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

looking flowers and the riot of greenery stretched a ceiling covered with intricate sharp-angled
patterns all of gleaming gold, like a jeweled map of a labyrinth.
Another memory came drifting up, the smell and the warm wet air tickling it free. This kind of
place was called . . . was called . . . a conservatory. A place where things were kept, he dimly
recalled, where things grew, where secrets were hidden.
He stepped forward, pushing the sticky fronds of a long-leafed plant out of his path, then had
to do a sudden dance to avoid tumbling into a pond that the plant had hidden. Dozens of tiny fish,
red as pennies heated in a forge, darted away in alarm.
He turned and moved along the edge of the pond, searching for a path. The plants were dusty.
As he worked his way through the thickest tangles, powdery clouds rose up into the light angling
down through the high windows, swirling bits of floating silver and mica. He paused, waiting for
the dust to settle. In the silence, a low sound drifted to him. Someone was weeping.
He reached up with both hands and spread the leaves as though they were curtains. Framed in
the twining vegetation stood a great bell-shaped cage, its slender golden bars so thickly wound
with flowering vines it was hard to see what it contained. He moved closer, and something inside
the cage moved. Paul stopped short.
It was a woman. It was a bird.
It was a woman.
She turned, her wide black eyes wet. A great cloud of dark hair framed her long face and
spilled down her back to merge with the purple and iridescent green of her strange costume. But it
was no costume. She was clothed in feathers; beneath her arms long pinions lay folded like a paper
fan. Wings.
_"Who's there?"_ she cried.
It was all a dream, of course--perhaps just the last hallucinatory moments of a battlefield
casualty--but as her voice crept into him and settled itself like something that had found its
home, he knew that he would never forget the sound of it. There was determination and sorrow and
the edge of madness, all in those two words. He stepped forward.
Her great round eyes went wider still. "Who are you? You do not belong here."
Paul stared at her, although he could not help feeling that he was doing her some insult, as


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though her feathered limbs were a sort of deformity. Perhaps they were. Or perhaps in this strange
place he was the deformed one.
"Are you a ghost?" she asked. "If so, I waste my breath. But you do not look like a ghost."
"I don't know what I am." Paul's dry mouth made it hard to speak. "I don't know where I am
either. But I don't feel like a ghost."
"You can talk!" Her alarm was such that Paul feared he had done something dreadful. "You do
not belong here!"
"Why are you crying? Can I help you?"
"You must go away. You must! The Old Man will be back soon." Her agitated movements filled the
room with a soft rustling. More dust fluttered into the air.
"Who is this old man? And who are you?"
She moved to the edge of the cage, grasping the bars in her slender fingers. "Go! Go now!" But
her gaze was greedy, as though she wished to make him into a memory that would not fade. "You are
hurt--there is blood on your clothing."
Paul looked down. "Old blood. Who are you?"
She shook her head. "No one." She paused and her face moved as though she would say something