"Wolfe, Gene - The Urth Of The New Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

Hearing it, it seemed to me for a moment that it was my
own cry, that something I had held deep inside me since
that still-dark morning when I had walked the beach with
the aquastor Master Malrubius and watched the aquastor
Triskele dissolve in shimmering dust had freed itself and
separated itself from me, and that it was below, howling in
the faint, lost light.
I was tempted to leap over the rail, for then I did not
know the depth of that shaft. As it was, I flung the mattress
through the doorway of my new cabin and descended the
narrow winding stair by jumping from one flight to the
next.
From above, the abyss of the shaft had seemed opaque,
the strange radiance of yellow lamps beating upon it
without effect. I had supposed that this opacity would
vanish when I reached the lower levels--but it solidified
instead, until I was reminded of Baldanders's chamber of
cloud, though it was really not so thick as that. The
swirling air grew warmer too, and perhaps the mist that
shrouded everything was only the result of warm, moist air
from the bowels of the ship mixing with the cooler atmoshere
of the upper levels. I was soon sweating in my velvet
shirt.
Here the doors of many cabins stood ajar, but the cabins
themselves were dark. Once, or so it seemed to me, the
ship must have had a more numerous crew, or perhaps had
been used to transport prisoners (the cabins would have
done well as cells, if the locks were differently instructed)
or soldiers.
The cry came again, and with it a noise like the ringing
of a hammer on an anvil, though it held a note that told me
it rang from no forge, but from a mouth of flesh. Heard by
night, in a fastness of the mountains, they would have been
more terrible than the howling of a dire-wolf, I think. What
sadness, dread, and loneliness, what fear and agony were
there!
I paused for breath and looked around me. Beasts, so it
seemed, were confined in the cabins farther down. Or
perhaps madmen, as we of the torturers had confined
pain-crazed clients on the third level of the oubliette. Who
could say that every door was shut? Might not some of
these creatures be unconfined, kept from the upper levels
by mere chance or their fear of man? I drew my pistol and
made sure it was at its lowest setting and that it had a full
charge.
My initial glimpse of the vivarium below confirmed my
worst fears. Filmy trees waved at the edge of a glacier, a
waterfall tumbled and sang, a dune lifted its sterile yellow
crest, and two score creatures prowled among them. I
watched them for a dozen breaths before I began to suspect