"Zelazny, Roger - Lord Demon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

I stepped back and regarded it there on the tabletop, allowing myself a faint smile. Then I seated myself cross-legged upon a heap of cushions and relaxed into the moment.
Kai Wren bottles are of course pricelessЧgoing back over fourteen centuries. I don't know how many of them I've made over all that time. Virtually indestructible, they will keep any wine decanted into them fresh for a span greater than two normal human lifetimes. They will do the same with cut flowers. And even if nothing is placed within them, they are said to bring their owners considerable good luckЧby way of wealth, good health, happiness, long life. And this, too, is true. I place a certain measure of my particular chi within their structure, and my will is made manifest within my work.
A few knowledgeable private collectors have gone to inordinate lengths to obtain Kai Wren specimens for their collections. Sorcerers have sought for them and conjured with them, for they do lend themselves to magical usage. A few Oriental art experts in museums and galleries know of themЧand there are full-time scouts who make a living searching out my pieces for their wealthy employers.
Oliver O'Keefe entered the room with a catlike silence, realizing that I had finally completed this one and that possiblyЧin ways incomprehensible to himЧI was happy. I have made a study of emotions and I think it may be that I was.
After placing the bottle on the table once more, I rose. O'Keefe grinned at me. He was a short man, solid though not stocky, with fair skin that bore a host of freckles, and close-cropped, sandy hair.
We made quite a contrast, he and I, no matter what shape I took.
" 'Tis a pretty one, boss," he said. "Even better than that green one you did back in the I700s, I think, and that's always been my favorite."
"Why, thank you, Ollie. I've a special fondness for this one myself."
" 'Tis a Saturday night, and Tony's on duty at Pizza Heaven. Feel like a celebration?"
I smiled. "What shall we get on it?"
"Well, you always like your pepperoni," he said.
"That's true. And perhaps a few mushroomsЧbe they very fresh."
"I would check on this, of course."
"Of course. Sausage? If it smells fresh?"
"Excellent idea."
"You suggest something."
"Some sliced bell pepper?"
"Very good. Might as well pick up a few bottles of Mexican beer."
"Certainly."
"There's still plenty of money in the barrel?"
"Oh, yes."
I smiled again. It was virtually the same order time after time. But we enjoyed our little ritual in arriving at it.
I watched him zip into his jacket and go. The man served me. He'd been with me for over three hundred years, what with four first-class spells that kept him in good repair. But he was unlike any servant I'd employed before.
I'd met him in a pub in Dublin, where he'd gone to sell his fiddle. In my ignorance, I asked him what a fiddle was, to which he proceeded to play his for me. Instead of buying it, I offered him a job, and we'd been together ever since.
I am not overfond of going out into the world of humans, and Ollie was an excellent go-between for me on such excursions. He was glib, personable, and he always seemed to know his way around. This is no small talent, given how quickly the world of humans has changed these recent centuries.
I left my glassblowing lab and strolled, admiring my wall hangings, my collection of rugs, I could have gone on forever. My personal bottleЧwhich this wasЧis an entire world unto itself, its interior noncontinuous with human time and space. Any of those bottles of which I had spoken contained their worlds. You could fill them with water and put flowers in without disturbing one. Or, if you could figure out how to enter, you could make your way inside without getting your feet wet.
Mine has its own strange flora and fauna, including a troupe of insubstantial milkweed fairies who dwell in a curtained-off section where a light, misty rainstorm has been going on for about thirteen centuries now. There are ogres, too, and dragons, and other creatures even stranger.
The temperature within my bottle is gently clement, though I allow snow in the mountains. I maintain a vast forest, complete with hidden grottos, ruins, and mossy granite boulders on which strange shadows dance despite the arguments of light. There is an ocean as well, for when I feel like swimming or sailing.
Despite the bottle's enclosed environment, we will not suffocate within it. Once, long ago, my bottle dwelled for some centuries at the bottom of the East China Sea following a shipwreck. Not a trace of the waters without disturbed our comforts, although we did have a bit of trouble receiving guests.
