Lankar of Callisto
- Автор: Картер Лин Спрэг
- Серия: Callisto #6
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Lankar of Callisto». Краткое содержание книги:
...in the mysterious and treacherous domain of the insidious Mind Wizards. Searching for him is a fearless armada of his loyal friends, and a stranger who knows him better than anyone on Callisto. The stranger, Lankar, is none other than Lin Carter, accidentally transported through the Gate Between the Worlds to the land of the Thanatorians. Aware of Jandar's plight, Lankar joins the search beyond the world's edge and suddenly finds himself battling for his own existence against the most nightmarish creatures on the planet - the gruesome flesh robots of Kuur and the fiendish Mind Wizards of Callisto themselves...
A moment later and we dipped below the level of the fog and emerged into open air. The vista below us was much as we had imagined it would be. The valley sloped downwards towards a flat, circular plain, all crumbling clods of parched dead soil, littered with enormous boulders and heaped with broken rock. Nowhere could we discern the slightest sign of life, not even a growing bush or a patch of grass.
Through the center of the plain the river wound sluggishly, its black waters dead and lifeless. In the dull light, which bleached all colors into grayness under the gloomy, lowering clouds, the barren, desolate landscape looked like something from one of Gustave Dore’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno ….
Abziz had his optical glass to his eye, peering about, taking quick glances at the chart in his lap from time to time, comparing the landscape towards which we descended to the detailwork in his chart. He was muttering to himself under his breath, but the wind of our flight whipped his words away so that I could not hear them. Bozo whimpered and trembled beside me, pressing his huge face into my shoulder.
“Well, neighbor, what d’you say?” Glypto inquired, circling the gig about in a descending spiral with practiced ease.
“The curvature of the river matches that etched upon Ang Chan’s medallion closely enough,” replied the Doctor, “but where is the pyramid-shaped structure which also appears thereon?”
We stared about us, but nowhere were any man-built structures to be seen, not even ruins. The landscape was as empty of human life as something on the far side of the Moon.
Glypto leaned over the side of the cockpit, pointing, the wind whipping his tattered cloak into my face.
“Yonder curved cliff below looks to be in about the place where the pyramid should be,” he shouted. “Mayhap we’d be wise to bring the wee craft down, and poke about on foot!”
He swung the gig about, facing the craft into the wind, thus slowing our speed. The craft hovered, lurched, began to lose altitude.
“Prince Lankar, stand ready to belay yon mooringgrapple, if you please,” he called back to me. I reached backwards, behind me, where a length of line was secured around a latch. To the end of the line a lightweight collapsible grappling-hook was fastened. I snapped the prongs of the grapple open and gathered the line into my hands, searching below me for something to catch the prongs on, thus anchoring us.
We floated down below the crest of the line of cliffy outcroppings that protruded from the dry sand along a curved beach of the river. Then I spied a stone jutting from the sand and yelled out to Glypto that it looked about right for our purposes. He kicked the foot-pedals, activating the rotors fore and aft. We had not as yet used these, for the winds had supplied motive power sufficient to our needs, the gig being mostly designed as a sort of glider.
The craft angled down. I tried to belay the line about the jagged outcropping but it fell short. I tried twice again, missing each time. Finally, Glypto took the line from me and snagged the grappling-hook neatly into the underside of the rock. He grinned apologetically.
“Takes practice, your lordship! Now, lads, assist me, if you will, to draw the wee craft down.”
The gig was so perfectly balanced―the thrust of the levitant gas contained in her twin pontoons poised exquisitely against the weight of the four of us―that she was as weightless as a balloon. We took in the line hand over hand, dragging the wobbling craft down until she hovered only a few feet above the stretch of sandy beach. Then Glypto hopped down nimbly, followed by myself and Bozo, who performed the feat in the clumsiest fashion conceivable. The gig pitched so far over as the great othode cleared the edge of the cockpit that I feared Dr. Abziz would be thrown from his seat. He squawked, clutching his gear with one hand, the rim of the cockpit with the other. Then Glypto, grinning slyly, loudly advising the poor scholar to be wary of breaking his neck, assisted the Doctor to descend. Stiff with affronted dignity, Abziz clambered out, dusting himself off, while eyeing Bozo frostily.
We looked about. The cliff rose behind us twenty or thirty feet above the surface of the beach, smooth and unbroken. There was still no sign of human habitation to be seen, and the cliff-wall itself was unbroken. No cave, not even a fissure, could we observe.
“Why don’t you take the dear beast for a stroll up the beach towards that end of the cliff, your lordship, whilst we explore in t’other direction,” Glypto suggested amiably. “Come along, neighbor―if there be anything to be found, we’ll be the ones to find it!”
“I don’t understand it,” the Doctor muttered, trudging off with Glypto. “The map on the medallion clearly indicates a pyramid-shapen mark at about this location. Whatever could the sign symbolize, if it does not represent a man-made structure?” He strode off after the Tharkolian, shaking his head bemusedly.
“Come on, boy, we’re going this way!” Snapping my fingers, I turned about in the opposite direction, with Bozo gallumphing and frisking at my side, and began to explore the further end of the clifflike wall of rock.
Dry, crystalline sand crunched and squealed under my boot-heels. Except for the sound of our feet in the dead sand, and the melancholy slosh and slither of the cold black water to our left, no slightest sound broke the sepulchral silence of this deserted place. Above us, a dome of gray mist coiled and uncoiled snakily, blot ting away the daylight, and only a dim gray gloom penetrated the fog to shed its dour light over the bleak desolation.
Happy to set all six feet on solid land once again, Bozo clumsily frisked about me as if wanting to play. I was too tense and nervous to indulge him; the dead landscape, the brooding gray sky, and the ominous black river slithering between crumbling banks, all combined to cast a grim mood of depression over my spirits.
Then again I felt a curious uneasiness―a sensation of being watched. You know how it is when the skin creeps on the backs of your hands and tingles at the nape of your neck―a feeling of unseen. eyes studying you from a place of concealment? Well, that’s exactly how I felt as I trudged up the beach that day. From time to time I looked over my shoulder, almost expectting to see a dim, mysterious figure lurking behind me. But I saw nothing at all suspicious―just the gig bobbling at the end of its line like a huge, ungainly kite, and the two figures of Glypto and Dr. Abziz further down the beach; strolling along; peering up at the cliffs from time to time.
Suddenly Bozo stopped dead in his tracks.
His ears pricking, he stared directly behind us as at a smooth, flat stretch of rock. I followed the direction of his gaze in some bewilderment, unable to discover anything about the cliff-wall that had caught his attention.
“What’s the matter, boy? What is it?”.
The suedelike nap of his purple fur roughened along between his shoulders as his hackles rose bristling. His goggling eyes were fixed in an unwavering stare upon a smooth section of rock-wall. A heavy rumble of warning rose from deep in his broad chest.
I stared, first at the othode, then at the section of cliff, unable to see anything about a perfectly ordinary stretch of cliff that could have aroused his suspicions. There was simply nothing about the smooth area of dark gray rock that was in any way different from the dozen or so yards of exactly identical cliff we had just walked past. But something had very definitely alerted Bozo to the presence of danger. The warning rumble deepened now into a guttural growl of menace. His froglike jaws gaped, baring blunt, powerful tusks. His glaring eyes blazed like coals as he stared unwaveringly at that innocent-seeming stretch of rock-wall.