Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Жанр: Триллер, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Against a Dark Background: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Against a Dark Background»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

She came from one of the more disreputable aristocratic families.
Sharrow was once the leader of a personality-attuned combat team in one of the sporadic little commercial wars in the civilization based around the planet Golter. On an island with a glass shore – relic of some even more ancient conflict – she discovers she is to be hunted by the Huhsz, a religious cult which believes she is the last obstacle before their faith's apotheosis. She has to run, knowing her only hope of finally escaping the Huhsz is to find the last of the ancient, apocalyptically powerful but seemingly cursed Lazy Guns. But that is just the first as well as the final step on a search that takes her on an odyssey through the exotic Golterian system and results in both a trail of destruction and a journey into her own past, as well as that of her family and the system itself;
a journey that changes everything.

Against a Dark Background — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Against a Dark Background», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

She looked up. A little catchfire lightning played about the highest towers, turrets and aerials of the Sea House. The cloudbase, dark-grey and solid looking, hung immediately above. She had been here only twice before, and on neither occasion had the rain and mist permitted her to see more than the first fifty metres or so of the Sea House’s towering bulk. Today, all three hundred metres of it was visible, soaring dimly up towards the overcast.

She pushed a nosegay-scarf up over her mouth and nose, hoisted her satchel onto her shoulder, picked her way through the stumps of decaying concrete, stepped over the great iron chain, and-limping slightly, but walking quickly nevertheless-started down the rutted, cambered surface of the causeway.

At least, she told herself, the rain had stopped.

The Sea House was probably as old as civilisation on Golter; somewhere near its long-buried core it was claimed to rest on the remains of an ancient castle or temple predating even the zero-year of the First War. Over the millennia the building had grown, accreting about itself new walls, courtyards turrets, parapets, halls, towers, hangars, barracks, docks and chimneys.

The history of the planet, even of the system, was written on its tiered burden of ancient stones; here the age had demanded defence, leaving battlements and ramparts; here the emphasis was on the glory of gods, producing helical inscript columns, mutilated idols and a hundred other religious symbols fashioned in stone and wrought from metal, most of them meaningless for centuries; here the House’s occupants had thought fit to honour political benefactors, resulting in statues, relief columns and triumphal arches over walled-off roadways; elsewhere trade had been the order of the day, depositing cranes and jetties, graving docks, landing pads and launch gantries like flotsam round the outskirts of the House’s layered walls; on occasion information and communication had ruled, leaving a litter of rusting aerials, broken dishes and punctured shell domes crusting the scattered summits of the vast structure.

The current incumbents of the Sea House-who claimed despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary that they had inhabited it from the beginning, but who had certainly ruled there for the last five hundred years or so-were the Sad Brothers of the Kept Weight, one of Golter’s multitudinous ancient and arcane religious orders. They were exclusively male and claimed to believe in abstinence, continence and acquiescence to the will of God.

By Golter standards they were cooperative and outgoing, to the extent of permitting secular scholars to study in the many libraries, archives and depositories the House had accrued over the millennia. A veneer of ecumenicalism allowed visits by monks from other orders, and numerous prisoners from all over the system convicted under a variety of religious laws were held in the House. Other visitors were discouraged.

Sharrow was accepted at the House because six years earlier her half-sister Breyguhn had smuggled herself into the structure in an attempt to find and steal the Universal Principles , one of the system’s many fabled lost Unique books. Breyguhn had failed in her quest; she had been caught and imprisoned in the Sea House, and it was because she was her closest relation that Sharrow was allowed in to visit her.

With what was-arguably-a rare exhibition of an underlying sense of irony, the Sad Brothers had made the recovery of the Universal Principles the condition for Breyguhn’s release. Whether this implied they did not possess the book but wished to, or that they already did and so knew the task was impossible, was a matter for conjecture.

