Eric Van Lustbader - Sunset Warrior 4 - Beneath an Opal Moon, Angielskie [EN](4)(2)
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BENEATH AN OPAL MOON
By
Eric V. Lustbader
Published by Fawcett
Books:
THE NINJA
BLACK HEART
SIRENS
THE MIKO
JIAN
SHAN
ZERO
FRENCH KISS
WHITE NINJA
The Sunset Warrior Cycle
THE SUNSET WARRIOR
SHALLOWS OF NIGHT
DAI-SAN
BENEATH AN OPAL MOON
Quickly, man! Do as I say!"
Moichi stepped back so that the 1iIle of trees
brushed against him. He looked to where Kossori
was gazing. South of them a shadow had
materialised as if out of the night itself. It was in
violent motion yet silent and smooth, running
lightly then leaping across the narrow chasms
between buildings as if it were but a wisp of
smoke. A cool breeze off the water rustled the
spiky leaves of the trees and ~oichi shivered
slightly, feeling his muscles tense. Still he watched
the shadow approach, the fluidity of motion
mesmerising, for there seemed to lie no
disturbance to the continuous flow of energy, runt
leap, run, leap.
Now the shadow was spurting across the
adjacent buildings rooftop, the image abruptly
blossoming. But so swiftly did it move, that
Moichi only recognised it for what it was as it
landed on their own rooftop.
BENEATH
AN OPAL
MOON
Eric V. Lustbader
FAWCETT CREST NEW YORK
A Fawcett Crest Book Published by Ballantine
Books Copyright A) 1980 by Eric Van Lustbader
All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published
in the United States by Ballantine Books, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, and
simultaneously in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in
part, by mimeograph or any other means, without
permission. For information address: Doubleday
& Company, Inc., 245 Park Avenue, New York,
New York 10017.
ISBN 0-449-21649-7
This edition published by arrangement with
Doubleday, a division of Bantam, Doubleday,
Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
All of the characters in this book are fictitious,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, is purely coincidental.
Printed in Canada
First Ballantine Books Edition: March 1990
For Ralphine
Contents
PREFIGURE:
On Green Dolphin Street I
ONE: CITY OF WONDERS
Rubylegs 13
Koppo 36
Circus of Souls 66
Snatch 86
TWO: PURSUING THE DEVIL
The Lorcha 101
Mer-Man's Tales 116
Fugue 132
Water's Edge 164
THREE: THE FIREMASK
Intimations 181
Demoneye 189
The Anvil 204
Sardonyx 220
The Opal Moon 231
FOUR: LION IN THE DUSK
Idyll 243
The Orphans 250
And All the Stars
to Guide Me 256
us
Thus we struggle so that our
history shall become the
salvation of our children.
From the Tablets
of the Iskamen
PREFIGURE:
On Green Dolphin
Street
Or
THE Scarred Man enters Sha'angh'sei at sunset.
He pauses before the towering cinnabar
escarpment of the western gate and turns in his
dusty saddle. Above him, a pair of ebon carrion
birds spread their grotesquely long wings,
hovering, startlingly set off by the flare of the
sky. Piled clouds riding like chariots of crimson
fire obscure for long moments the bloated ablate
of the sun as it sinks slothfully toward the heights
of the city already lost within the thickening
haze. It is a unique mark of the sunsets in
Sha'angh'sei that the city itself and the land all
around it is first engulfed by the purest crimson,
sliding, as the sun disappears behind the
man-made facade into the amethyst and violet
which heralds the night.
But the scarred man's deep-set eyes, slitted and
as opaque as dry stones, study only the winding
much-traveled highway behind him and the
steady lines of jumbled traffic ox-carts piled
high with raw rice and silk, horsemen, soldiers,
and traveling merchants, businessmen, farmers
on foot moving toward him and the city; the
outbound flow is of no import to him.
His horse snorts, shaking its head. Gently, the
scarred man strokes its neck below the short
mane with a thin red hand. The stallion's coat is
lusterless, matted with the mingled dust of the
highway, the caked mud of narrow back roads
and the grease of many a hasty meal.
The scarred man pulls at his hat, a floppy felt
affair which, constructed anaesthetically, does
little more than conceal his long and haggard
face. Satisfied at last, he turns and, slouched in
his high and dusty saddle, presses against his
mount with his heels, riding through the gate. He
raises his eyes as he moves, watching the
perspective changing, deriving pleasure
1
2 Eric V. Lustbader
from the shifting angles as he studies the endless
bas-reliefs carved into the cinnabar of the dark
western gate, an epic monument to a dichotomy:
the triumph and the cruelty of war.
