Lilith’s Castle
In this sequel to The Memory Palace, fantasy crosses over to the real world as the Malthassan Archmage Koschei Corbillion becomes Guy Parados, his creator.When the magician Koschei escaped through the mind of his creator Guy Parados into the world where he is fiction, he became Guy Parados. And Parados became the Red Horse in the land of Malthassa… his own invention, he believed. But Malthassa has deeper roots, as deep as hell, and it is there the Red Horse must go.Gry’s father passed along the road to the Palace of Shadows where Asmodeus rules, King of the Lightless Garden. Pursued by the shaman Aza and riding the Red Horse, Gry must follow the same road, though it is the road to hell.From hell all other places are accessible: this is a reason to go there, the only one not steeped in madness. But it is not Gry’s reason. Gry is only running from home, riding the Red Horse which was once her father’s horse – not a woman’s. And surely she is mad, for the Red Horse talks to her…At the Fortress of Lilith the two worlds will meet, and between the two walk the Gypsies.
Читать Lilith’s Castle онлайн беплатно
GILL ALDERMAN
Lilith’s Castle
Each page a promise that all
shall be well
Harper Voyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Copyright © Gill Alderman 1999
Gill Alderman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780006482727
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008228446
Version: 2016-12-22
CONTENTS
he fleeth as it were a shadow
Nandje, Rider of the Red Horse, Father and Imandi to the Ima tribe, lay still beneath the ceremonial blanket which covered him. The bustard feathers woven into it pierced his face with their long barbs and the rawhide strips lay heavier than lead on his throat, part of him and also something separate, deadly and symbolic. The felted horsehair had sucked up his blood and sunk into the rotting craters which were his wounds. He knew himself to be no longer human and a man but as much and little as the earth on which the Horse Herd also trampled, wounding its soft surface with the same lunular pits.
It was ill to be thus trapped underground, within a redundant body whose eyelids were held down with stones, nostrils and lips sewn shut with dried Plains grasses. Nor could he recall the Past, whatever that unlikely concept was, or look into the Future as he had once been able, in life. The Now, terrible, endless, was all: death inescapable, triumphant, eternal.
Aza, the Shaman, lifted the blanket from Nandje’s face and observed the dead Imandi’s crushed skull and grotesquely distorted face. The skin was drying out and splitting, pulling his twelve-month-old stitching apart. He found an end and pulled the grass strands out, to the last shred and wisp, using his nails where the flesh had tightened round the thread.
‘The sleep of death is long,’ said Aza ‘but there comes a time to awaken.’
He took up the pointed stick he had prepared during the long mourning and thrust it between the lips and teeth of the corpse, down savagely, hard to the base of the throat. It groaned and belched as the gases rose and bubbled from its liquid interior and a terrible stench was hurled into his face. The corpse moths which had been incubated in Nandje’s body flew free, a many-winged pied cloud.
‘Nay, go peacefully to the Palace of Shadows!’ he cried. ‘Be wise and kind, as you were with us.’
The final alteration had taken place with the freeing and the flight of Nandje’s soul. All that remained was lolling, putrefying matter which Aza might leave alone to complete its metamorphosis, flesh to grass. Tenderly and carefully, for this was the last office he was able to perform for Nandje, he rolled back and folded the death-blanket and carried it with him, up into the light.
It is the usual thing for a herd led by a mare
to be strayed and destroyed
The night was almost over and the Red Horse walked slowly out of it, pacing steadily over the low hills which lay between Nandje’s tomb and his Herd. He had made this nightly journey since the burial, observing how the body he had carried at both easy walk and furious gallop was decaying and what tender care the shaman took over his rituals. Yet, each time he returned to the Herd, he felt at heart less satisfied and more restive. These emotions, he knew, came to him because his understanding was beginning to awake and not from sorrow at the untidy fate of Nandje, nor any fellow-feeling for the fine man he had been.
The horses stood in small constellations, group by group within the universe of the Herd. The stars were fading and dawn about to break. A skein of geese, pointing like an arrow to the far horizon, flew overhead and the Red Horse paused to watch them out of sight. They were flying into the wind and making heavy weather of it, yet the song of their wings was hopeful and eager: they were always moving on from riverhead to marsh, from forest lake to seashore, water their element as his was this grass-grown earth of the Plains. The wind pushed at his back and he moved off, breaking into a canter as he breasted the last hill and saw his mares and young stallions, his filly foals and colts all facing forward, all looking out for him. The Herd neighed a soft welcome, the sound passing from horse to mare, and he returned the greeting joyfully: this part of his life was whole and good. He turned his head toward the village where the Ima slept. The sun always rose beyond it. He waited patiently for its first, arising rays to touch the round roofs of the houses.