Our bottle-owners have these treasures at their fingertips all their lives, though most of them know it not. Even in ignorance, ownership of a Kai Wren bottle always benefits one. Those who know its secrets may lengthen their lives for centuries by taking a big vacation withinЧthis is what has become of a lot of the old sages, many of whom I still visit.
Giving way to a small desire to celebrate, I found my wayЧ"outward" I guess you'd call itЧthrough a small, perpetually misty and twilit region of mountains calculated to resemble a Taoist painting. For me, this is a kind of Faerie, where a man could hide himself and beautifully sleep the sleep of a Rip Van Winkle, where a lady could become a Sleeping Beauty in a rose-tangled castle and cave grown into a jade mountainside.
I heard a hearty howl from my left and another from my right. I walked on. Always good to let the boss know you're on the job.
After a time, an orange fu dog the size of a Shetland pony appeared to the left, a green one to the right. They seated themselves close to me, their great, fluffy tails curved over their backs.
"Hello," I said softly. "How's the frontier?"
"Nothing unnatural," growled Shiriki, the green one.
"We passed the O'Keefe recently on his way out, but that is all."
Chamballa merely studied me with those great round eyes set in a flat face above a wide mouth. I have said that she was orange in color, but her coat was no garish citrus hue. It was closer to the ruddy glow of a coal that has not yet become fringed with ash.
I nodded.
"Good."
I had found them some nine and three-quarter centuries ago, half-starved, dying of thirstЧfor even some more and less than natural creatures have their needs. Their forgotten temple had fallen apart, and they were a pair of unemployed temple dogs nobody wanted, roaming the Gobi. I gave them water and food and permitted them to come back to my bottle with me, though I was a creature such as they had been cautioned about. I had always avoided contact with temple dogs if I possibly could. Me and my like, they'd been trained to rend into tiny pieces, to be carried off to a variety of uncomfortable places, with a mess of dog-magic for company and security.
So we never talked employment. I just told them that if they cared to live in the abandoned dragon's cave in my Twilight Lands, there was fresh water nearby, and I would see that there was food. And I would like if they would keep an eye on things for me. And if there was anybody nearby that they needed simply to howl.
After a few centuries details were forgotten and only the fact of their residency remains. They call me Lord Kai and I call them Shiriki and Chamballa.
I walked on. Where I'd no need whatsoever to go outside what with O'Keefe tending to everything, there was that small desire to celebrate, to walk and to breathe the night air.
Coming to the edge of the worlds, I considered my appearance. Within my bottle I wore my natural shape: humanlike in that it possessed two arms, two legs, a recognizable torso and head, the usual number of eyes and suchlike. However, I stood eight feet tall on my taloned feet (these possessed of five toes) and my skin was a deep blue with a trace of purple. Around my eyes were angular segments of black. Some have supposed these are cosmetic (indeed, at one point a thousand years ago there was a fashion for such), but they are natural. They make my pupil-less dark eyes seem to glow and give my countenance a forbidding cast, even when I might not wish it.
Yes, this would not do for the world of humans. Quickly, I slipped into the human guise I use for my infrequent journeys without: a Chinese male of mature years, glossy black hair untouched by gray, average tall, but with an aura of command. I shaped my clothes into the dull fashions of the American city in which we now dwelled, sighing inwardly for the elegant robes of bygone China.
These preparations a matter of desire, I manifested outside the bottle with barely a pause in my stride. As I had wished, I was in a garage belonging to the son of the late lady who'd formerly kept the bottle on a parlor table. Either location was an easy one for our comings and goings. The son has not yet decided whether to give the bottle to his wife or to keep it on the table, where he enjoys looking at it. I had no opinion at the moment, and so stayed out of the matter.
Letting myself out of the garage's side door, I strolled off in the directionЧseveral blocks awayЧof Tony's Pizza Heaven.
It was a starry but moonless night, crisp and breezy. I knew that something was wrong when, as I passed one of the town's small parks, I scented blood and pizza on the air. And demon.
I faded. I moved with absolute silence. All of the ways I have learned to inflict death and pain over the years rose up and came with me. At that moment, I was one of the most dangerous things on the planet.
. . . And I saw the tree and them.