The scarred man shivers even though he is not
cold. He does not believe in omens yet he thinks
it interesting that he enters Sha'angh'sei through
the western gate, erected as a sinister reminder of
a particularly odious aspect of man's nature. But,
he asks himself, would it really make any
difference if he had made his entry into the city
through the green-onyx southern gate, the
alabaster eastern gate, or the intricate
red-lacquered wood and black iron northern gate?
Then he throws his head back and utters a short
bitter laugh. No. No. Not at all. For at this hour
of sunset they are all stained crimson by the
lowering light.
The scarred man breaks into the populous surf
of the great city and his journey is slowed by the
milling throngs of people as if he is passing
through a moving field of poppies. He feels an
end to long isolation, far from the companionship
of man, a seemingly interminable time with only
his stallion, the stars and the moon as his family.
Yet as he rides into the explicit riot of the city,
his mount walking through the clouds of jostling
men and women and children, fat and thin, large
and small, young and old, ugly and fair, as he
passes the bursting shops, stalls, stands with
striped awnings, the tangled buildings with their
dense cluster of swinging signs advertising the
tempting wares within, he realizes that never
before has he felt such an apartness from the
warmth of.the family of man. And this peculiar
alienness suffuses him with such completeness
that his body begins to quake as if he is ill.
He digs his bootheels into the flanks of his
mount and shakes the reins, abruptly anxious to
reach his destination. Through this vast kinetic
sea he jounces, metal jangling, dusty leather
creaking, the grime of travel heavy upon him. A
torrent of filthy children, their torsos ribbed like
corpses, brush against his legs like a separate
eddy in this fetid surf and he is obliged to press
his boots tightly against the stallion's flanks lest,
howling, they pull them from his feet. He extracts
a copper coin from his wide sash and flings it
high into the air so that it catches the oblique
light. As it disappears into the swirling mass of
pedestrians on his left, the children abandon him,
rushing to follow the flight of the spinning coin.
They plow through the crowd, tenaciously
searching on hands and knees in the slime and
offal of the street.
BENEATH AN OPAL MOON 3
He moves on, turning a corner at an acute angle,
following the street. He inhales the rich musk of
coriander and limes, the heavy incense of charring
meat, the somewhat lighter scents of fresh fish and
vegetables flash-cooked in hot sesame oil. As he
passes the opening of a dark alley, the thick sweet
smell of the poppy resin for which Sha'angh'sei is
so famous, hits him with such intensity it takes his
breath away and he is dizzied.
The din of the city, after so long on the road,
alone with himself, is claustrophobically
overpowering, a constant harsh cacophony
consisting of wails, shrieks, cries, shouts, laughter,
whispers, chanting, a glorious babble of voices,
testament to the indomitability of man.
Within the deep shadows of the felt hat, the
scarred man is hollowcheeked. A long bent nose
leads inevitably to thick gnarled lips as if, in his
wild earlier years, he had fought with his fists
within the hempen circle, as is the wont of certain
of the folk of the western plains of the continent
of man. His hair is silver, silken, flowing long down
his back, held away from his wide wrinkled
forehead by a thin plaited band of copper. His
face, defiantly hairless, exhibits the tracery of livid
white scars puckering the flesh of his cheeks and
throat like rain on the surface of a pond. He wears
a long traveling cloak of a dark, indeterminate
color, owing to the grit of his journey. Beneath it,
a tunic and leggings of deepest brown. Hanging
from his waist from a simple stained leather belt is
a scabbarded curving sword, wide-bladed and
single-edged.
He pauses beside a wine stall on Thrice Blessed
Road and, dismounting, leads his mount out of the
enormous crush of the thoroughfare. As he strides
into the dimness beneath the pattemed awning, he
spies the wineseller, moon-faced and almond-eyed,
arguing with two young women over the price of a
leather flagon of wine. With a sweep of his
deep-set eyes, the scarred man takes in the curving
bodies of the women, their faces tipped high in
anger. But they are restless, his eyes, and while he
listens and waits somewhat impatiently, his gaze
darts this way and that, alighting on a face here,
the pale flash of a hand there. For a moment, he
observes a man with eyes like olives and black
curling hair so long that it covers his shoulders,
until he is met by another man and they depart.
The scarred man's head cocks at the thumping
sounds of running feet, shouts echo and diminish
as a body rushes past outside, elbowing through
the crowd. He turns away. He asks the wineseller,
now free, for a cup of spiced wine, downs it in one
4 Eric V. Lustbader
swallow. It is not the rice wine of the region,
which he finds too thin for his taste, but the
heartier burgundy of the northern regions. He
purchases a flagon.
