Читать книгу The Secrets of Names. Snow Chronicles. Book 1 - Ар'лан ис'Дрекхэм - Страница 9
Rustlers
ОглавлениеVera had just opened her mouth to demand an explanation at once when Yin suddenly lifted her head.
Yang stopped crackling in his usual distracted way and seemed, somehow, to gather into himself.
And the air around them – that marvellous, shining, snowy air – grew heavier.
Vera felt it at once.
Not as a sound.
Not as movement.
More like someone else’s attention.
As if into a splendid hall full of music and lights there had suddenly walked someone who could not hear music at all, but was extremely good at counting other people’s spoons.
«What?» Vera whispered.
Yang turned to her slowly.
«And there,» he said, «is your answer to why you ought not to have shouted like that.»
«I wasn’t shouting! I was calling for help!»
«For local hunters,» said Yang grimly, «that amounts to much the same thing.»
At first Vera saw nothing.
Then on the far slope the glittering snow suddenly seemed wrong. Like fur lifting along the spine of a frightened animal. A shadow twitched there – long, swift, and much too smooth to be anything good. Then another.
And another.
They slid out of the radiance the way some thoughts arrive in the middle of the night: noiselessly, badly, and at entirely the wrong moment.
«Who are those?» Vera asked, already quite certain she was not going to like the answer.
«Rustlers,» said Yin quietly.
And one had to admit that the name suited them.
They were like wolves only in the sense that a nightmare is like a dog. The general arrangement was there, but the soul flatly refused to acknowledge the relationship. Long and supple and blue-silver, they skimmed over the snow as if they were not stepping on it at all, but drawing light out of it. Their fur neither bristled nor lay flat. It streamed, like smoke on water. Their muzzles were too narrow, too drawn out, and where their eyes ought to have been there were only dark hollows in which pale glints kept flashing – as if other people’s forgotten names were still trapped there, fluttering and unable to get free.
But the worst thing was not their faces.
It was the way they listened.
The Rustlers stopped in a half-circle, and all at once Vera understood. They were not looking at her.
They were listening to her.
To the way she was put together.
To the way her name held inside her.
Like hungry creatures that do not want meat, or blood, or bone.
They want meaning.
«Why are they staring at me like that?» Vera asked very softly.
«Because you’re fresh,» said Yang.
«And whole,» said Yin.
«And noisy,» Yang finished. «Which, if you will forgive me, was not a strategic triumph.»
One of the Rustlers moved forward.
The snow under its paws did not crush.
It dulled.
Wherever the creature passed, the coloured sparks went out for a moment, as though someone had drawn a wet grey hand across the world.
«What do they want?» Vera asked.
«To bite off a piece,» said Yang with disgusting calm.
«A piece of what?»
«Oh, a memory, perhaps. Or a name. Or a feeling. They generally begin with the tastiest bits.»
«And what is the tastiest bit about me?»
«Judging by the way they’re behaving,» said Yang, «all of it.»
«Yang,» said Yin.
«I’m being honest!»
The Rustlers came nearer.
Now Vera could hear them properly. They did not growl. They did not pant. They did not show any decent wolfish teeth.
They rustled.
Softly, dryly, steadily – like pages turning in an empty room when nobody is there. At the sound of it, the skin on Vera’s back prickled so fast it was as if it had been rehearsing.
She took a step back.
Then another.
«Can we run?» she asked.
«We can,» said Yang.
«Will we get away?»
«No,» said Yang.
«Wonderful.»
«I have a gift for clarity,» he observed.
Yin moved forward.
Or rather, she did not exactly move. She simply found herself a little farther ahead, the way water somehow gets between a bank and a falling stone.
«Behind me,» she said to Vera.
«And behind me too, if you prefer your survival with a little more excitement,» Yang added.
Both of them flung up their hands.
The light around them shivered.
The Snow World of Meanings, quiet and beautiful a moment ago, suddenly began rearranging itself before Vera’s eyes. The hill to the left bent and grew higher. Behind them a shining ridge reared up. Thin silver trees shot instantly into a thick glittering wood. A distant tower broke apart into misty radiance and reappeared somewhere else entirely.
«What are you doing?» Vera gasped.
«Confusing the trail,» said Yin shortly.
«We’re simples!» Yang shouted, and golden sparks flew from his hands into the air. «But useful ones! I can muddle the near things, she can hold a shape steady. Between us we are pure bureaucracy for any pursuit!»
The first Rustler sprang.
Vera did not even have time to scream.
