THE SUBTLE KNIFE 精彩片段：
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: ONE ALAMO GULCH-2
The Specter was leaning over the pilot and pressing what would be its face to his. His daemon, a finch, fluttered and shrieked and tried to pull away, only to fall half-fainting on the instrument panel. The pilot turned his face to Lee and put out a hand, but Lee had no power of movement.
The anguish in the mans eyes was wrenching. Something true and living was being drained from him, and his daemon fluttered weakly and called in a wild high call, but she was dying.
Then she vanished. But the pilot was still alive. His eyes became filmy and dull, and his reaching hand fell back with a limp thud against the throttle. He was alive but not alive; he was indifferent to everything.
And Lee sat and watched helplessly as the zeppelin flew on directly into a scarp of the mountains that rose up before them.
The pilot watched it rear up in the window, but nothing could interest him. Lee pushed back against the seat in horror, but nothing happened to stop it, and at the moment of impact he cried, "Hester!"
And woke.
He was in the tent, safe, and Hester nibbled his chin. He was sweating. The shaman was sitting cross-legged, but a shiver passed over Lee as he saw that the eagle daemon was not there near him. Clearly this forest was a bad place, full of haunting phantasms.
Then he became aware of the light by which he was seeing the shaman, because the fire was long out, and the darkness of the forest was profound. Some distant flicker picked out the tree trunks and the undersides of dripping leaves, and Lee knew at once what it was: his dream had been true, and a zeppelin pilot had flown into the hillside.
"Damn, Lee, youre twitching like an aspen leaf. Whats the matter with you?" Hester grumbled, and flicked her long ears.
"Aint you dreaming too, Hester?" he muttered.
"You aint dreaming, Lee, youre seeing. If Ida known you was a seer, Ida cured you a long while back. Now, you cut it out, you hear?"
He rubbed her head with his thumb, and she shook her ears.
And without the slightest transition he was floating in the air alongside the shamans daemon, Sayan Kotor the osprey. To be in the presence of another mans da;mon and away from his own affected Lee with a powerful throb of guilt and strange pleasure. They were gliding, as if he too were a bird, on the turbulent updrafts above the forest, and Lee looked around through the dark air, now suffused with a pallid glow from the full moon that occasionally glared through a brief rent in the cloud cover and made the treetops ring with silver.
The eagle daemon uttered a harsh scream, and from below came in a thousand different voices the calls of a thousand birds: the too-whoo of owls, the alarm shriek of little sparrows, the liquid music of the nightingale. Sayan Kotor was calling them. And in answer they came, every bird in the forest, whether they had been gliding in the hunt on silent wings or roosting asleep; they came fluttering upward in their thousands through the tumbling air.