The sunset is fading, the sky above Sha'angh'sei
turning mauve and violet as night approaches
boldly from the east.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl upanicza.keep.pl
BENEATH AN OPAL MOON
By
Eric V. Lustbader
Published by Fawcett
Books:
THE NINJA
BLACK HEART
SIRENS
THE MIKO
JIAN
SHAN
ZERO
FRENCH KISS
WHITE NINJA
The Sunset Warrior Cycle
THE SUNSET WARRIOR
SHALLOWS OF NIGHT
DAI-SAN
BENEATH AN OPAL MOON
Quickly, man! Do as I say!"
Moichi stepped back so that the 1iIle of trees
brushed against him. He looked to where Kossori
was gazing. South of them a shadow had
materialised as if out of the night itself. It was in
violent motion yet silent and smooth, running
lightly then leaping across the narrow chasms
between buildings as if it were but a wisp of
smoke. A cool breeze off the water rustled the
spiky leaves of the trees and ~oichi shivered
slightly, feeling his muscles tense. Still he watched
the shadow approach, the fluidity of motion
mesmerising, for there seemed to lie no
disturbance to the continuous flow of energy, runt
leap, run, leap.
Now the shadow was spurting across the
adjacent buildings rooftop, the image abruptly
blossoming. But so swiftly did it move, that
Moichi only recognised it for what it was as it
landed on their own rooftop.
BENEATH
AN OPAL
MOON
Eric V. Lustbader
FAWCETT CREST NEW YORK
A Fawcett Crest Book Published by Ballantine
Books Copyright A) 1980 by Eric Van Lustbader
All rights reserved under International and
Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published
in the United States by Ballantine Books, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York, and
simultaneously in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in
part, by mimeograph or any other means, without
permission. For information address: Doubleday
& Company, Inc., 245 Park Avenue, New York,
New York 10017.
ISBN 0-449-21649-7
This edition published by arrangement with
Doubleday, a division of Bantam, Doubleday,
Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
All of the characters in this book are fictitious,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, is purely coincidental.
Printed in Canada
First Ballantine Books Edition: March 1990
For Ralphine
Contents
PREFIGURE:
On Green Dolphin Street I
ONE: CITY OF WONDERS
Rubylegs 13
Koppo 36
Circus of Souls 66
Snatch 86
TWO: PURSUING THE DEVIL
The Lorcha 101
Mer-Man's Tales 116
Fugue 132
Water's Edge 164
THREE: THE FIREMASK
Intimations 181
Demoneye 189
The Anvil 204
Sardonyx 220
The Opal Moon 231
FOUR: LION IN THE DUSK
Idyll 243
The Orphans 250
And All the Stars
to Guide Me 256
us
Thus we struggle so that our
history shall become the
salvation of our children.
From the Tablets
of the Iskamen
PREFIGURE:
On Green Dolphin
Street
Or
THE Scarred Man enters Sha'angh'sei at sunset.
He pauses before the towering cinnabar
escarpment of the western gate and turns in his
dusty saddle. Above him, a pair of ebon carrion
birds spread their grotesquely long wings,
hovering, startlingly set off by the flare of the
sky. Piled clouds riding like chariots of crimson
fire obscure for long moments the bloated ablate
of the sun as it sinks slothfully toward the heights
of the city already lost within the thickening
haze. It is a unique mark of the sunsets in
Sha'angh'sei that the city itself and the land all
around it is first engulfed by the purest crimson,
sliding, as the sun disappears behind the
man-made facade into the amethyst and violet
which heralds the night.
But the scarred man's deep-set eyes, slitted and
as opaque as dry stones, study only the winding
much-traveled highway behind him and the
steady lines of jumbled traffic ox-carts piled
high with raw rice and silk, horsemen, soldiers,
and traveling merchants, businessmen, farmers
on foot moving toward him and the city; the
outbound flow is of no import to him.
His horse snorts, shaking its head. Gently, the
scarred man strokes its neck below the short
mane with a thin red hand. The stallion's coat is
lusterless, matted with the mingled dust of the
highway, the caked mud of narrow back roads
and the grease of many a hasty meal.
The scarred man pulls at his hat, a floppy felt
affair which, constructed anaesthetically, does
little more than conceal his long and haggard
face. Satisfied at last, he turns and, slouched in
his high and dusty saddle, presses against his
mount with his heels, riding through the gate. He
raises his eyes as he moves, watching the
perspective changing, deriving pleasure
1
2 Eric V. Lustbader
from the shifting angles as he studies the endless
bas-reliefs carved into the cinnabar of the dark
western gate, an epic monument to a dichotomy:
the triumph and the cruelty of war.
