"Walter Jon Williams - City on Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

obviously serves the same purpose.
Practical, Aiah thinks. It avoids congestion on the bridges, or building
expensive tunnels underwater for pneuma and trackline transport.
Images of the Blue Titan and the Lynxoid Brothers brighten the sky, a plasm
advert for the new chromoplay. .. .
The buildings grow nicer as the boat approaches the Aerial Palace: expensive
apartments, tinted glass and jutting balconies with fancy gingerbread
scrollwork on the rails, and broad-shouldered office buildings crouching on
their pontoons like animals ready to spring. Buildings don't reach as high
here as in Jaspeer, because it would make the pontoons top-heavy.
And then the boat passes through a battlefield, and the contrast is shocking:
a series of squat blackened buildings, roofs fallen in, piles of rubble
spilled in the street. Barges rock silently at the quayside, filled with
slick plastic body bags. Priests with surgical gauze over their lower faces
process the dead as they are brought from the rubble.
Come to mourn! a sound truck cries. Come to mourn the dead!The Burning Man
had appeared here, a firestorm of plasm in human shape. He had been fighting
for Constantine, trying to stop a government counterattack; but the mage had
been inexperienced and everything had gone out of control.
Twenty-five thousand dead. Including the mage. Several thousand soldiers.
The rest civilians.
Aiah, in the coup's headquarters, had watched it happen, had tried to stop
it.. . too late.
Her fault. She had provided the plasm.
Come to mourn the dead!There are people hanging, she sees, from the ruined
buildings. Hanging in what look like sacks, feet sticking out the bottom, the
sacks swinging free on lines secured to broken rooftops. They are not dead
people, not casualtiesтАФthey have hung themselves there since the burning.
Mad people? Mourners? Aiah cannot tellтАФthey are all too far away.
Blowing soot brings tears to Aiah's eyes. She dabs at them with her sleeve.
Then fantastic architecture of the Aerial Palace appears on the horizon, all
swoops and spirals like the path of a falcon traced through the air.
Shieldlight shimmers off the arabesques of the building's collection web,
bronze patterns set into the building's exterior and designed to absorb and
defuse any plasm attack, defense and ornament in one. The burnished bronze
adds lovely bright accents to the building's design, but its defense aspect
failed drasticallyтАФthe building is scarred, pocked by machine guns and
punctured by rockets. Plastic sheeting is tacked up over shattered windows.
The Keremaths lived here, and they died here, too. When the assault teams
fought their way up the stairways they found only corpses.
Jewels appear in the air behind the Palace. An advertisement for diamonds.
Surprise moves through Aiah as she sees people hanging here as well,
dangling from sacks set into niches in the building. When she comes close,
however, she sees they are not real people, but statues.
A mystery. When she finds an opportunity she will ask.
The colossal structure is built on a raft made of several pontoons, and the
motor launch drives between two pontoons into a narrow, watery alley lit with
bright sodium floods both above and below the water. Aiah looks down into the
milky water for dolphins and finds none.
The motor launch pulls into a slip alongside other, equally flamboyant craft.