Дом ста дорог

[329] Charmain shrugged and pulled forward Volume 7. It was called, not very helpfully, Potentes. She took it over to the windowsill, where there was space and light, and opened it not far from the beginning. As soon as she did, she knew it was the one. "Demon: powerful and sometimes dangerous being," she read, "often confused with an Elemental qv," and leafing on a few pages, "Devil: a creature of hell…." After that she was at "Elfgift: contains powers gifted by Elves qv for the safety of a realm…," and then, a wad of pages later, "Incubus: specialized Devil qv, inimical mostly to women…." She turned the pages over very slowly and carefully after that, and twenty pages on, she found it.

[330] "Lubbock. Got it!" she said.

[331] "Great!" Peter slammed Hex shut. "This one's nearly all diagrams. What does it say?" He came and leaned on the windowsill beside Charmain and they both read the entry.

[332] "LUBBOCK: a creature fortunately rare. A lubbock is a purple-hued insectile being of any size from grasshopper to larger than human. It is very dangerous, though nowadays luckily only to be encountered in wild or uninhabited areas.

A lubbock will attack any human it sees, either with its pincer-like appendages or its formidable proboscis. For ten months of the year, it will merely tear the human to pieces for food, but in the months of July and August it comes into its breeding season and is then especially dangerous; for in those months it will lie in wait for human travelers and, having caught one, it will lay its eggs in that human's body. The eggs hatch after twelve months, whereupon the first hatched will eat the rest, and this single new lubbock will then carve its way out of its human host. A male human will die. A female human will give birth in the normal fashion, and the offspring so born will be a LUBBOCKIN (see below). The human female then usually dies."

[333] My goodness, I had a narrow escape! Charmain thought and her eyes, and Peter's, scudded on to the next entry.

[334] "LUBBOCKIN: the offspring of a LUBBOCK qv and a human female. These creatures normally have the appearance of a human child except that they invariably have purple eyes. Some will have purple skin, and a few may even be born with vestigial wings. A midwife will destroy an obvious lubbockin on sight, but in many cases lubbockins have been mistakenly reared as if they were human children. They are almost invariably evil, and since lubbockins can breed with humans, the evil nature does not disappear until several generations have passed. It is rumored that many of the inhabitants of remote areas such as High Norland and Montalbino owe their origins to a lubbockin ancestor."

[335] It was hard to describe the effect of reading this on both Charmain and Peter. They both wished they had not read it.

Great-Uncle William's sunny study suddenly felt entirely unsafe, with queer shadows in the corners. In fact, Charmain thought, the whole house did. She and Peter both found themselves staring around uneasily and then looking urgently out of the window for danger in the garden. Both jumped when Waif gave an outsize yawn somewhere in the corridor.

Charmain wanted to dash out there and make sure that window at the end was quite, quite shut. But first she had to look at Peter very, very carefully for any signs of purple in him. He said he came from Montalbino, after all.

[336] Peter had gone very white. This showed up quite a few freckles across his nose, but they were pale orange freckles, and the meager new hairs that grew on his chin were a sort of orange too. His eyes were a rusty sort of brown, nothing like the greenish yellow of Charmain's own eyes, but not purple either. She could see all this easily because Peter was staring at her quite as carefully. Her face felt cold. She could tell it had gone as white as Peter's. Finally, they both spoke at once.

[337] Charmain said, "You're from Montalbino. Is your family purple?"

Peter said, "You met a lubbock. Did it lay any eggs in you?"

Charmain said, "No."

[338] Peter said, "My mother's called the Witch of Montalbino, but she's from High Norland, really. And she is not purple.

Tell me about this lubbock you met."

[339] Charmain explained how she had climbed out of the window and arrived in the mountain pasture where the lubbock lurked inside the blue flower and—

[340] "But did it touch you?" Peter interrupted.

[341] "No, because I fell off the cliff before it could," Charmain said.

[342] "Fell off the—Then why aren't you dead?" Peter demanded. He backed away from her slightly, as if he thought she might be some kind of zombie.

[343] "I worked a spell," Charmain told him, rather airily because she was so proud of having worked real magic. "A flying spell."

[344] "Really?" said Peter, half eager, half suspicious. "What flying spell? Where?"