shouldn’t walk around unshielded.’
‘The light is gone.’ Her voice was cool and differed from that of the xaurian rider and the purple-cowled hologram in one essential: it was not subservient. Nathan found himself seeing her in profile and thought: She is very beautiful. Her hair was hidden under a white head-dress, like some kind of wimple; she wore a long white tunic and trousers, and her skin had the pale golden hue associated in our world with Orientals. The lines of her cheekbone and jaw reminded him of pictures he had seen of the head of Nefertiti, though her neck was longer, slightly too long for an ordinary human, and as she turned towards him he realized the planes of her face were subtly different, though it would have been hard to explain in what way. A millimetre here, a millimetre there, and the whole visage was somehow distorted, though its beauty remained undiminished. But then, Nathan reflected, maybe our faces would look that way to her – as if a fractional adjustment had produced that impression of wrongness, of something out of kilter. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘what does it matter? I have little fear of death, even the sundeath, the shriveller of all that lives. The slow hours weary me, and my breath galls. I would welcome Death, if I could find her.’
‘Don’t be in such haste to destroy your beauty,’ the man said, turning now to gaze at her. ‘It still gives me pleasure to look on it, and there is little enough cause for pleasure left.’
‘To be beautiful,’ she said, ‘it is necessary to have a world to be beautiful in. You wrote a letter to me once, in the far-off days of youth and hopefulness, saying that creation itself was for my benefit. The earth, the moons, the sun, the sea were made only to frame your loveliness. Now, the earth is foul, and the sun poisons the sea, and the three moons of Eos turn red. Without creation, without a place to be, I am nothing. You are so clever, Grandir: make me a world to live in.’
‘I cannot make worlds,’ he said, ‘even I, but maybe … I can take one. Have patience awhile, Halmé, and hide your face from the daylight a little longer. I will find a world for you, ‘I promise.’
The woman called Halmé went to the window, sliding one of the screens aside, and Nathan saw she was right: there was a huge moon, not quite full, hanging in the sky, and it was red, and eastward another moon-sliver had the same blood-stained hue.
‘Close the screen!’ said the man. ‘The moon is too bright. It could be dangerous.’
The woman obeyed, but slowly. The more he looked at her, the more beautiful Nathan found her; it was as if his sight was adjusting to her different facial proportions, and now the women of his own world would look forever wrong to him. He watched her leaving: she moved swiftly and very gracefully, the white ends of her wimple fluttering behind her. Halmé was her name, he was certain, but Grandir, he thought, might be a title, like Lord or Excellency. He was thinking about that when the scene changed.
The masked ruler was climbing a stair. The stair moved, like an escalator but in a spiral, twisting round and round inside a cylindrical shaft, and the man was stepping briskly upwards, perhaps impatient of its slowness. At the top was a circular chamber with no windows: the architects of this world evidently favoured curves in construction. The only light came from a number of clear globes, some smooth-sided, some facetted, which appeared to be suspended in mid-air, though as Nathan drew closer he saw there were no threads or wires supporting them: they simply floated, motionless or in orbit. A pale radiance came from the heart of each, yet it illuminated nothing in the room save the globes themselves. The man moved to the centre of the chamber where a slightly larger globe with many faces revolved slowly in one place. Lances of light emanated from it, sinking into the darkness, never reaching the walls. The man stretched one hand towards it without actually making contact and murmured a single word: ‘Fia!’ A white dazzle flooded the room, so that for an instant Nathan was blinded, even though it was only a dream; then the glare retreated back into the globe, and Nathan saw a picture appear above it, as if projected onto the ceiling. At first it was difficult to make out, since he was looking at it from underneath, but then he realized it was a roof – he could see tiles – with a square hole in it, an open skylight, and a boy and a girl emerging into view, staring and pointing, pointing out of the picture, down at the globe. It was a minute or two before he understood. He was seeing himself, himself and Hazel, looking up at a star that didn’t belong …
He awoke much later with the dream still fresh in his mind. It was still dark, and he got up very quietly and stole downstairs to the cupboard between the shelves, and climbed the ladder to the Den, and opened the skylight, and there was the star, only he knew now it wasn’t a star, it was a globe that shone both in this world and the other one, a watching eye for a man whose face was never seen. A guardian angel – a manipulator – a menace. Nathan didn’t know, and the only way to find out was to dream on. Or maybe it was all pure fancy, a story invented by his subconscious mind to explain something he couldn’t comprehend. For if it was true why – why in all the worlds – would a ruler so powerful, so desperate, clearly facing some cosmic catastrophe, be interested in him?
He closed the skylight, descended the ladder, went back upstairs to bed. But the question followed him, nagging at his mind, keeping him from sleep: the unimaginable, unanswerable why.
Nathan didn’t get a chance to tell Hazel everything for another fortnight. ‘It’ll be easier when the summer holidays start,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll have more time together – time to find the missing injunction –’ they had barely begun searching ‘– and time to sort this out.’
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.