Right in front of her face a thin white arc flashed into being, and the creature struck it with a dry, horrible sound – not like an animal hitting a wall, but like a knife striking ice. The Rustler recoiled. Grey sparks spilled from its hollow eye-sockets.
«Run!» Yang bellowed.
They fled down the slope.
Or rather, Vera fled down the slope, trying not to look behind her and at the same time wanting desperately to look behind her, which, as is well known, is very bad for dignified running. Yin and Yang skimmed beside her, not so much running as directing the landscape itself. Bright tracks flashed beneath her feet. Stones shifted aside. Drifts opened into passages.
Behind them the pack rustled on.
The Rustlers came without growls, without howls, without any respectable warning at all. Only that dry hungry shh-shh-shh over the snow, which made the throat feel suddenly hollow.
One burst out on the right so fast that Vera did not see it until the grey shape was already reaching for her shoulder.
«Look out!» cried Yin.
But Yang was quicker.
He clapped his hands – sharp and furious, with an accuracy one would not have expected from so fidgety a creature. A golden ring flared in the air. The space in front of the Rustler jerked and folded like a sheet of paper, and the beast struck not Vera but its own shadow.
Vera had never seen a shadow scream before.
It was deeply unpleasant.
«Good heavens!» she gasped, still running.
«I told you I was useful!» Yang shouted, sounding absurdly gratified.
«You can boast later!» Yin snapped.
They shot out into an open stretch between two high shining cliffs.
Here the snow was falling more thickly. More brightly. The air was so crowded with radiance that everything looked as though it had been sketched in lightning.
And that was bad.
Because the Rustlers could see them perfectly too.
They were circling fast, skilfully, with that dreadful patience peculiar to creatures that have been doing the same thing far too long.
«They’re cutting us off from the path,» said Yang.
«I can see that,» said Yin.
«What does cutting us off from the path mean?» Vera demanded, breathless.
«It means exactly what it sounds like,» said Yang. «We are about to be divided into convenient parts.»
«That is a horrible way to explain things!»
«But a clear one!»
One of the Rustlers crouched to spring.
And then Vera saw that in one of its hollow eye-sockets something familiar flashed for an instant.
Not a face.
Not a word.
A feeling.
Warm summer. Laughter. Someone’s hand in hers.
Gone.
Vera went cold.
«Have they… already eaten things?»
«A great many things,» said Yin quietly.
And at that moment the Rustler sprang.
Vera flung up her arms over her head, though she knew perfectly well that elbows were poor defence against creatures that ate memories.
But no blow came.
Instead the world split with thunder.
Not metaphorical thunder.
Not beautiful thunder.
Actual thunder.
The sky – that deep strange sky with no sun in it – blazed with a white-gold crack. A shock rolled across the snow that flattened every Rustler to the ground at once, and inside Vera’s chest everything jumped as if her heart had suddenly decided it was leaving on its own.
A shadow fell across the clearing from above.
Huge.
Cat-shaped.
«Just try,» said a voice that made the air itself remember discipline, «touching my girl again.»
Vera looked up.
And for a second forgot how to breathe.
Domino was there.
And not merely there, either – for standing was a word for ordinary cats, the sort that slept on radiators and despised humanity in comfort. This Domino towered over the clearing like a thunderstorm that had taken the shape of a cat out of convenience and personal preference. His fur was blacker than water at midnight and whiter than fresh snow all at once. Thin lightnings ran along his sides. His whiskers shone like silver wires.
And above his head – whether one believed it or not – there gleamed a crown.
A real one.
Slightly crooked, because otherwise it would not have been Domino at all, but something much too official.
His tail moved once, slowly.
And light rippled over the snow.
The Rustlers fell back.
«Domino?» Vera breathed.
The enormous cat turned one yellow eye on her.
«And whom, precisely, were you expecting?» he thundered. «A committee for public safety with apologies?»
One of the Rustlers, evidently, was either exceptionally hungry or exceptionally stupid. Unfortunately those qualities often travel together. It launched itself straight at Domino’s chest.
Domino did not move.
He merely looked.
The creature came apart in mid-air into strips of dull grey smoke, which the wind whipped away into the darkness between the hills.
«I did warn you,» said Domino almost lazily.
The others sprang back farther still.
The lightning in his fur burned brighter. The crown trembled and grew a little taller.
«Listen carefully, you rustling scraps,» he said, and there was so much cold dignity in his voice that even the snow seemed to lie flatter. «Human beings may be confused. Human beings may be tiresome. Human beings may even be mildly educated. But only by cats. To touch one of my subjects without permission is simple impertinence.»