At the far end of the causeway the stone-flagged road inclined upwards to a huge, crumbling central gatehouse which was the only landward aperture in the House’s blank curtain wall of seaweed-hemmed granite. The gateway’s deeply machicolated summit hung like a set of gigantic discoloured teeth over a throat blocked by a rusting, ten-metre-square door of solid iron. The massive door-and the whole gatehouse-leaned out over the causeway’s end in a manner which indicated either serious subsidence, or a desire to intimidate.

Sharrow picked a rock up from the fractured surface of the wheel-grooved causeway and slammed it several times as hard as she could against the ungiving iron of the door. The noise was flat and dull. Rock dust and rust flakes drifted away on the breeze. She dropped the stone, her arm sore from the series of impacts.

After a minute or so she heard metallic sliding, scraping noises coming from the door. Then they faded. After another minute she hissed through her teeth in exasperation, picked up the stone again and slammed it against the door a few more times. She rubbed her arm and looked up into the dark arches of the stonework, searching for faces, cameras or windows. After a while, the clanking noises returned.

Suddenly a grille opened in the door at chest height; more flakes of rust fell away. She bent down.

“Yes?” said a high, scratchy voice.

“Let me in,” she said to the darkness behind the iron-framed hole.

“Ho! ‘Let me in,’ is it? What’s your name, woman?”

She pushed her scarf down from her mouth. “Sharrow.”

“Full na-”

“That is my full name, I’m a fucking aristo. Now let me in, creep.”

What ?” the voice screeched. She stood back, putting her hands in her pockets while the grille slammed shut and a grinding, creaking noise seemed to shake the whole door. Finally the outline of a much smaller entrance appeared under the flakes of rust, and with a crunch a door swung open, large enough for a human to enter bowed. A small man in a filthy cowled cassock glared out at her. She held her passport in her right hand and shook it in front of his grey, unhealthy-looking face before he could say anything. He stared at the document.

“Cut the crap,” she said. “I went through it all last time. I want to speak to Seigneur Jalistre.”

“Do you now? Well, you’ll just have to wait. He-” the small monk began, swinging the door shut with one manacled hand.

She stepped forward, planting a boot in the doorway.

The brother looked down, eyes wide.

“Get… your… filthy… female foot out of my d-” he said, raising his gaze to find that he was looking down the barrel of a large hand gun. She pressed his nose with it. His eyes crossed, focusing on the stubby silencer.

He swung the door open slowly, his chain rattling. “Come in,” he croaked.

The silencer muzzle left a little white circle imprinted on the grey flesh at the tip of his nose.

“But, sire! She threatened me!”

“I’m sure. However, little brother, you are uninjured; a state subject to amendment, should you ever speak back to me like that again. You will take the Lady Sharrow’s weapon, issue a receipt, then escort our guest to the Chain Gallery and equip her with a visitor’s chain. At once.” The holo image of Seigneur Jalistre’s head, bright in the dim and musty gatekeeper’s cell, turned to her. The Seigneur’s broad, oiled face smiled thinly.

“Lady Sharrow, your sister will receive you in the Hall Dolorous. She has been expecting you.”

“Half-sister. Thanks,” Sharrow said. The holo faded.

She turned and handed her gun to the furiously scowling gatekeeper. He took it, dropped it in a drawer, scribbled quickly on a slip of plastic, threw it at her and whirled away. “This way, woman,” he snarled. “We’ll find you a nice heavy chain, I think. Oh yes.” He scuttled off, muttering; his own chain rattled along the wall-tracks to the doorway as she followed.

The monk snapped the manacle over her right wrist and rattled the heavy iron chain vigorously, snapping it taut against the wall a few times, jerking her arm.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Against a Dark Background»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Against a Dark Background» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Iain Banks - Der Algebraist
Iain Banks
Iain Banks - L'Algébriste
Iain Banks
Iain Banks - Matter
Iain Banks
Iain Banks - A barlovento
Iain Banks
Iain Banks - Inversiones
Iain Banks
Iain Banks - El jugador
Iain Banks
Iain Banks - The Algebraist
Iain Banks
Отзывы о книге «Against a Dark Background»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Against a Dark Background» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x