The scarred man shivers even though he is not
cold. He does not believe in omens yet he thinks
it interesting that he enters Sha'angh'sei through
the western gate, erected as a sinister reminder of
a particularly odious aspect of man's nature. But,
he asks himself, would it really make any
difference if he had made his entry into the city
through the green-onyx southern gate, the
alabaster eastern gate, or the intricate
red-lacquered wood and black iron northern gate?
Then he throws his head back and utters a short
bitter laugh. No. No. Not at all. For at this hour
of sunset they are all stained crimson by the
lowering light.
The scarred man breaks into the populous surf
of the great city and his journey is slowed by the
milling throngs of people as if he is passing
through a moving field of poppies. He feels an
end to long isolation, far from the companionship
of man, a seemingly interminable time with only
his stallion, the stars and the moon as his family.
Yet as he rides into the explicit riot of the city,
his mount walking through the clouds of jostling
men and women and children, fat and thin, large
and small, young and old, ugly and fair, as he
passes the bursting shops, stalls, stands with
striped awnings, the tangled buildings with their
dense cluster of swinging signs advertising the
tempting wares within, he realizes that never
before has he felt such an apartness from the
warmth of.the family of man. And this peculiar
alienness suffuses him with such completeness
that his body begins to quake as if he is ill.
He digs his bootheels into the flanks of his
mount and shakes the reins, abruptly anxious to
reach his destination. Through this vast kinetic
sea he jounces, metal jangling, dusty leather
creaking, the grime of travel heavy upon him. A
torrent of filthy children, their torsos ribbed like
corpses, brush against his legs like a separate
eddy in this fetid surf and he is obliged to press
his boots tightly against the stallion's flanks lest,
howling, they pull them from his feet. He extracts
a copper coin from his wide sash and flings it
high into the air so that it catches the oblique
light. As it disappears into the swirling mass of
pedestrians on his left, the children abandon him,
rushing to follow the flight of the spinning coin.
They plow through the crowd, tenaciously
searching on hands and knees in the slime and
offal of the street.
BENEATH AN OPAL MOON 3
He moves on, turning a corner at an acute angle,
following the street. He inhales the rich musk of
coriander and limes, the heavy incense of charring
meat, the somewhat lighter scents of fresh fish and
vegetables flash-cooked in hot sesame oil. As he
passes the opening of a dark alley, the thick sweet
smell of the poppy resin for which Sha'angh'sei is
so famous, hits him with such intensity it takes his
breath away and he is dizzied.
The din of the city, after so long on the road,
alone with himself, is claustrophobically
overpowering, a constant harsh cacophony
consisting of wails, shrieks, cries, shouts, laughter,
whispers, chanting, a glorious babble of voices,
testament to the indomitability of man.
Within the deep shadows of the felt hat, the
scarred man is hollowcheeked. A long bent nose
leads inevitably to thick gnarled lips as if, in his
wild earlier years, he had fought with his fists
within the hempen circle, as is the wont of certain
of the folk of the western plains of the continent
of man. His hair is silver, silken, flowing long down
his back, held away from his wide wrinkled
forehead by a thin plaited band of copper. His
face, defiantly hairless, exhibits the tracery of livid
white scars puckering the flesh of his cheeks and
throat like rain on the surface of a pond. He wears
a long traveling cloak of a dark, indeterminate
color, owing to the grit of his journey. Beneath it,
a tunic and leggings of deepest brown. Hanging
from his waist from a simple stained leather belt is
a scabbarded curving sword, wide-bladed and
single-edged.
He pauses beside a wine stall on Thrice Blessed
Road and, dismounting, leads his mount out of the
enormous crush of the thoroughfare. As he strides
into the dimness beneath the pattemed awning, he
spies the wineseller, moon-faced and almond-eyed,
arguing with two young women over the price of a
leather flagon of wine. With a sweep of his
deep-set eyes, the scarred man takes in the curving
bodies of the women, their faces tipped high in
anger. But they are restless, his eyes, and while he
listens and waits somewhat impatiently, his gaze
darts this way and that, alighting on a face here,
the pale flash of a hand there. For a moment, he
observes a man with eyes like olives and black
curling hair so long that it covers his shoulders,
until he is met by another man and they depart.
The scarred man's head cocks at the thumping
sounds of running feet, shouts echo and diminish
as a body rushes past outside, elbowing through
the crowd. He turns away. He asks the wineseller,
now free, for a cup of spiced wine, downs it in one
4 Eric V. Lustbader
swallow. It is not the rice wine of the region,
which he finds too thin for his taste, but the
heartier burgundy of the northern regions. He
purchases a flagon.
The sunset is fading, the sky above Sha'angh'sei
turning mauve and violet as night approaches
boldly from the east.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]