Читать книгу The Secrets of Names. Snow Chronicles. Book 1 - Ар'лан ис'Дрекхэм - Страница 10
Way
ОглавлениеThe road to the Mirror City was not, in any ordinary sense, a road at all.
Indeed, a great many things here were making a most determined effort not to be ordinary. The path appeared, vanished, decided it would much rather be a bridge of light, then spread itself obligingly under their feet as a broad snowy slope. Once it rose straight upwards in the form of a staircase, although there was no hill ahead, no house, and not the least excuse for behaving architecturally.
«Is it always like this?» Vera asked, stepping cautiously on to a shining stair that had been air a moment before.
«No,» said Yang. «Sometimes it is stranger.»
«This world dislikes standing still,» Yin explained. «There is no time here in your sense. No before and after. No yesterday or tomorrow in the way you mean them.»
«Then how is there?»
Yin considered.
«Like memory,» she said at last. «You can remember summer and yesterday’s breakfast and what it felt like to be six all at once, can’t you? None of them has to wait politely for the others.»
«Only here it’s all… outside?» Vera said slowly.
«Exactly,» said Yang, pleased. «Extremely inconvenient for admirers of timetables, and extremely useful for oddities.»
«And for trouble,» said Domino.
«Trouble,» said Yang, «is wonderfully resourceful in every world.»
Vera walked on in silence for a while, trying to digest this. Snow glowed underfoot. Endless sky shimmered overhead. Far away, cities sharpened into view and faded again, as if someone were sketching them on frosted glass and changing their mind.
«If there isn’t any time here,» she said at last, «does that mean I could stay a long while, and only a minute would pass at home?»
«Perhaps,» said Yin.
«Or the other way round,» said Yang cheerfully. «You go back and discover it’s summer, everyone has retired, and they’ve redone the stairwell.»
«Yang,» said Yin wearily.
«What? I am broadening her grasp of possibilities.»
Vera cast a nervous look at Domino.
«Is he joking?»
«In part,» said the cat. «Which is the most disagreeable kind of joke. In the World of Meanings, the farther you go, the faster time moves in the human world. But if you stand still, time stands still too. You could remain here for an eternity, if that happened to suit you.»
