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...
The full moon of Cambodia was an immense pallid orb of ghostly light silvering the carven faces on the stone gates and towers. The moonlight hid the scars of time’s decay behind a veil of shimmering glamor. Almost, it seemed, the city lived untouched by the erosion of the ages. The cracks that zigzagged the worn stone facing of the temple were invisible in the silvery dimness; the rubble-choked streets were brimming with dense gloom. At any moment I half expected barbaric priests in feather headdresses to appear on the upper tiers and begin some primordial chant to the moon gods, or masked princelings of a lost age to be glimpsed amidst the shadows of the long arcade, bound for assignations with naked, barbaric courtesans.
It was all impossibly romantic.
For a time I smoked and dreamed, my imagination peopling the shadowy streets with ghostly processions ….
Then I saw the light.
It appeared suddenly, like an apparition. One moment the city was dark and dead and still, gilded by the jungle moon: in the next instant a dazzling shaft of amazing light sprang out of nowhere to thrust like a shining lance against the jeweled skies. It was like a huge searchlight, impossibly brilliant, very unexpected. Vague thoughts of air raids stirring in my mind, I headed towards it, impelled by devouring curiosity. I entered a curving street lined with frowning monoliths, then passed through a gloom-drenched arcade of partially-fallen pillars, and found myself on the edge of an immense stone-paved plaza.
Before me, in the center of a circle of huge stone idols, lay an opening in the stone floor, round as the mouth of a well. It was from deep in the subterranean shaft of this well that the beam of sparkling radiance soared skyward. And then, of course, I knew it … and the prickling of superstitious awe roughened the skin of my arms and stirred the nape-hairs on the back of my neck.
For it could be none other than that mysterious, jade-lined well Jandar had seen a year and a half ago … and the weird beam of sparkling force was, must be, the transdimensional gateway he had called “the Gate Between the Worlds.” …
Within me, my imagination awoke. I shivered slightly as to the cold breath of the Unknown. For the scene that lay before me now was in no detail different from the scene he had described in that first volume of his memoirs which I had titled Jandar of Callisto … there before me, bathed in the dim silver of the moonlight, the ring of stone colossi squatted, facing inwards to turn their enigmatic carven eyes upon the mystic Well that formed a magic pathway to other planets.
There they sat, the nameless gods of a primal and mysterious race, many arms brandishing aloft the emblems of their forgotten divinity, wheels and keys and stone flowers, stylized thunderbolts and odd-looking swords and skulls … and the restless, pulsing light of the Well cast ripples of luminance across their sculptured features. As wave on wave of sparkling force moved up the stationary beam, it seemed they frowned or smiled or grimaced; and the moving, throbbing heart beats of light lent the flicker of motion and the illusion of cold, watchful intelligence to their carven eyes.
It was an unforgettable scene of weird grandeur and strange majesty―as awesome and magical as anything in the pages of Haggard or Merritt―and it was really happening! Not on the written page; but in the real world of everyday life.
It was too strange, too fantastic, to be frightening. I was caught in the grip of a supernatural awe such as I have never before experienced. Without consciously thinking about it, I stepped forward, entering the plaza. The throbbing heartbeat of living radiance flickered before my eyes with mesmerizing force. I went forward between two of the stone gods to stand on the very brink of the Well, and all I could see before me was that soaring shaft of mysterious light that blazed up and up until it dimmed the stars and paled the ghostly glory of the Cambodian moon … .
And then my boots slid out from under me and I fell, sliding down a shallow incline towards the very edge of the Well!
Too late for caution, I remembered that the margin of the Well was fashioned of a slick, glassy stone like pale, smooth jade.
Too late to avoid the peril, I remembered that Jandar himself had made exactly the same mistake. He, too, had slipped and fallen on the glossy stone … but I, at least, had been forewarned!
The jade lip of the Well was slick as if oiled; ever so slightly concave, it sloped inward towards the mouth of the Well.
I slid down the depression helplessly, skinning the palms of my hands against the stone as I instinctively sought to arrest my progress. There was no handhold, nothing I could catch hold of, no way I could keep from falling into the Well … .
Then I slid over the brink, and the golden, throbbing splendor of the mystic light enveloped me, and I lost all consciousness.
Was it a dream―a distorted fancy of my mind alone?
I seemed as unaware of my physical body as if I had been transformed into a dimly sentient thing of impalpable vapor.
Yet somehow my senses functioned: I was aware of the sensation of flight. It seemed to me that I was thrust upwards at an inconceivable velocity.
Only for a brief, flashing instant was I aware of hurtling through space at fantastic speed.
There was a moment when intense darkness closed about me, black as the cold gulf that yawns between the stars.
For a flashing instant I shuddered in the grip of intolerable, super-arctic cold.
I was hurled through space at frightful velocity.
Ahead of me, a dim radiance expanded with magical swiftness into an ochre, banded sphere.
Particles of frozen rock circled the width of the luminous giant.
One granule of parched, frigid rock swung up before me, unfolding like a magic flower.
For a blurred instant I saw needle-sharp peaks of black rock stabbing up at me as I fell downward now … and the valleys between the fanglike peaks were choked with smooth expanses of cold blue snow … frozen methane or ammonia … .
Then the vision before me went hazy, as if I hurtled through an immaterial barrier of illusion … .
I caught a brief, swift glimpse of what lay behind the mirage of a dead, frozen world.
I saw vast plains of weird scarlet, fantastic jungles of black trees with crimson foliage, glittering rivers and shining seas. Barbaric stone cities sprinkled the plains, stood beside the shores of river and sea, looking like wonderfully detailed toy metropolises designed by Frazetta or Hannes Bok.
Then black and crimson jungles swept up to engulf me.
And my consciousness went out like a blown candle.
Chapter 3
ON ANOTHER PLANET
My back was cold, as if I was laying on some hard, uncomfortable surface of glass.
I opened my eyes and looked into arching skies of crawling gold. It was as if the heavens had been domed over with auric glass, crawling with a film of liquid.
I rolled over on my side, levering myself up on one elbow, and became suddenly conscious of two things.
For one thing I was stark naked. My khaki shirt and jacket and whipcord riding-breeches were gone. So were my boots; even my undershorts and socks.
For another thing I was staring upon an incredible landscape. Before me lay a vista of smooth meadows, rising from a distant stream to the edge of a dense forest or jungle. The meadow grasses were the color of new-shed blood, impossible, pure scarlet. And the jungle, or as much of it as I could see from my recumbent position, was composed of weird trees, black as India ink, whose trunks and branches and roots were fantastically gnarled and knotted, unlike those of any tree I had ever seen or heard of.