Roger Zelazny - Hall of Mirrors

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 37KB 14 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Roger Zelazny. Hall of Mirrors

Neither of us realized there had been a change until a halfdozen guys

tried an ambush.

We had spent the night in the Dancing Mountains, Shask and I, where I'd

witnessed a bizarre game between Dworkin and Suhuy. I'd heard strange tales

about things that happened to people who spent the night there, but I hadn't

had a hell of a lot of choice in the matter. It had been storming, I was

tired, and my mount had become a statue. I don't know how that game turned

out, though I was mentioned obliquely as a participant and I'm still

wondering.

The next morning my blue horse Shask and I had crossed the Shadow

Divide 'twixt Amber and Chaos. Shask was a Shadow mount my son Merlin had

found for me in the royal stables of the Courts. At the moment, Shask was

traveling under the guise of a giant blue lizard, and we were singing songs

from various times and places.

Two men rose on either side of the trail from amid rocky cover,

pointing crossbows at us. Two more stepped out before usone with a bow, the

other bearing a rather beautiful looking blade, doubtless stolen,

considering the guy's obvious profession.

"Halt! and no harm'll happen," said the swordsman.

I drew rein.

"When it comes to money, I'm pretty much broke right now," I said, "and

I doubt any of you could ride my mount, or would care to."

"Well now, maybe and maybe not," said the leader, "but it's a rough way

to make a living, so we take whatever we can."

"It's not a good idea to leave a man with nothing," I said. "Some

people hold grudges."

"Most of them can't walk out of here."

"Sounds like a death sentence to me."

He shrugged.

"That sword of yours looks pretty fancy," he said. "Let's see it."

"I don't think that's a good idea," I said.

"Why not?"

"If I draw it, I may wind up killing you," I said.

He laughed.

"We can take it off your body," he said, glancing to his right and

left.

"Maybe," I said.

"Let's see it."

"If you insist."

I drew Grayswandir with a singing note. It persisted, and the eyes of

the swordsman before me widened as it went on to describe an arc calculated

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Roger%20Zelazny%20-%20Hall%20of%20Mirrors.htm (1 of 14) [10/16/2004 3:21:15 PM]

Roger Zelazny. Hall of Mirrors

to intersect with his neck. His own weapon came out as mine passed through

his neck and continued. His cut toward Shask and passed through the animal's

shoulder. Neither blow did any damage whatsoever.

"You a sorcerer?" he asked as I swung again, delivering a blow that

might have removed his arm. Instead, it passed harmlessly by.

"Not the kind who does things like this. You?"

"No," he answered, striking again. "What's going on?"

I slammed Grayswandir back into the scabbard.

"Nothing," I said. "Go bother someone else."

I shook the reins, and Shask moved forward.

"Shoot him down!" the man cried.

The men on either side of the trail released their crossbow bolts, as

did the other man before me. All four bolts from the sides passed through

Shask, three of the men injuring or killing their opposite numbers. The one

from ahead passed through me without pain or discomfort. An attempted sword

blow achieved nothing for my first assailant.

"Ride on," I said.

Shask did so and we ignored their swearing as we went.

"We seem to have come into a strange situation," I observed.

The beast nodded.

"At least it kept us out of some trouble," I said.

"Funny. I'd a feeling you would have welcomed trouble," Shask said.

I chuckled.

"Perhaps, perhaps not," I replied. "I wonder how long the spell lasts?"

"Maybe it has to be lifted."

"Shit! That's always a pain."

"Beats being insubstantial."

"True."

"Surely someone back at Amber will know what to do."

"Hope so."

We rode on, and we encountered no one else that day. I felt the rocks

beneath me when I wrapped myself in my cloak to sleep that night. Why did I

feel them when I didn't feel a sword or a crossbow bolt? Too late to ask

Shask whether he had felt anything, for he had turned to stone for the

night.

I yawned and stretched. A partly unsheathed Grayswandir felt normal

beneath my fingers. I pushed it back in and went to sleep.

Following my morning ablutions, we rode again. Shask was taking well to

hellrides, as well as most Amber mounts did. Better, in some ways. We raced

through a wildly changing landscape. I thought ahead to Amber, and I thought

back to the time I'd spent imprisoned in the Courts. I had honed my

sensitivity to a very high degree through meditation, and I began to wonder

whether that, coupled with other strange disciplines I'd undertaken, could

have led to my intangibility. I supposed it might have contributed, but I'd

a feeling the Dancing Mountains were the largest donor.

"I wonder what it represents and where it came from?" I said aloud.

"Your homeland, I'd bet," Shask replied, "left especially for you."

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Roger%20Zelazny%20-%20Hall%20of%20Mirrors.htm (2 of 14) [10/16/2004 3:21:15 PM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Roger Zelazny - Hall of Mirrors.pdf

共14页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Roger Zelazny - Hall of Mirrors

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: