Tanith Lee - In the City of Dead Night
VIP免费
2024-11-23
0
0
41.74KB
13 页
5.9玖币
侵权投诉
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20do.../spaar/Tanith%20Lee%20-%20In%20the%20City%20of%20Dead%20Night.txt
TANITH LEE
IN THE CITY OF DEAD NIGHT
Her new story for us merges traditional elements of both science fiction and fantasy into a rich and
evocative blend.
WE ENTERED THE CITY IN the hour after the first sunset. It was twilight. Thick bluish dusk, like
smoke, rose from the ground. Out of this, the cliffs of buildings towered to touch the luminous sky, that
was, and would stay, too bright for any but the fiercest stars to show.
Night could never come here. Here, night was done with.
"Don't be so awed by this," said Hassent.
I looked at him "No?"
"No. It's an old city, partly destroyed by aerial action, partly ruinous.
And after sunfall it lies between two suns, the second and smaller of which will rise in three hours.
That's all. The facts."
"Really."
He smiled. Oddly, in the half-dark, his own darkness was paler.
"Well, what would you say then, Aira?"
"There weren't always two suns."
"True. And?"
"Once there used to be night."
"But now there isn't, only twilight. Just perfect for scum like us to burgle in."
Why did we have this discussion? To pass the time, probably, while we rested on the terrace-wall after
the appalling climb up from the valley below. We had used ropes, of course, and each of us was agile as
a monkey, but it still took a long while and was peril-fraught enough to satisfy even Hassent's irritating
taste for dangerous, arduous exercise.
From the terrace, we could look down straight through into the City. A vista was carved for miles by a
wide boulevard like the bed of a precisely ruled river. The strange smooth buildings, rising either side,
with their pointed windows that had the shape of fingers, ended frequently in shattered tops, where the
bombardment had hit them all those years ago. And obviously, there was nobody anymore to light a
lamp. From the valley, if one was unaware, the City could pass for another feature of the surrounding
mountains. It had done so often, our Source had assured us. You had to know, and have a map. And then
there was the climb. But Hassent and I were used to climbs. Up the sheer towers of ancient palaces,
along the sloping insides of charming sewage systems .... We were thieves. The climbing, like the
robbery, was part of our job.
But the second sun filled me with concern. It lay now, just under the horizon, throwing upward a
preview of light the way the first sun, the real sun, does at dawn. The second sun was not real. It had
been made and raised and set to circle the City by magic. They-- the ones who once lived here -- had
called it the Great Lantern. Now these magicians were gone, bombed out of residence by some of their
numerous enemies from across the mountain range. But the second sun, the Great Lantern, that
remained, and went on rising (in the north), so here, there could never be night. And -- what else
remained?
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...20Lee%20-%20In%20the%20City%20of%20Dead%20Night.txt (1 of 13)23-2-2006 23:34:29
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20do.../spaar/Tanith%20Lee%20-%20In%20the%20City%20of%20Dead%20Night.txt
I had said something like this to him, back in the desert, when we were at the last halt, and sold off the
riding-urts. We had a night (yes, because there was night, out there) on the town, he with a pretty female
pay-me, and I with a handsome male pay-me. We had also drunk the wine-wells dry. And in the
intimacy post-received pleasure and alcohol, I had let slip to Hassent my doubt about the magics of this
place--whether they were truly finished. But Hassent had only said, "All gone. All that's left in the City
is treasure beyond the dreams of insanity. That's why we're going. And it's a bit late to coward out.
We've spent all our money."
Now, on the terrace, he said, businesslike, "Let's make a move, shall we?
So we hitched the ropes again and swung off over the inside drop, to where a flight of broken steps hung
in the dusk.
To descend was to go down into the gathered dark. The other way, the glowing green-blue sky watched
us indifferently. I looked it in the eye, coiled up my rope, and followed Hassent down the stair.
WHEN I WAS a child in Sheemelay, the masters who taught me theft had also taught me quite a lot of
superstition. Tie always the left boot up after the right boot; lick your finger and touch the stone of your
marked building, to placate it with a bit of yourself. (Blood was better, but then you had to be careful.)
Over the years, especially once I partnered up with Hassent, I had stopped, or tried to stop, some of this.
Hassent had absolutely no time for it. He is a pragmatist. "You take," he was fond of saying, "till it takes
you." But old habits die hard.
The lower levels of the City, as we got down into them, seemed buried, as if in a cellar. The effect was
heightened by all the upper streets which rose above, and sometimes forded the lower in the form of
bridges. Several of those had been smashed by bombs. The surviving masonry stuck out, and in the
unending dusk seemed to have weird shapes, like the staring heads of huge beasts with open jaws &
I said nothing about this fancy to Hassent. Five years of his company had enabled me to imagine what
he would say back.
There were gardens in the City. Some must have been there to begin with, parks with curious tapering
pines and thin stone statues. But the gardens had overgrown themselves and spread, and elsewhere
groves of weeds, bushes, and trees had sometimes seeded in the walls and avenues. Even so, the City,
beyond certain areas of rubble, drifts of dust, old leaves, the ground-down shale of fallen marble, was
tidy, spacious, and uncluttered.
After a while, we paused again under an archway, to consult the map.
Beyond lay a vast plaza. It was closely and immaculately paved except in one spot far across, where
bomb damage had caused two or three buildings to collapse. A fountain stood at the square's center,
pristine. As we lurked, peering over the map by the light of Hassent's glow-worm torch, a snake hissed
loudly from the square and a prickle of new stars shot off from the fountain into the air.
"It's fine, Aira. Calm down."
"But--"
"Some of their gadgets still work here. We know that, we've been told that."
"I thought it was an exaggeration."
"Their second sun still works so why not a mere fountain?"
"Yes, I see." Did I? I watched the water-jet playing up its spangles at the sky. Was there enough green
light even so for it to glitter quite so eloquently?
"Now," said Hassent, "let's get our bearings. We came in over South Wall. Sun Two will rise up there, in
the mountains, when it does. That's north, then. And this plaza, I believe, is this one on the map, with the
file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruis...20Lee%20-%20In%20the%20City%20of%20Dead%20Night.txt (2 of 13)23-2-2006 23:34:29
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！
分类：外语学习
价格：5.9玖币
属性：13 页
大小：41.74KB
格式：PDF
时间：2024-11-23
作者详情
-
IMU2CLIP MULTIMODAL CONTRASTIVE LEARNING FOR IMU MOTION SENSORS FROM EGOCENTRIC VIDEOS AND TEXT NARRATIONS Seungwhan Moon Andrea Madotto Zhaojiang Lin Alireza Dirafzoon Aparajita Saraf5.9 玖币0人下载
-
Improving Visual-Semantic Embedding with Adaptive Pooling and Optimization Objective Zijian Zhang1 Chang Shu23 Ya Xiao1 Yuan Shen1 Di Zhu1 Jing Xiao25.9 玖币0人下载
渝公网安备50010702506394
