Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth (Scott Lynch) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги

IV

You must be exquisitely careful with a spell for traveling through time.

You think you understand that before you fuck it up, but you don’t.

Not the way you understand afterward.

Anthar-Kaladon, Lord of the Bleeding Gems, Arch-Thaumaturge, Defiler and Deliverer of Thrax, could have been more precise with his incantation. Heavenly bodies rotate on their axes and move through space as they move through time. There are equations to deal with this, but Anthar-Kaladon admits to some impatience (indeed, a certain moderate impatience is often concomitant with brilliance). Rather than a triumphant appearance under the bright gleam of the moon in the proper year for his intended ritual, he materialized in the middle of a stone wall some three hundred feet down, in one of the annexes of this minor dungeon complex he built twenty or thirty centuries ago.

Now, that would have been the final line in the biography of most wizards, but Anthar-Kaladon, nobody’s gods-damned clown, had already traded in the tired squish-squish of his mortal frame for cold, elegant mineralization. For a creature of undying stone, the act of teleporting face-first into his own architecture, while frustrating, was not quite a permanent setback.

He hasn’t been able to move, but he hasn’t been entirely inert-while complex sorcery is out of the question, Anthar-Kaladon has been able to intone a simple teleportation spell at about half of one-millionth of his usual speed, his voice a whisper so low, it is entirely lost in the sounds of the settling earth. Every few years, he completes an intonation and teleports a few feet up, invariably embedding himself in a new section of wall or floor, but after so many years and so many castings he’s almost made it, surely. Possibly this might even be the last time, and then ...

Something flits across his awareness. A sensation of life and movement overhead, separated from his outstretched fingers by just a few inches of stone. The feeling vanishes, unsurprising. His immortal form is antithetical to life. Nothing with a beating heart can long tolerate his proximity. Still, this is exciting. Inches! Inches between him and the creature above! Oh, let it be this time. This time for sure!

V

Down goes the basket and Yrmegard just knows they’re not going to be happy with something in it. They’re never satisfied, bloody lunatics.

Yrmegard grunts and thinks uncharitable thoughts as she lets more rope out via the pulley she has rigged just above the broken skylight leading into the cursed labyrinth under the hill the folk have always called the Kal’s Mound (or Kalgrave, in a few cases, though Yrmegard has never met anyone who knew this Kal or had any notion what he was about). Forty feet below, one of the lunatics is standing in the circle of light from the aperture and waving her on, as though a basket sent straight down a rope might go anywhere but directly into the fool’s arms.

Soft summer flatbread, liver-and-oat sausages, baked yams stuffed with crackling black pepper pods, cinnamon pie, and straw-colored sweet wine: this is Yrmegard’s contribution to the endeavor, and this is as close as she gets for the midday delivery. Mullion and Tylo and her aunt’s cousin’s friend Arna might poke about in the dark as if they were lunatics themselves, but when Yrmegard brings the catered luncheon, it goes down by rope and she remains in daylight. The thought that one of these days she might hear the last fading screams of those below is both frightful and just the slightest bit secretly attractive-a scold loves nothing more than to have their habits validated (and anyway, Yrmegard’s aunt’s cousin has a lot of friends).

“Hey! Hey up there!” The waiting lunatic has received the basket and started pawing through it.

Yrmegard peers down. She thinks the figure below might be the sorceress, though she doesn’t recall the woman wearing red robes. With a start, she realizes the clothes are drenched in fresh blood. The adventurer seems completely unbothered. “What is it?” Yrmegard shouts.

“There’s supposed to be wine with this!”

“There is!” Yrmegard massages her temples. Last thing she needs is lunatics clawing back coins from their accounts, claiming nondelivery when she knows full well she set a cool clay jar of the stuff in the basket not a handful of minutes ago. Yrmegard might fantasize about some memorable horror erupting below, but the hard truth is she needs the money, same as everyone. “Had it fallen from the basket, surely you’d have caught it right in the face, so it must be there! Look again!”