In spite of everything, Vera nearly snorted.
Even as a thunderous cat-deity Domino somehow sounded like a householder lodging a complaint about an empty food bowl.
The Rustlers circled the edge of the clearing. They did not attack. They did not retreat. They waited.
For fear to weaken.
And Domino saw that.
He took one step forward.
One step – and the snow beneath his paw burst into white fire.
«Out,» he said.
A second step – and a jagged bolt of lightning tore between him and the pack, lighting the clearing so fiercely that Vera had to screw her eyes shut.
«Of here.»
He did not take a third step.
He simply fluffed up his fur, and over the clearing rolled such a crack of thunder that at last the Rustlers lost their nerve – if creatures of that sort can be said to possess anything so respectable.
The pack broke and scattered over the slopes, melting into the bright snow. Within seconds there was only their dry, affronted rustling, fading farther and farther away.
Then that vanished too.
Silence.
Only the snow still glowed faintly. Only the air still smelled of storm – if storm can smell of ice and ringing and slightly singed dignity.
The storm-cat stood with his head high until everything around them had fallen still. Only then did he turn to Vera.
She was sitting in the snow, trembling, looking at him with an expression that caused a small, awkward sensation somewhere inside him.
«You… came,» she whispered.
Domino snorted. Looked away. Looked back. Came over. Sat down beside her. For a moment he said nothing.
«Of course I came,» he muttered at last. «Who else was supposed to save you?»
She threw her arms round one enormous thunderous paw.
Properly.
He went absolutely still, as if struck.
«Now then,» he said quietly. «No crying on the fur. It isn’t waterproof.»
«I was frightened,» she whispered. «I thought I’d never see them again. Mum, or Dad, or the boys…»
«Nonsense,» said the cat.
Quietly. Not grumpily. Almost kindly.
«I always find my own. Even if they have forgotten who they are. Even if they have forgotten who owns them.»
He got up, shook the snow off one ear, resumed his ordinary cat shape, and turned as if to go.
Then stopped.
Domino let out a long breath.
And began to grow smaller.
Not all at once, not with some vulgar magical snap, but with the strange natural dignity of a great wave going back into the sea. One moment he was huge, taller than a cliff, more alarming than a storm. The next he was merely a very large cat. Then just a large one. Then ordinary Domino.
Or ordinary for Domino, at any rate.
The crown remained.
He shook his head crossly. It slid over one ear.
«I detest this thing,» he muttered.
Vera flung herself at him and, before she had time to remember that he was still a cat with the temperament of a vindictive war god, hugged him.
She gave a short laugh through the last of her fright, clutching the black-and-white bundle with the crooked crown.
Then she looked at him – at the crown, at the whiskers still trembling faintly from thunder – and asked with pure, childlike astonishment,
«Domino… what are you, exactly?»
Domino gave her the look of a being who had been caught doing something altogether too solemn and was now expected to explain it in a domestic tone.
«That,» he said, adjusting the crown with one paw, «is an unreasonably large question for a girl who was, ten minutes ago, lying here as a puddle.»
«I was not lying here as a puddle,» Vera said automatically.
«You were. Snow notices everything while it is falling. A highly expressive puddle, admittedly. But that is not the point.»
Yin gave a delicate cough. If snowy light had ever chosen to become a librarian, it would have coughed exactly like that.
«As a matter of fact,» she said, «we ought to go.»
«Go where?» Vera asked.
Yang threw up his hands.
«Where indeed? To the Mirror City, naturally! We have to show you something. Something very odd is happening there, and you are also very odd, so I feel certain the two are connected.»
Domino jumped down from the rock he had somehow contrived to get on top of with the air of a victorious commander, and landed softly beside them.
He was ordinary-sized again now. Only his eyes still shone a little more brightly than any domestic cat’s had a proper right to, and the crown – small, silver-white, and crooked to one side, as though it too possessed a personality – sat between his ears with perfect seriousness.
Vera stared at it.
«Is it real?»
«Unfortunately, yes,» Domino muttered. «A great many things here become real simply because too many people have thought about them.»
«And what does that make you? A king?»
Domino stopped.
«First of all, not king, but His Unpredictable Feline Majesty, if we are to preserve standards.»
«And secondly?» said Yang with obvious enjoyment.
«And secondly – not now. We are going to the city. I do not care to linger here waiting for Rustler reinforcements. We may discuss my peculiarities on the way.»
And with that, the crowned cat set off in front, making it perfectly plain that certain subjects were suitable for discussion only after a respectful supper – which, as had already been established, did not exist here.
