Xooch: переводы

→Then its head fell from its shoulders, hood and all, dissolving into flickering memory embers as it went. Its headless body went mad, somehow letting out a scream, thrashing and kicking and falling to the ground, where grey-and-white fire poured from its truncated neck.

→I never got a chance to find out. In the space of an instant, <i>Sir Stuart</i> crossed the lawn to the final lemur, only his rush ended not in front of his foe, but six feet past it. The lemur jerked in the twisting, surprised reaction I had just engaged in a moment before.

→All things considered, I thought Stuart might be being a little hard on the thing. It wasn’t cowardly to <i>not</i> rush a juggernaut when you’d just seen your buddies get thrashed by it. Maybe the thing was just smarter than the others.

→The fifth lemur hesitated, seeming to abort its instantaneous rush about halfway across the yard. Stuart let out a bellow and threw the knife. It struck home, and the lemur frantically twisted in upon itself, howling like the others, until the knife tumbled free of its ghostly flesh and fell to the snowy ground.

→The first lemur to charge met the butt of Sir Stuart’s ax, a blow that sent it into a fluttering, backward tailspin. The second and third lemurs charged at almost exactly the same moment, and Sir Stuart’s ax swept out in a scything arc, slashing them both and sending them reeling with high-pitched, horrible screams. The fourth lemur drove a bony-wristed punch across Sir Stuart’s jaw, staggering the marine and driving him to one knee. But when the lemur tried to follow up the attack, Stuart produced a gleaming knife from his belt, and it flashed in opalescent colors as he swept it in a treacherous diagonal slash over the thing’s midsection.

→When it came, it came fast. Not fast like the rush of a mountain lion upon a deer, and not even fast like a runaway automobile. They were fast like bullets. One second, the lemurs were at the street, and the next they were in the air before the porch, seemingly without crossing the space between. I didn’t have time to do more than yelp and go into a full-body twitch of pure, startled reaction.

→“Hell’s bells,” I breathed. “Why didn’t . . . Couldn’t you have stopped them?”

→I watched, my stomach twisting, as even that image faded. Within seconds, it was gone.

→I heard a hollow scream that sounded as if it had come from a couple of blocks away, and lifted my eyes to see half a dozen wraiths who had all attacked together swarm over a phantom Doughboy, a scrawny young man in a baggy uniform. Though one of the things was literally opened from one side to the other by a slash of the ghost soldier’s bayonet, the other five just fastened on to him, first by a single fingertip, which was then blindly followed by others. Another wraith expired when the young soldier drew his knife. But then all those tattered fingers began winding and winding around him, lengthening impossibly, until within a few seconds he looked like nothing so much as a massive burn victim covered in heavy, dirty bandages.

→Sir Stuart’s troops reacted like the fighting men they had once been. Swords and sabers appeared, along with stilettos and brass knuckles and bowie knives. The wraiths came at them with a slow, graceful, terrible momentum and were hacked, stabbed, punched, clubbed, and otherwise broken—but there were a lot of wraiths.

→A tide of destruction swept over the assaulting wraiths, distorted light and sound tearing great, ragged holes in them, filling the air with faded, warped shadow-images as their feeble memories bled into wisps of cloud that were swallowed by the night. They fell by the dozens—and there were still plenty more wraiths left to go around. Wraiths closed in with the Lindquist Historical Home Defense Society—and it still wasn’t fair.

→Spectral gunfire roared out at once from the weapons of the hovering defenders. Again, clouds of powder smoke were replaced with bursts of colored mist. Bullets had been switched out for streaking spheres of violent radiance. Instead of the explosions of propellant and projectiles breaking the sound barrier, hammering bass-note thrums filled the air and echoed on long after a gunshot would have faded.

→Without warning, the air filled with whistling and ear-slashing shrieks, and the horde of wraiths washed toward us in a flash flood of strangled moans.

→I indulged myself in half a second of disgust that once again the universe seemed to be making an extraspecial effort to align itself against me, but it was my pride that was in critical condition. I was accustomed to being the guy who did the fighting and protecting. Fear had been fuel for the fire, meat and potatoes, when I was the one calling the shots. But now . . .

→I mean, come <i>on</i>. How screwed up is your life (after- or otherwise) when you find yourself needing phrases like <i>that</i>?