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دانلود اپلیکیشن «زیبوک»

این فصل را می‌توانید به بهترین شکل و با امکانات عالی در اپلیکیشن «زیبوک» بخوانید

دانلود اپلیکیشن «زیبوک»

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برای دسترسی به این محتوا بایستی اپلیکیشن زبانشناس را نصب کنید.

متن انگلیسی فصل

CHAPTER 80

THE METAL MAN

PETER COULD SEE THEM NOW—the shadowy shapes of men on the spiral staircase, using their boots to stamp out the remaining flames of the dying lantern fire. They would be coming down very soon.

“Molly,” he said. “We have to leave now.”

Molly took one last look at the body of McGuinn, then gestured across the room and said, “There’s another staircase over there.”

“Come on, then,” said Peter.

They started across the room, and were passing the display of medieval suits of armor when Tink sounded a soft warning.

“What is it?” said Molly.

“She says men are coming down the other way,” said Peter.

They looked ahead and saw an archway. There was light moving inside. Somebody was coming down the far staircase.

“Are there any other stairs?” whispered Peter.

“I don’t think so,” said Molly.

“Then we’re trapped down here.”

Molly looked around at the suits of armor. There were several dozen, their shiny steel plates reflecting the light from the lantern in Peter’s hand.

“We’ll have to hide,” she said. “Put out the light.”

Peter blew out the lantern. The center of the room was now nearly pitch dark. At both ends they could see men descending stairs. The searchers were moving slowly, hampered by darkness and the fact that each group had only one lantern. But eventually they would converge on the center of the room.

“In here,” said Molly, tugging Peter into the display of armor. They positioned themselves in the middle of a cluster of suits, peering out between them. The searchers at each end of the room had spread out and were moving, slowly and methodically, ever closer to where Peter and Molly stood.

“What are we going to do?” whispered Molly.

Peter had been thinking about that, and the only plan he could come up with was to try to fly out. He knew he couldn’t carry Molly far; his hope was that he had enough starstuff left in his locket to enable her to become airborne. The ceiling was high; Peter’s plan was to try to swoop over the men and get to the staircase. He knew that if—if—they managed to get upstairs, they would likely encounter more men…and Ombra. But for now he had to worry about the men closing in on them.

“We’ll have to fly over them,” he whispered, pulling the locket out from under his shirt. Molly nodded, immediately grasping the plan.

Peter put his thumb on the catch and was about to flick the locket open. Suddenly, the locket became warm—almost hot.

Then it started to glow.

“Molly,” he whispered, “the—”

“Peter,” she interrupted. “Look.”

Peter turned—and saw it. The suit of armor directly behind him was also glowing—not the color of steel, but the same color as the locket—a soft, radiant gold.

Then it began to move. As Peter and Molly watched in openmouthed amazement, the suit of armor slowly, silently, raised its right hand.

“What’s happening?” whispered Peter.

“I don’t know,” whispered Molly.

Touch it, said Tink softly.

“What?” whispered Peter.

Touch the metal man’s hand with your locket.

“What’s she saying?” whispered Molly.

“She says I should touch the hand with the locket,” whispered Peter.

Molly looked around; from both sides of the room, the searchers were getting closer.

“Then do what she says,” she whispered.

Peter raised the locket and touched it to the golden knight’s hand. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the floor began to move. Peter and Molly grabbed each other as they realized that they were sinking on a square slab of stone, about four feet on each side. Silently they descended into a dark chamber beneath the floor of the big room. Above them was the square hole through which they had descended. They could hear the searchers very close now.

“They’ll see us down here,” whispered Peter.

Get off the stone, said Tink.

Quickly, Peter stepped off the floor slab, pulling Molly with him. Immediately the knight and the slab rose back into place, pushed silently upward by a thick marble column rising from the floor of the chamber.

For a moment Molly and Peter were in total darkness. Then, suddenly, the chamber was bathed in a soft yellow light, which seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere. They found themselves in what looked like a large study, furnished with a long table, a dozen comfortable chairs, a writing desk, one large wall entirely covered with shelves crammed with thousands of books, and another wall covered with an enormous floor-to-ceiling map.

“Well,” said Molly, “I guess we’ve found the Keep.” CHAPTER 81

THE SECRET

THE TWO SEARCH PARTIES—Slank’s and Nerezza’s—met at the armor display in the center of the room. They surrounded the suits of armor, then searched through them thoroughly. They found no sign of the boy and girl.

“I don’t understand it,” said Slank, standing among the motionless steel knights, frustration raising the pitch of his voice. “I could have sworn I saw a light right here.”

“You probably saw our lantern,” said Nerezza.

“No,” said Slank. “It was—”

He stopped in midsentence, feeling—as did the other men—the familiar, unwelcome coolness in the air.

Nerezza and Slank turned to face Ombra. For a moment there was silence; neither man wanted to deliver the bad news. Finally Nerezza spoke.

“They’re not here, my lord,” he said.

Another silence; the air seemed to grow even colder. Nerezza and Slank both felt the faceless stare.

“They are here,” groaned Ombra. “I saw them.”

“Yes, my lord,” said Nerezza, “but we—”

“SILENCE.”

The hideous voice echoed through the vast stone room. Not a man was breathing.

“You will search this room again,” said Ombra, softly now. “And if you do not find the children, you will search the floor above this, and then the upper floor. The boy and the girl are here somewhere, and you will find them.”

“Yes, my lord,” said Nerezza. To the men he said, “You heard him. Find them!”

The men began scouring the room again. Ombra remained where he was, facing the suits of armor. In his dissection of the fragment of soul he had managed to extract from McGuinn, Ombra had concentrated on learning, in what little time he had, the location of the starstuff, and the Return. But he’d sensed that McGuinn was holding back something else as well—another deep secret, something about the White Tower.

Ombra stared at the armor, sifting through the dreamlike swirl of images he’d seen in the last instants of his struggle with McGuinn. There was something there, something tantalizingly close….

What was it?

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