Vukisa: переводы

→It’s not the whole Lone Power at all, Dairine thought. It’s an avatar, like all the others. Maybe a more aware one. But, otherwise, it may not have a lot of autonomy.

→Darkness had fallen as soon as they’d entered, but there was no need for artificial light: the Yaldiv saw by heat, and so everything glowed, or seemed to, more or less brightly. The walls were no exception. In infrared, their rough-paper patterning showed up every change in texture. But what also showed was a never-ending flow of words and phrases and instructions and diktats written on the tunnel walls in scent, and woven into the structure of them in mile after mile of papier-mâché bas-relief. Some of these were quite graceful, even beautiful… but the sentiments expressed made Dairine even uneasier than she’d been to begin with.

→Regimented is right, Dairine said as they walked. Look at all the rules.

→Probably there’s not a great deal of room for it everywhere, Roshaun said. And these people seem quite rigid, very regimented … so what can’t be done everywhere inside isn’t done at all.

→At least Filif was right, Kit said, also sounding relieved. You don’t have to do the claw thing in here.

→I am saving everything we see and all the paths we walk to memory, Spot said. Even if manual functions are not able to build us a more complex map, at least we will know where we’ve been, if not always where we’re going.

→They followed Kit in, and for a good while simply walked around and tried to get a feeling for the size and structure of the place. Dairine quickly realized that, on a first visit, this was going to be impossible. It was too complex. Tunnels led into tunnels, into archways and galleries; ramps led up and down between levels, up into the spire and down into dug-out galleries and arcades beneath ground level. We’d better not get lost, Dairine said silently.

→Strikes me that the one thing it’d be smart not to lose around here is your sense of humor, Kit said.

→They walked through the guarded door. As they went, Dairine saw Ronan elbow Kit warningly with one foreleg. Don’t get cute!

→The warriors stared at him briefly, their little scent-detecting antennae working. Then one of them waved him past. “Pass, and go about the Great One’s business.”

→Every Yaldiv who approached the door was stopped, and there was an exchange of some kind between the entering Yaldiv and the guards. Other warriors were entering the tunnel in front of them, and Dairine watched to see what they did. They raised their claws crosswise in the same kind of greeting as had been used on the outer path. But at this distance, she couldn’t hear what they were saying. She hoped Kit could.

→It seemed like weeks since she’d first heard the word. Commorancy. A home, a “place inside the walls”—

→THE COMMORANCY IS ONE THE COMMORANCY IS ALL

→Across the lake of tar and oil a number of causeways had been built; they were made of stones and rubble underneath, and paved with more of the chewed-leaf paper. Kit led the way in the wake of many, many more Yaldiv who were making their way toward the city in the fading light of day’s end. At the end of the causeway was a great tunnel guarded by warriors, and even from halfway across the causeway, Dairine could see the words written above it in the Yaldiv language.

→Dairine looked ahead. Over the bodies of the many Yaldiv who were now sharing the path with them, she could see the forest around them thinning slightly. Beyond it, the trees, no longer so gnarled and tangled, were starting to be replaced by bigger-trunked ones, darker-colored, leafless—perhaps stripped of their leaves by the depredations of thousands of Yaldiv. But then, as the trees lining the path began to give way to a much more open area, Dairine saw that she had been mistaken. As the line of Yaldiv immediately ahead of their group poured out from the narrow path into a space easily a mile wide, she found herself looking up and up at a structure she could hardly make sense of.

→Whether there’s even the slightest evidence…

→I see it, Roshaun said.

→“All we have to do now is find out who’s going to be the Hesper,” Kit said. “Get to it, and find out what we have to do to help it.”

→If It knows, the Champion said. Great efforts have been made to keep It from discovering all the details. Or any of the other Powers, for that matter. If, as seems to be the case, the efforts to keep the secret have been successful … then our job is to make sure that the ensoulment goes through without a hitch.

→Ponch lifted his head, and his tail banged against the floor. I told you I smelled something brand-new! he said. That’s part of what I was following.