（外文电子版资料）Tanith Lee - All the Birds of Hell.pdf

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Tanith%20Lee%20-%20All%20Birds%20of%20Hell.html TANITH LEE ALL THE BIRDS OF HELL Tanith Lees most recent books include Faces Under Water and a young adult novel thats due out in England very shortly, Law of the Wolf Tower. Her last appearance in these pages was exactly two years ago, with her retake on the Cinderella fairy tale, The Reason for Not Going to the Ball. She returns now with a very different sort of story, a dark and dazzling vision of a world locked in winter for fifteen years... ONCE THEY LEFT THE CITY, the driver started to talk. He went on talking during the two-hour journey, almost without pause. His name was Argenty, but the dialogue was all about his wife. She suffered from what had become known as Twilight Sickness. She spent all day in their flat staring at the electric bulbs. At night she walked out into the streets and he would have to go and fetch her. She had had frostbite several times. He said she had been lovely twenty years ago, though she had always hated the cold. Henrique Tchaikov listened. He made a few sympathetic sounds. It was as hopeless to try to communicate with the driver, Argenty, as to shut him up. Normally Argenty drove important men from the Bureau, to whom he would not be allowed to speak a word, probably not even Goodday. But Tchaikov was a minor bureaucrat. If Argenty had had a better education and more luck, he might have been where Tchaikov was. Argentys voice became like the landscape beyond the cindery cement blocks of the city, monotonous, inevitably irritating, depressing, useless, sad. It was the fifteenth year of winter. Now almost forty, Tchaikov could remember the other seasons of his childhood, even one long hot summer full of liquid colors and now-forgotten smells. By the time he was twelve years old, things were changing forever. In his twenties he saw them go, the palaces of summer, as Eynin called them in his poetry. Tchaikov had be