Robert Adams - Castaways 5 - Of Myths and Monsters

VIP免费

2024-11-29 0 0 405.16KB 168 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Adams, Robert - Castaways 5 - OF Myths and Monsters (v1.0) (html).html

Scanned by Highroller.

Proofed more or less by Highroller.

Made prettier by use of EBook Design Group Stylesheet.

Of Myths and Monsters

by Robert Adams

PROLOGUE

In one of the larger cities of an Eastern Seaboard state of the United States of

America, in the first year of the last quarter of the twentieth century, a man sat at a

desk in a modest office which was located in a building that, though it once had

been the mansion of a well-to-do family, was now become one- and two-room

offices. The man resembled in his physical appearance, dress, and usual manner

only what he was supposed to resemble, a businessman of indeterminate age but

probable middle years, a run-of-the-mill, middle-class American who was

possessed of sufficient business acumen to afford to dress well, drive a midpriced

but new auto, pay his bills on time and in full. A bachelor who had been known to

make allusions to one or more former wives, he occasionally wined and dined and

otherwise entertained acquaintances of the female persuasion and later, in his

comfortable apartment, often shared sex with them. That he never allowed any

serious or lasting relationships with them to develop was usually ascribed to his

understandable fear of repeating the pain of his late marriage or marriages.

In fact, the man was nothing of the sort. In the strictest sense, he was not even a

man—male, but not human, not completely human, at least. Not that there had not

once been a truly human man just like this being, but he had died and his husk had

been used as the pattern for fashioning the body that this being now inhabited; his

brain and selected portions of several others had been skillfully merged to occupy

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ro...%2005%20-%20Of%20Myths%20and%20Monsters.html (1 of 168) [10/16/2004 3:28:33 PM]

Adams, Robert - Castaways 5 - OF Myths and Monsters (v1.0) (html).html

the skull of this "man" by a technology so far beyond the "man's" present

contemporaries as to be unbelievable.

Although other beings considered this being to be almost young, still had the

being been in existence in one or another form for almost half a millennium, by

the standards of authentic men.

He sat at the desk, speaking in a conversational tone although he was alone in the

office. The language in which he spoke, however, was one incomprehensible to

any save two or three other beings like himself on all the earth. He spoke to a

dimly pulsing spot of light that hovered in the air before him, its glow all but

invisible in the shafts of sunlight spearing between the slats of the window blinds.

"I am certain that it is more well-meant idiocy on the parts of those cretins who

are mining the easternmost reaches of the largest northern-hemisphere continent

of the world we call 3-9-23-1. It is but more proof of what has been said by beings

before this: Their available technologies have far outstripped their intellect and

judgment and, are they not more strictly controlled and guided in the proper ways,

they will eventually be the innocent instigators of real difficulties for all of us.

"In an attempt to return certain humans to this world which is my current station

of duty, said humans having been plucked into the world of 3-9-23-1 by way of a

malfunctioning primitive projector out of the world that we call 3-9-18-20, they

managed to instead lose all of them somehow, on exactly which world and in

exactly which line of time I have yet to ascertain.

"I came upon all of this by way of purest accident. I was called upon in the line of

work that this creature I here am conducts to investigate disappearances of

valuable items from the properties of a firm that specializes in the sale and resale

of weapons of many varieties. Seated with the senior officer of the parent firm in

his office, I was able to sense the afterglow of one of the carriers used by the

miners of 3-9-23-1. This alerted me and I was caused to recall that close relatives

of this very man had but recently disappeared under most singular circumstances.

He had, indeed, asked me to investigate those disappearances, and I had so done,

my conclusions having been reported to you higher beings in my report

#11.523LSP12RF.

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ro...%2005%20-%20Of%20Myths%20and%20Monsters.html (2 of 168) [10/16/2004 3:28:33 PM]

Adams, Robert - Castaways 5 - OF Myths and Monsters (v1.0) (html).html

"Had immediate remedial action been taken at that time, doubtless none of the

present threatened problems would be occurring; but the circumstances prevented

speedy action, I was informed, and so we now are faced with the result. I will be

unable to report on the degree of gravity of this result until I can discover just

where and when these subjects were projected, of course.

"The artifacts being apparently projected from this world are very oddly assorted,

and many of the varieties of foods and weapons have disappeared in quantities

much larger than the ten or twelve human projectees could use themselves, so I

must assume that they are giving them or selling them to humans indigenous to

that time and world, and all of us are unpleasantly aware of the certain outcome of

such interference if it is allowed to go on for any length of time. It was

interferences akin to this, allowed by the lesser ones who preceded us, that

brought about the sorry state of affairs now so bedeviling us.

"But worse than the projections of artifacts of this world to another is what I

noticed in a research laboratory of the firm on which I was calling. The carrier

afterglow was very strong in one room of that place, and certain traces remained

as to lead me to believe that the room and some of its equipment had been used to

reproduce technologically sophisticated devices of the miners' culture, world, and

time. If such knowledge as was necessary to do what was done there falls into the

hands of even so primitive a culture as this one the result could be chaos for us.

"It is for this reason that I send this report and why I most urgently request that my

other duties be either assigned to other beings or allowed to be suspended until I

can put this dangerous matter to rights. The only viable alternative will be to

assign an emergency team of beings to the situation, with all that attends to such

assignment and preparations of the beings for it.

My report is now concluded."

Immediately his last syllable was pronounced, the dimly pulsing light winked out

of existence.

