StudentBotan: переводы

→I entered the Maze Undue, and the whole city of Queen Mab became my classroom.

→When I was twelve, and not one day more, I entered the Maze Undue, and began my private instruction by the fourth, unspoken branch of the worshipful Ordos. I was selected for this because of certain aspects of my humour, which Mentor Saur refers to as my temper.

→She suggested this simply makes me familiar with the function of metaphor.

→The city has always been an old place, with damp around its feet and dust in its mouth and a cold wind off the Mountains at its shoulder. From my early childhood, I rose up through it. Sister Bismillah often said I floated up, from the lowest, wettest part, all the way to Highgate Hill. I remarked to her that this makes me a strong swimmer.

→The city is called Queen Mab. It is in the prefecture of Hercula, in the south part of the world, which is named Sancour, which itself is in the subsector of Angelus. Queen Mab was once very mighty and important, the mightiest city in the world, and its splendid towers and conspicuous gates were the envy of all other cities in the world, and on many other worlds besides. War made it mighty. But the war ended, and Queen Mab was left spent and exhausted.

→If the city is not familiar to you, then let me tell you something about it. The marshes I spoke of are to the south, far to the south, beyond the crumbling bulk of Toilgate where the workers once passed to and from the shipyards. This was in the olden times. Sister Bismillah told me about it when I was a girl. By the time I lived there the shipyards were derelict, just rockcrete sheds of immense size standing at intervals along the old river slipway, and the lands had been partly reclaimed, or conquered, by the water, turning them into a grey and misty flatness of wet trees, and low, impoverished dwellings. To the west of the city, past Highgate, lay the mountains, which were only ever referred to as the Mountains, and to the north-east, beyond the grim structure of Coalgate, lay the emptied space, the great Sunderland, whose grey dusts, I was told, eventually give way to the scorched harrat of the Crimson Desert.

→I was found wandering in the marsh as a very young child by a kindly stranger, and upon investigation it was revealed that my mother had passed away of a distemper. The air of the marshes is noisome, and can afflict the lungs.

→It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.