Methodius Buslaev. Third Horseman Of Gloom. Дмитрий ЕмецЧитать онлайн книгу.
voice was distorted: it jumped, sounding sometimes like a falsetto, sometimes like a bass, and Daph would not risk assuming whether it belonged to a man, a girl, or an adolescent. “Look at how he protected himself! The spell of voice change. Plus the magic of distraction, attached to the rune of falsity of the second level. You see an old lady or a packed donkey, but in reality it’s a massive Cyclops, to whom the doctor prescribed cannibalism to boost hemoglobin, or a combat unicorn!” she thought. “Eh! Moscow is becoming a boring, weird place. A little longer, and it’ll breed so many wizards that moronoids will become an attraction. But why did I survive?”
After deciding that it was time to leave her hideout, Daphne started to get up, but the back of her head struck painfully against something. She twitched and pricked her shoulder with a carelessly driven nail. She rolled away fearfully, imagining heaven knows what, with her hair sliding along the wet sand, leaped up quickly and… her gaze was captured by the recently planed side of the sandbox – two boards below and one horizontally for the comfort of resting mommies.
Do not throw sand in mommy’s eyes! You will get your hands dirty!
“Indeed, the sandbox is pine! A board on the side and a board overhead!” Daph thought. She suddenly wanted to burst out laughing, fall down and, rolling on the sand, repeat, “Well, have you eaten?” Realizing that she had started to become hysterical, she bit her hand painfully. The pain brought her to her senses.
Daph approached the arch, examined and even felt it. Her returned sight informed her that in front of her was plaster with a cheerful pattern of mould, and brick under the plaster. The arch was like an arch. Fully moronoid in every respect. There was no confirmed presence of a permanent magic teleport. So, the passageway was temporary.
So, here was the fatal danger Essiorh had imagined! A temporal shift had befallen the hapless keeper, and he had seen a threat that had not yet happened at that moment. If not for the appearance of the succubus confusing them, Essiorh’s help would have come opportunely.
Daph already wanted to leave the arch when she suddenly saw a dark spot on the asphalt. She squatted and ran her finger along it. She lifted her finger to her eyes and suddenly felt sick, nauseous, and horrible. To a guard of Light, even inexperienced, it was enough to see blood once in order to understand whose and under what circumstances the blow was inflicted. There was only one thing Daph could not say: who had inflicted it.
Chapter 2
AH YOU @ AND THE OTHER BEASTS
On noticing that the edge of the blanket had slipped, Irka straightened it. She preferred to keep her legs covered, even in summer, when there was no necessity for this. This way, sometimes it was possible to forget about their existence for a while. But during a massage, changing, or when she was taking a bath, she could not manage to run away from her legs, and they persistently tormented her gaze and soul – deprived of muscles, blue-white, with protruding knees that could bend only in the hands of the masseur.
How she hated her body: hideous, useless! How she wanted to break free and exist independently, out of the flesh. How she envied apparitions and ghosts, which freely moved in space, not depending on a body. Let alone that they did not need a wheelchair. And they did not have blue ghastly legs.
Over time Irka adjusted and more and more perceived her body as a small house of little boxes, the shell of a snail, on the whole, something serving as the temporary abode of the mind. Her legs, though, were a nuisance, a huge dinosaur tail that she had to drag behind her, when she, using the handrails attached to the walls, moved from the wheelchair to the bed or settled down in the armchair by the computer.
Now and then, after staying up reading or near the monitor until the middle of the night – Granny did not insist too much on a routine, she simply did not care for it – Irka became so tired that she almost existed out of her body. In any case, she hardly thought about it.
“The computer lights burn so terribly at night. Like Vii’s eyes,” she thought, falling asleep, although, it goes without saying, she personally was not acquainted with the reputable functionary from Bald Mountain.
All day she was reading – the pyramid of books occasionally grew to the middle of a wheel of the wheelchair and even higher. Her world was fantasy – hundreds of realities, sometimes terrible, sometimes tempting, sometimes strictly Gothic, in muted tacit colours. But all of them, even the most lacklustre, were still better than reality. As a result, Irka spent a large part of her life in dreams. She knew as much about dragons, centaurs, griffins, chimeras, the sharpening of swords, and the mechanism of crossbows, as only a person not having seen or held one can know. Under the assumption, of course, that all this was the minimum amount known by the authors of the books from which she got the information.
School did not especially strain her, since Irka studied as an external student. Helping her were her grandmother (mainly serving as a morally determined baton) and two teachers, with whom she met five or six times a month. Each year, lessons took up less and less time. At times, Irka wondered whether it was worthwhile for her to glance in a textbook, as she already knew the answer in advance. Everything was simple, logical and… boring. The most depressing of all was to write in the notebook even answers clear to her: to spell out in simple terms the elementary component, all these parentheses, degrees, intermediate actions, and other crutches of thought; to reveal formulae, where her mind leapfrogged two or three steps. In the end, tired of following dreary school conventions, Irka abandoned the tedious entries and limited herself to immediately writing the answer.
The first time, the teachers were indignant, claiming that she peeked into the “answer keys” and, according to Irka’s expression, “bread crumbs”. However, this continued only until she solved one of two dozen problems in their presence. Then the teachers stopped squealing in amazement, and in their eyes appeared the bewilderment of people who do not want to relinquish profitable tutoring; but deep down they wondered what was still possible to be taught here.
Irka had already passed exams for grade nine. Two more grades, swallowed by the external student, and it would be possible to enter college. But Irka was not particularly in a hurry. Intuition suggested that seventeen- or eighteen-year-old fellow students would not take her seriously but only as an amusing little talking pet. If so, then her student life, let it even be restricted in a wheelchair, would be hopelessly shattered.
This evening, when Granny, yawning in her shop, was cutting a marshal’s uniform for the theatre, Irka was home alone. And, it goes without saying, she was sitting in front of the computer. Irka’s computers – both the desktop and laptop – were on even at night and, as often happened, they frightened Granny with the sounds of texting.
Suddenly a strange sound was heard from the kitchen. A chair had fallen. Plates clattered. The teapot stand hanging from a cord also shook, scratching the wall. And in the next instant, it seemed to Irka that she heard a moan. Completely real. Human.
As any computer person, Irka thought with her fingers and was also scared with her fingers. Now, before panicking in earnest and sounding the alarm, she reflexively typed:
Rikka: Someone has gotten into our kitchen!
Anika-voin: Aha! They want to steal your antique fridge!
Miu-miu: run for help, but stop to make a sandwich on the way.
Rikka: I’m serious! Someone is moaning in there!
Miu-miu: eat a sandwich.
Anika-voin: What if some bozo came to you with a chainsaw? I wonder, do-chainsaws work not plugged in?
Miu-miu: Nah, hardly!
Rikka: Idiots!
While she was typing “Idiots!”, the moan in the kitchen repeated itself. The reality of what was happening finally reached Irka’s consciousness. And she actually felt fear. After all, the second floor is not the ninth. Granny had warned many times that a thief could climb in from the street, and if not a thief, then some tipsy cadre, who took it into his head to drink water from a tap.
And here this happened. Irka understood that she was sitting by the computer without light,