding, poisonous-