considerations are entirely different from ours. When men assume they’ll continue, responsibility is postponed.’
‘Listen, what if it made no difference, neither ended it all nor made it better—why do the hit?’
‘At the simplest level? Revenge, and honour satisfied.’
‘Then death wouldn’t be punishment enough, would it?’
Lockhart twitched a small smile. ‘You and old Quinas have a lot to talk about.’
I didn’t like the sound of this—Quinas was a charred moon dropped from the sky, yesterday’s hero gone to margin remnants and remains. ‘I’ve met shamanic burnouts. Some shivering leftover with weird eyes? I haven’t got the patience to hear about some gold-rimmed yesterday.’
‘He’s rather younger than I am,’ Lockhart muttered tersely, and I felt like the idiot I was. I loved this kindly gentleman who had been born in the days before our enemy’s existence had even been verified. ‘In any case it’s important you meet him before the big push. And be surprised by nothing you see or hear. He’s ... on the night side of right.’
I decided I needed a little more recovery time. I’d stripped my gears being something deliberately counterclockwise to my idea of myself—someone out of control. Hip discord wasted my time. But I was the great age for edgework—faced with truth, the young merely fizzed with its acid clarity. They weren’t crippled—they were connoisseurs of the delicate tension between alive and nonalive, the sweet halfway.
In my cell I watched the colloidal motion in the wall, and asked for stories. I knew books could see people around them, they ground their tiny teeth, tried to rattle like windows, stories to tell. Here were stored Arabian secrets uncynical and sensate, books tattooed in pain-ink, buds turning open, suburb flagstones, broken down gardens, a tin barrow red hot in the sun, insects in the dusk-fluctuating wind flying against shallow water, a mind where river floor scenes flutter unseen, all in the worming walls of the Keep. I treasured the safety here. Dead entrances withstood storms and there were aimless stains of music on the air. Outer platitude galaxies tapped ineffectual at the door. Kneeling to see along two thousand miles of architectonics I found the accumulated density of civilisation, the food chain binding scraps of posterity. Society flowed along the vibration, unchallenged and unchallenging. What kind of world was that for a growing lad?
3 PAINLESS BLOOD, A SECRET
Originality irritates so obscurely that people may have to evolve to scratch it
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
