Pegasus, Lion, and Centaur. Дмитрий Емец

and closely planted eyes. The person pressed himself so close to the hyeon that they seemed like a two-headed essence. Yara understood that she had run into one of those two warlocks that dived for the cloud. The rider did not manage to turn the hyeon around: the speed of a taking-off hyeon was too incomparable to that of a winged horse almost going into a dive. Understanding this very well, the warlock on the off chance jerked up a hand with the dim half-moon of a crossbow. Eric twitched from the pain. Its elongated neck oozed a long ribbon of blood, as if the horse had been cut by a razor. “He thought that he couldn’t hit me and fired at the horse so that we would crash together,” Yara determined.

      The horse rushed towards the ground, acquiring impossible strength with each instant. It was impossible to look at its wings. They did not become white or radiant, but they were blinding all the same and stinging the eyes, becoming too bright for them.

      As Eric was transforming, everything around it paled. The hills, the pine trees, the highway were covered by a haze, watered down. At the same time Yara realized that the world remained the same as it was: completely substantial and not spectral. Simply Eric no longer belonged to this world, in which it was nevertheless a guest, although it was old and born here. Repeatedly Yara and other hdivers tried to describe the crossing to novices, but words were insufficient to explain how it was possible to become more real than reality itself despite that it would remain unchanged also.

      Yara looked askance at her own hands. This was the dispersion test well-known to hdivers. Next to Eric’s mane the hands seemed flat, cardboard-like. Much less real than Eric. Because of this annoying attack of the wind Yara had remained a part of her own world, whereas the horse no longer belonged to it. In a second or two Eric would pierce right through her world, and Yara, if she were unable to merge with it, would be stuck somewhere between the highway and a brush of pine trees on the small hill.

      Yara acted instinctively. After realizing that it would be hopeless if left behind, she leaned down and clung to Eric’s neck as tightly as she could. Her cheek was buried in the stiff brush of mane. “Don’t leave me behind! All the same I won’t let go of you!” she whispered soundlessly, knowing that even if Eric heard, it would not be in words nevertheless.

      And it did not leave her behind. It closed up base and changed the incline, after wrapping Yara up with its wings like dense sails. Time stopped. The small hill, no more than fifty metres away from Yara, blurred, as if water was splashed from a jar onto fresh watercolour. It did not make room, did not disappear, remained where it was, but Eric and Yara pierced it like a soap bubble, which closed up after them. Yara felt the tension of her own world sliding down along the horse’s wings shielding her. She took a risk and again looked around. Her world slowly floated back, screened off by invisible glass. Somewhere there the trailer was moving and birches grew. Ul also remained there. “Thank you!” Yara whispered. It became clear to her that at the last minute Eric dragged her, the perpetual latecomer, through to become the same as it.

      But in front something messy, the colour of meat scum, was already moving up to Yara. A disgusting formless mass. It was impossible to pass over it or fly around it, only right through it. There was neither sky nor earth nor constellations here, only this mass. Swiftly revolving in the centre, it was lying motionless along the edges and forming a quiet little stagnant mass. Most of all it very much resembled dirty water with food scraps pulled into the drain with a squelch. And there, in this terrible centre, everything was boiling and seething.

      Something flickered on Yara’s left hand side. After a hard look, she understood that this was Delta. Dropping behind a little bit in the dive, the mare quickly caught up. Yara did not immediately realize whether Dennis was on its back and experienced several unpleasant seconds. “But indeed he dived! Didn’t break up! Now if only he doesn’t start panicking in the swamp!” she decided.

      Yara was shaken in the saddle. A wing, pulling back, touched her shoulder. Eric accelerated. Instead of flying into the calm and outwardly safe foam, it, after extending the snout, rushed straight into the revolving centre of “the sink.” Delta followed it. The spiral of the drain now thickened and calmed down, now coiled up into a thread, and then began to toss her from side to side. Yara knew, according to her own experience, that this was more terrible for a novice than falling together with the horse’s folded wings and waiting to hit the ground.

      Before throwing itself into the seething volcano, Eric folded its wings. The wind plucked Yara off the saddle. The scum on her hdiver jacket broke off, hung on it, and ran off as if alive. Yara lost orientation for several seconds and thought only of one thing – not to lose the stirrup, not to let go of the rein.

      Sensing that the hurricane was losing strength, Yara hurriedly sucked in air. She sucked in fiercely till it hurt in her chest, knowing that soon any breath would be a luxury. And indeed: Yara breathed out already in the swamp.

      As in “the drain,” everything here was the colour of meat scum. A compressed, disgusting, still space supporting neither hope nor happiness nor motion. A world locked in itself and starting to reek as a nestling dead in an egg. Yara breathed out slowly, in small portions, with regret, trying to keep from pulling in what substituted as air here. The air in the swamp was inconceivably musty. It stuck to the cheeks like slush. It crawled into the nostrils and stung the eyes. The filthy toilet in a station would seem in comparison like the dream of an epicure. But all the same it was necessary to breathe. Yara opened her mouth and felt how she pulled into herself all this trash together with the air. Recently Yara had been hit by the wind. Here the wind was absent altogether. She flew and pushed with her tongue the prickly scarf climbing into her mouth.

      Eric no longer kept its wings folded. It was flying but incredibly slowly. The wing feathers began to break off from the stress. It seemed it was forcing its way through glue. Each stroke of the wings moved them forward, but monstrously slowly. It seemed to Yara that they were not flying but crawling. Without a winged horse she could not cover even a centimetre here, though she would be raking up the sticky air with her palms over the centuries.

      Eric and Delta made their way along a narrow tunnel. It was drilled by the hurricane and had clear sticky walls, which sucked in everything but let nothing out. Yara was amazed by the wisdom compelling the horses to rush to the centre of the hurricane. It would be unrealistic to fly through the quagmire in all the other places. Here the hurricane opened a breach.

      Something brightened hazily in front, although it was a dense, sucking darkness to the right and left. Yara stubbornly tried to look only at the horse’s mane, knowing that it was mortally dangerous to avert her eyes from it. She understood the melancholy of those who once got stuck in the swamp. To sit eternally in the sticky scum, which held on such that you would be unable to blink or stir a finger. And all this time guessing at the something close by, something completely different – bright, real, flamboyant.

      In the dense darkness drifted sluggish grey shadows, similar to clay-covered dwarfs with googly eyes. These were elbes. The shadows were shifting and approaching the walls of the tunnel. When the dwarfs touched the walls, they fired off something not unlike gossamers. A piece of gossamer touched Yara’s jacket and immediately burst.

      Yara felt the short probing twinges almost continuously and surmised that there were lots more elbes than she was capable of discerning in those two-three seconds that she had the courage to look. At the moment of the touch of prickly little gossamers Yara experienced sometimes a wolf hunger, annoyance, greediness, sometimes sluggish sleepiness and indifference. But again and again Eric’s wings traced a semicircle and tore up the gossamer.

      After ascertaining that their attacks were futile, the elbes changed tactics. They upped the stakes. Now instead of hunger and melancholy they proposed pleasures of the most different kinds to Yara. All this time they were probing Yara, attempting to find a flaw in her. So, you do not want to put your arms up to your elbows in the gold coins of an Indian rajah or stroke the fur of a tame tiger? How about running with cheetahs or standing under the rainbow jet of a waterfall? Shashlik with hot mulled wine? Again no? Maybe, sinorita prefers furs, a long car and a taciturn chauffeur, who will slowly transport her along the streets at night to the sound of cocaine jazz?

      The imageries were so distinct, so visible that Yara no longer distinguished them from reality. She could scarcely determine where she was in reality