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

Paul winced as the screaming began again. But it could not be the dying man--_this_ was the
dying man. So. . . .
"Feeling?" he asked, then looked up.
The dark shape was tumbling down the sky toward him, a black hole in the dull gray air,
whistling as it came. The dull thump of the howitzer followed a moment later, as though Time had
turned and bitten its own tail.
_"That it's a mistake,"_ said the hanging man.
And then the shell struck, and the world folded in on itself, smaller and smaller, angle after
angle creased with fire and then compressed along its axes, until it all vanished.


Things became even more complicated after Paul died.
He _was_ dead, of course, and he knew it. How could he be anything else? He had seen the
howitzer shell diving down on him from the sky, a wingless, eyeless, breathtakingly modern Angel
of Death, streamlined and impersonal as a shark. He had felt the world convulse and the air catch
fire, felt his lungs raped of oxygen and charred to cracklings in his chest. There could be no
doubt that he was dead.
But why did his head hurt?
Of course, an afterlife in which the punishment for a misspent existence was an eternally
throbbing headache might make a sort of sense. A horrible sort of sense.
Paul opened his eyes and blinked at the light.
He was sitting upright on the rim of a vast crater, a surely mortal wound ripped deep into the
muddy earth. The land around it was fiat and empty. There were no trenches, or if there were, they
were buried under the outflingings of the explosion; he could see nothing but churned mud in any
direction until the earth itself blurred into gray-gleaming mist along the encircling horizon.
But something solid was behind him, propping him up, and the sensation of it against the small
of his back and his shoulder blades made him wonder for the first time whether he had anticipated
death too soon. As he tilted his head back to look, his helmet-brim tipped forward over his eyes,
returning him to darkness for a moment, then slid down over his face and onto his lap. He stared
at the helmet. Most of its crown was gone, blasted away; the torn and tortured metal of the brim
resembled nothing so much as a crown of thorns.


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Remembering horror tales of shell-blasted soldiers who walked two dozen yards without their
heads or held their own innards in their hands without recognizing what they were, Paul shivered
convulsively. Slowly, as though playing a grisly game with himself, he ran his fingers up his
face, past his cheeks and temples, feeling for what must be the pulped top of his own skull. He
touched hair, skin, and bone . . . but all in their proper places. No wound. When he held his
hands before his face, they were striped with as much blood as mud, but the red was dry already,
old paint and powder. He let out a long-held breath.
He was dead, but his head hurt. He was alive, but a red-hot shell fragment had ripped through
his helmet like a knife through cake frosting.
Paul looked up and saw the tree, the small, skeletal thing that had drawn him across no-man's
land. The tree where the dying man had hung.
Now it stretched up through the clouds.

Paul Jonas sighed. He had walked around the tree five times, and it showed no sign of becoming