Labyrinths of Oblivion

Глава 1Lana, whose name, to her colleagues in the academic m;tier, sounded perhaps a trifle pretentious, like that of some rare, capricious orchid, had dedicated her life—or, at the very least, its prime, those years not yet entirely overcast by the dust of archives and the migraines induced by microfilms—to the pursuit of a chimera, denominated the "Library of Oblivion." This phantasmal compendium of vanished sagacities beckoned to her with the insistence of an unrequited passion. And so it was, on one of those London days when the fog was so thick one might have fancied slicing it with a butter knife, that she came upon It. Not a mere book, but a Tome, a ponderous volume reposing in the window of a shop bearing the deceptively modest appellation, "Antiquarian Sundries," like some dormant leviathan.Her fingers, accustomed to the fragility of papyri and the patina of…