Odnośniki
- Indeks
- Burroughs, Edgar Rice Venus 1 Lost on Venus
- Fred Saberhagen Lost Swords 2 Sightblinder's Story
- Judith Tarr The Hounds of God
- Miles to Go_ A Rennie Vogel Intrigue Amy Dawson Robertson
- Herbert Frank Tom 2 Dune Messiah
- Antonio HernÄĄndez,An Around the World History of the Skullcap
- Maxwell M. ProśÂ mnie Raz jeszcze
- Pratchett_Terry_ _The_Light_Fantastic
- CIERPKIE WINOGRONA I CHYTROSC ROZUMU Jozef Tischner
- Alessandro Manzoni La storia della Colonna Infame
- zanotowane.pl
- doc.pisz.pl
- pdf.pisz.pl
- effulla.pev.pl
twenty foot thick at the base, rising to a dome like a sugarloaf over the
castle keep. It might have taken a long time but there were many Mrs Danvers,
they were highly organised, and they had an inexhaustible supply of
dictionaries.
'Find the minotaur?' I asked Havisham.
'Long gone,' she replied. 'There will be hell to pay about this, I assure
you!'
When our carrots had returned to being crunchy vegetables, and the last
vestiges of parrotness had been removed, Havisham and I pulled off our vyrus
masks and tossed them in a heap the dictionary filters were almost worn out.
'What happens now?' I asked.
'It is torched,' replied Tweed, who was close by. 'It is the only way to
destroy the vyrus.'
'What about the evidence?' I asked.
'Evidence?' echoed Tweed. 'Evidence of what?'
'Perkins,' I replied. 'We don't know the full details of his death.'
'I think we can safely say he was killed and eaten by the minotaur,' said
Tweed pointedly. 'It's too dangerous to go back in, even if we wanted to. I'd
rather torch this now than risk spreading the vyrus and having to demolish the
whole book and everything in it do you know how many creatures live in
here?'
He lit a flare.
'You'd better stand clear.'
The DanverClones were leaving now, vanishing with a faint pop
, back to wherever they had been pulled from. Bradshaw and I withdrew as Tweed
threw the flare on the pile of dictionaries. They burst into flames and were
soon so hot that we had to withdraw to the gatehouse, the black smoke that
billowed into the sky taking with it the remnants of the vyrus and the
evidence of Perkins' murder. Because I was sure it was murder. When we walked
into the vault I had noticed that the key was missing from its hook.
Someone had let the minotaur out
.
18
Snell Rest in Peece and Lucy Deane
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'I didn't notice it straight away but Vernham, Nelly and Lucy all had the same
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surname:
Deane. They weren't related. In the Outland this happens all the time but in
fiction it is rare; the problem is aggressively attacked by the
Echolocators
(q.v.), who insist that no two people in the same book have the same name. I
learned years later that Hemingway once wrote a book that was demolished
because he insisted that every single one of the eight characters was named
Geoff.'
THURSDAY NEXT
The Jurisfiction Chronicles
The minotaur had given Havisham the slip and was last seen heading towards the
works of Zane Grey;
the semi-bovine wasn't stupid he knew we'd have trouble finding him amongst
a cattle drive. Snell lasted another three hours. He was kept in an isolation
tent made of fine plastic sheeting that had been over-printed with pages from
the Oxford English Dictionary. We were in the sickbay of the Anti-
mispeling Fast Response Group. At the first sign of any deviant mispeling,
thousands of these volumes were shipped to the infected book and set up as
barrages either side of the chapter. The barrage was then moved in, paragraph
by paragraph, until the vyrus was forced into a single sentence, then a word,
then smothered completely. Fire was not an option in a published work; they
had tried it once in Samuel
Pepys' Diary and burnt down half of London.
'Does he have any family?' I asked.
'Snell was a loner detective, Miss Next,' explained the doctor. 'Perkins was
his only family.'
'Is it safe to go up to him?'
'Yes but be prepared for some mispelings.'
I sat by his bed while Havisham stood and spoke quietly with the doctor. Snell
lay on his back and was breathing with small shallow gasps, the pulse on his
neck racing it wouldn't be long before the vyrus took him away and he knew
it. I leaned closer and held his hand through the sheeting. His complexion was
pail, his breething laboured, his skein covered in painful and unsightly green
pastilles. As I wotched, his dry slips tried to foam worlds but all he could
torque was ninsense.
'Thirsty!' he squeeked. 'Wode Cone, udder whirled doughnut Trieste !'
He grisped my arm with his fungers, made one last stringled cry before feeling
bakwards, his life force deported from his pathotic misspelled boddy.
'He was a fine operative,' said Havisham as the doctor pulled the sheep over
his head.
'What will happen to the Perkins & Snell series?'
'I'm not sure,' she replied softly. 'Demolished, saved with new Generics I
don't know.'
'What ho!' exclaimed Bradshaw, appearing from nowhere. 'Is he ?'
'I'm afraid so,' replied Havisham.
'Snell was one of the best,' murmured Bradshaw sadly. 'Did he say anything
before he died?'
'Nothing coherent.'
'Hmm. The Bellman wanted a report on his death as soon as possible. What do
you think?'
He handed Havisham a sheet of paper and she read:
'Minotaur escapes, finds captor, eats captor, captor dies. Horse mispeled in
struggle. Colleague dies attempting rescue. Minotaur escapes.'
She turned over the piece of paper but it was blank on the other side.
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'That's it?'
'I didn't want it to get boring,' replied Bradshaw, 'and the Bellman wanted it
as simple as possible. I think he's got Libris breathing down his neck. The
investigation of a Jurisfiction agent so close to the launch of
UltraWord"! will make the Council of Genres jittery as hell.'
Miss Havisham handed the report back to Bradshaw.
'Perhaps, Commander, you should lose that report in the pending tray.'
'This sort of stuff happens in fiction all the time,' he replied. 'Do you have
any evidence that it was not
accidental?'
'The key to the padlock wasn't on its hook,' I murmured.
'Well spotted,' replied Miss Havisham. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]