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

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around the great tree was becoming murkier, the ends of the branches obscured; he could see vast
shadowy shapes hanging in the distant foliage overhead, but could not identify them. Another half
hour's climbing revealed them to be monstrous apples, each as large as a barrage balloon.
As he mounted higher, the fog thickened until he was surrounded by a phantom world of branches
and drifting, tattered clouds, as though he clambered in the rigging of a ghost ship. No sound
reached him but the creaking and scratching of bark beneath his feet. Breezes blew, cooling the
thin sweat on his forehead, but none of them blew hard enough to shake the great, flat leaves.
Silence and shreds of mist. The great trunk and its mantle of branches above and below him, a
world in itself. Paul climbed on.
The clouds began to grow even more dense, and he could sense the light changing; something
warm was making the mists glow, like a lantern behind thick curtains. He rested again, and
wondered how long it would take him to fall if he were to step off the branch on which he sat. He
plucked a loose button from his shirt cuff and let it drop, watching it shiver down the air
currents until it vanished silently into the clouds below.
Later--he had no idea how much later--he found himself climbing into growing radiance. The
gray bark began to show traces of other colors, sandy beiges and pale yellows. The upper surfaces
of the branches seemed flattened by the new, harsher light and the surrounding mist gleamed and
sparkled as though tiny rainbows played between the individual drops.
The cloud-mist was so thick here that it impeded his climb, curling around his face in
dripping tendrils, lubricating his grip, weighting his clothes and dragging at him treacherously
as he negotiated difficult hand-to-hand changeovers. He briefly considered giving up, but there
was nowhere else for him to go except back down. It seemed worth risking an unpleasantly swift
descent to avoid the slower alternative which could lead only to eternal nothingness on that gray
plain.
In any case, Paul thought, if he was already dead, he couldn't die again. If he was alive,
then he was part of a fairy tale, and surely no one ever died this early in the story.
The clouds grew thicker the last hundred yards of his ascent he might have been climbing
through rotting muslin. The damp resistance kept him from noticing how bright the world was
becoming, but as he pushed through the last clouds and lifted his head, blinking, it was to find
himself beneath a dazzling, brassy sun and a sky of pure unclouded blue.
No clouds above, but clouds everywhere else: the top of the great frothy mass through which he
had just climbed stretched away before him like a white meadow, a miles-wide, hummocked plain of
cloudstuff. And in the distance, shimmering in the brilliant sunlight . . . a castle.
As Paul stared, the pale slender towers seemed to stretch and waver, like something seen
through the waters of a mountain lake. Still, it was clearly a castle, not just an illusion
compounded of clouds and sun; colorful pennants danced from the tops of the sharp turrets, and the
huge porticullised gate was a grinning mouth opening onto darkness.
He laughed, suddenly and abruptly, but his eyes filled with tears. It was beautiful. It was
terrifying. After the great gray emptiness and the half-world of the clouds, it was too bright,
too strong, almost too real.
Still, it was what he had been climbing toward: it called to him as clearly as if it had
possessed a voice--just as the dim awareness of an inescapable _something_ awaiting him had
summoned him to climb the tree.
There was the faintest suggestion of a path across the spun-sugar plain, a more solid line of
whiteness that stretched from the tree and meandered away toward the distant castle gate. He
climbed until his feet were level with the top of the clouds, paused for a moment to revel in the
strong, swift beating of his heart, then stepped off the branch. For a sickening instant the
whiteness gave, but only a little. He windmilled his arms for balance, then discovered that it was