Читать книгу The Serpent Bride - Sara Douglass - Страница 22

Isaiah did not go back to his private quarters after talking with Axis. Instead, restless and uncertain, he went down to the dark stables, saddled a horse (waving back to their beds the four or five grooms who hurried sleepy-eyed to serve their master), and rode the horse to the Lhyl.

He pushed the horse across the river, then rode south along the river road to where rose the great glass pyramid called DarkGlass Mountain. Isaiah did not once raise his eyes to look at it, but rode directly to a small door in its northern face where he hobbled the horse, and entered.

He walked through the black glass tunnels of the pyramid to its very heart — a golden-glassed chamber known as the Infinity Chamber.

Here Isaiah sat cross-legged in its very centre and meditated.

Kanubai — trapped deep beneath DarkGlass Mountain — and he were enemies. Bitter, terrible, lifetime enemies. Isaiah came here to expose himself to the beast, not only to test his own strength and resolve, but also to sense out his enemy and divine his strengths and weaknesses.

Time was when Kanubai’s weaknesses outnumbered his strengths.

Now, the strengths were gaining.

Isaiah visualised the abyss that sank into the very heart of the world. He concentrated on that abyss until it formed his entire consciousness, until he knew nothing but the abyss.

Then, gathering his courage, he cast his eyes down into the darkness.

When he had first started doing this, he had seen nothing, although he had felt the horror that lurked in the pit of the abyss.

Kanubai, cast down an infinity of ages ago.

But over the past few years Isaiah had started to see as well as sense Kanubai. The gleam of an eye.

Or perhaps a tooth.

The wetness of a tongue.

Now, as he had over the past year, Isaiah’s gaze managed to discern a blackened shape huddled against the walls of the abyss.

Kanubai was rising closer.

He was still far, far below, but every time Isaiah came here he could see that Kanubai was a little nearer.

Thin black fingers suckered into tiny cracks in the abyss.

A darkened face, staring upwards, feeling the weight of Isaiah’s regard.

Kanubai had once been stoppered tight in his abyss, but was no longer. Those ancient cursed Magi who had built the glass pyramid, and then opened it into Infinity, had unwittingly cracked open the stopper Isaiah and Lister had placed over the abyss.

Kanubai had been inching his way through that crack ever since.

Hello, Isaiah.

Isaiah fought down his nausea. Kanubai had been whispering to him for many years now. At first nothing but unintelligible thick mutterings, but now almost every word was clear.

What do you, Isaiah?

Isaiah never replied. The last thing he wanted was to get into conversation with the beast.

Do you know what I will do to your river, Isaiah, when I rise?

Isaiah knew he had to break the connection. He had spent too long in here. He had to leave now before —

He went cold.

In his vision of Kanubai, Isaiah thought he had seen, just for a moment, something clinging to Kanubai’s back.

Or something in his hands, perhaps.

Isaiah opened his eyes, then rose to his feet, stumbling a little in his foreboding as he made for the doorway out of the Infinity Chamber.

Something else rose with Kanubai.