"Roger Zelazny - Amber Chronicles, The 08 - Sign of Chaos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

magic."
I nodded.
"Your own comings and goings might give one pause," I observed.
"I keep my paws to myself," he replied. "Which is more than Luke can
say."
"What do you mean?"
"He's caught in a contagious trap."
"How does it work?" I asked.
But he was gone again, and this time the grin went too.
Contagious trap? That seemed to indicate that the problem was Luke's,
and that I had been sucked into it in some fashion. This felt right, though
it still gave me no idea as to what the problem was or what I might do about
it.
I reached for my tankard. If I couldn't solve my problem, I might as
well enjoy it. As I took a slow sip I became aware of a strange pair of
pale, burning eyes
gazing into my own. I hadn't noticed them before, and the thing that
made them strange was that they occupied a shadowy comer of the mural across
the room from me
that, and the fact that they were ,moving, drifting slowly to my left.
It was kind of fascinating, when I lost sight of the eyes but was still
able to follow whatever it was from the swaying of grasses as it passed into
the area toward which I had been headed earlier. And far, far off to my
rightbeyond Luke-I now detected a slim gentleman in a dark jacket, palette
and brush in hand, who was slowly extending the mural. I took another sip
and returned my attention to the progress of whatever it was that had moved
from flat reality to 3-D. A gunmetal snout protruded from between a rock and
a shrub; the pale eyes blazed above it; blue saliva dripped from the dark
muzzle and steamed upon the ground. It was either quite short or very
crouched, and I couldn't make up my mind whether it was the entire crowd of
us that it was studying or me in particular. I leaned to one side and caught
Humpty by the belt or the necktie, whichever it was, just as he was about to
slump to the side..
"Excuse me," I said. "Could you tell me what sort of creature that is?"
I pointed just as it emerged-many-legged, long-tailed, dark-scaled,
undulating, and fast. Its claws were red, and it raised its tail as it raced
toward us.
Humpty's bleary eyes moved toward my own, drifted past.
"I am not here, sir," he began, "to remedy your zoological ignor- My
God! It's-"
It flashed across the distance, approaching rapidly. Would it reach a
spot shortly where its cunning would become a treadmill operation-or had
that effect only applieD to me on trying to get away from this place?
The segments of its body slid from side to side, it hissed like a leaky
pressure cooker, and steaming slaver marked its trail from the fiction of
paint. Rather than slowing, its speed seemed to increase.
My left hand jerked forward of its own volition and a series of words
rose unbidden to my lips. I spoke them just as the creature crossed the
interface I had been unable to pierce earlier, rearing as it upset a vacant
table and bunching its members as if about to spring.