—————CHAPTER

THE FIRST

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ro...%2005%20-%20Of%20Myths%20and%20Monsters.html (3 of 168) [10/16/2004 3:28:33 PM]

Adams, Robert - Castaways 5 - OF Myths and Monsters (v1.0) (html).html

His name was Brian, the eighth man of that name to reign as Ard-Righ or High

King of Eireann or Ireland, but Brian VIII was only seen on documents or used

orally by a filid as he sang the long, rhymed, often rambling genealogical records

that had never been written in all the many centuries they had been compiled.

He was called Brian the Burly, and burly he was. Scion of a long line of warriors,

fighting monarchs and fighting chiefs, he was obviously their true get. Although

not truly a tall man, he nonetheless gave a first impression of size, of massivity;

though well formed and graceful, his hands were large, strong, hairy-backed, and

heavily scarred. His frame was all big bones and rolling muscles sheathing them,

the hips as wide as the shoulders that looked almost too broad and thick for his

body. His head rested on a neck nearly as thick as the head itself. His lower

extremities, though no less solid and strong than his arms, were clearly those of a

horseman, with flat thighs. Now, in his middle years, his waist was beginning to

thicken slightly and strands of grey were appearing in his hair and beard, but still

he looked as powerful, vital, and incipiently dangerous as ever he had in the past.

And Ard-Righ Brian the Burly was indeed dangerous in many a way. In his prime,

few men in all of Eireann had been his match with the fearsome Danish-style axe

he favored, ahorse or afoot; and even now, when he was in his fifties, many a

younger man would be inclined to think twice before meeting the monarch in lists

or on field of battle. But as deadly an opponent as he certainly was sitting his

spotted destrier in armor grasping his fearsome axe, this was not the only danger

he represented… or even the most significant.

For Brian was not only physically strong, he was possessed of wealth and power,

wealth, power, and an ambition that gnawed at him without cease, waking and

sleeping. Countless men had died, countless gallons of blood had been shed, in his

years-long attempts to assuage the pangs of his ambition, and, ruthless as he was,

he stood quite prepared and ready to see half the male population of the entire

island done to death if it would achieve his ends.

For years without number, Brian's paramount title, High King, had been mostly a

mockery, for the high kings had held no more land than any of the other kings in

Eireann, had had no hint of true sovereignty over these other kings, in fact, had

acted as little better than a referee in wars between kings and kings, kings and

would-be kings and the like. Brian's sire and predecessor had envisioned an

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ro...%2005%20-%20Of%20Myths%20and%20Monsters.html (4 of 168) [10/16/2004 3:28:33 PM]

Adams, Robert - Castaways 5 - OF Myths and Monsters (v1.0) (html).html

Eireann over which the high kings would hold such sway as the kings of other

lands—England, Scotland, France, Norway, Denmark, and Aragon—did over

theirs, and he had inculcated his son with an equally driving ambition from his

very earliest years.

Of course, Brian did not, would not, could not admit to the fact that personal

ambition drove him, rather did he often cite his desire to bring to an end, once and

for all, the small wars between the kings that had, for year after year, century after

century, racked and impoverished what could have been a rich, fertile, productive

land and people. These citations, however, were only taken at face value by

foreigners who did not know him or know him well; his kingly opponents in

Eireann knew better. And foreigners of any intelligence or intuitiveness who

served him or had any depth of dealings with him for any length of time quickly

sensed a real difference between that in which Brian believed and that in which he

wished others to believe he believed.

Such men as these were three condottieri temporarily resident in widely separated

portions of Eireann. One was an Italian—Ser Timoteo, il Duce di Bolgia— who

had, along with his justly famous condotta, been hired by one Cardinal D'Este and

sent to the Irish Kingdom of Munster to help to modernize its existing army and

hold it against the incursions of the High King for the Church and the House of

Fitz Gerald, scions of which had been its kings for centuries—the second was also

an Italian, actually, the full brother of the first, Roberto, and he now reigned as an

Irish king over the kingdom called Ulaid, in the northeast of the island. Righ or

King Roberto, who had realized even as the ancient crown of Ulaid was lowered

upon his brow that his small, weak, impoverished little holding had had all the

chance of a wet snowball on a hot griddle against the power and the wealth of the

grasping High King, had sought about and then made the short sea journey to the

Hebrides Islands, where—after certain negotiations—he had given over the

Kingdom of Ulaid to Sir Aonghus, Regulus of the Isles, then received it back of

the powerful old man as a feoff.

In due time, the Regulus had sent formal notification to the Ard-Righ and all other

nearby rulers that, as in archaic times, Ulaid was once more a feoff of the Western

Isles of Scotland, its king his vassal and, therefore, henceforth under his fearsome

protection. At receipt of that letter, Ard-Righ Brian the Burly had, so said his

people who waited upon him, cursed and blasphemed most sulphurously, then set

about recalling the bulk of his large army from campaign in the Kingdom of

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ro...%2005%20-%20Of%20Myths%20and%20Monsters.html (5 of 168) [10/16/2004 3:28:33 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

摘要：

Adams,Robert-Castaways5-OFMythsandMonsters(v1.0)(html).htmlScannedbyHighroller.ProofedmoreorlessbyHighroller.MadeprettierbyuseofEBookDesignGroupStylesheet.OfMythsandMonstersbyRobertAdamsPROLOGUEInoneofthelargercitiesofanEasternSeaboardstateoftheUnitedS atesofAmerica,inthefirstyearofthelastquartero...

展开>> 收起<<

Robert Adams - Castaways 5 - Of Myths and Monsters.pdf

共168页,预览5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！

Robert Adams - Castaways 5 - Of Myths and Monsters

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: