"Gene Wolfe - New Sun 1- The Shadow of the Torturer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

sometimes conceived of as a candle, sometimes as a flambeau - that engendered
life in whatever objects it fell upon, so that a leaf plucked from a bush grew
slender legs and waving feelers, and a rough brown brush opened black eyes and
scurried up a tree.
Yet sometimes, particularly in the sleepy hours around noon, there was little to
watch. Then I turned again to the blazon over the door and wondered what a ship,
a rose, and a fountain had to do with me, and stared at the funeral bronze I had
found and cleaned and set up in a corner. The dead man lay at full length, his
heavy-lidded eyes closed. In the light that pierced the little window I examined
his face and meditated on my own as I saw it in the polished metal. My straight
nose, deep-set eyes, and sunken cheeks were much like his, and I longed to know
if he too had dark hair.
In the winter I seldom came to the necropolis, but in summer that violated
mausoleum and others provided me with places of observation and cool repose.
Drotte and Roche and Eata came too, though I never guided them to my favorite
retreat, and they, I knew, had secret places of their own. When we were together
we seldom crept into tombs at all. Instead we made swords of sticks and held
running battles, or threw pinecones at the soldiers, or scratched boards on the
soil of new graves and played draughts with stones, and ropes and snails, and
high-toss-cockle.
We amused ourselves in the maze that was the Citadel too, and swam in the great
cistern under the Bell Keep. It was cold and damp there even in summer, under
its vaulted ceiling beside the circular pool of endlessly deep, dark water. But
it was hardly worse in winter, and it had the supreme advantage of being
forbidden, so we could slip down to it with delicious stealth when we were
assumed to be elsewhere, and not kindle our torches until we had closed the
barred hatch behind us. Then, when the flames shot up from the burning pitch,
how our shadows danced up those clammy walls!
As I have already mentioned, our other swimming place was in Gyoll, which winds
through Nessus like a great, weary snake. When warm weather came, we trooped
through the necropolis on our way there - first past the old exalted sepulchers
nearest the Citadel wall, then between the vainglorious death houses of the
optimates, then through the stony forest of common monuments (we trying to
appear highly respectable when we had to pass the burly guards leaning on their
polearms). And at last across the plain, bare mounds that marked the interments
of the poor, mounds that sank to puddles after the first rain.
At the lowest margin of the necropolis stood the iron gate I have already
described. Through it the bodies intended for the potter's field were borne.
When we passed those rusting portals we felt we were for the first time truly
outside the Citadel, and thus in undeniable disobedience of the rules that were
supposed to govern our comings and goings. We believed (or pretended to believe)
we would be tortured if our older brothers discovered the violation; in
actuality, we would have suffered nothing worse than a beating - such is the
kindness of the torturers, whom I was subsequently to betray.
We were in greater danger from the inhabitants of the many-storied tenements
that lined the filthy street down which we walked. I sometimes think the reason
the guild has endured so long is that it serves as a focus for the hatred of the
people, drawing it from the Autarch, the exultants, and the army, and even in
some degree from the pale cacogens who sometirnes visit Urth from the farther
stars.